When Dreams (And Liberty) Go Up in Smoke

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I will confess that sometimes, when the winter chill is creeping into the old bones, it might be nice to slip into a cozy cigar bar and enjoy a smoke and a nightcap.

It’s a comfort thought, but, in Wisconsin, unless you’re conveniently positioned, it isn’t going to happen, and this week our governor made sure it won’t be a possibility coming our way any time soon, vetoing a bill to exempt new cigar bars from the state’s public smoking ban.

Gov. Tony Evers’s allies in the nanny-state public health regime are no doubt jubilant. Safe cigar spaces are now literally empty of liberty, as one more private property right falls, one more space is robbed of freedom, one more constitutional prerogative is kidnapped from the people. What Wisconsinites should know is that Evers’s veto of a highly regulated expansion of Wisconsin’s existing tobacco-bar statute—cigar bars existing as of June 3, 2009, can still operate—was not really a policy disagreement. At least not at its core.

It was instead a tell, just the latest alarmist posturing under the sick guise of “public health,” a parody, really, of serious policy. The governor’s veto message, wrapped in the familiar white-coated credentials of the public-health establishment, declared that allowing new cigar lounges would harm every last one of us.

A public health emergency would ensue. Civilization would fall.

“I object to the negative impact this legislation will have on the public health of the people of Wisconsin,” Evers wrote in his message. “Secondhand smoke, a known carcinogen, causes serious health problems and is responsible for thousands of deaths on an annual basis.”

He objects to your chosen behavior, you see, even if you don’t, and he intends to do something about it. Meaning, he is going to take control of your behavior and will tell you where you can and cannot go to exercise your right to enjoy a legal product. That’s the real veto message, and it has become the administration’s central and defining commandment: Public health is sacred, liberty is conditional, and even legal, consensual adult behavior is contingent on government approval.

After all, walking into a cigar bar in the first place is akin to sitting in for the target at the firing range, so you must be deranged. But don’t worry, the government knows better. You can just see Evers and Department of Health Services (DHS) secretary-designee Kirsten Johnson smiling and nodding proudly to each other as they lead you away to a smoke-free re-education camp.

Truth is, though, Evers’s veto is fraught with flaws, from policy contradictions to philosophical inconsistencies to constitutional violations.

For one thing, the bill attempted to correct what is currently a discriminatory statutory construction. It would not have overturned smoking bans but would have simply allowed what the state already allows—cigar bars to operate under strict conditions—while removing an arbitrary 2009 grandfather cutoff that created a state-sanctioned monopoly.

So that was one tell. Evers didn’t veto a smoking exception so much as he vetoed competition. He told small businesses to go pound sand, and, in the same breath, he told adults seeking to exercise their rights to autonomy to take a long walk on a short plank. And he did it in the name of a public-health ideology that has levitated its disciples to the order of priesthood. Not a priesthood of believers, mind you, but a priesthood of elite deciders.

Unfortunately, the veto is not an isolated event and cannot be understood outside the context of other actions. It is, in fact, the latest expression of a broader effort by Evers, DHS, and legislative progressives to expand the boundaries of public-health authority into every nook and cranny of private life, whether it’s smoking, schooling, vaccination, employment, or the sacred boundaries of parental rights.

The cigar veto itself may appear minute in the overall scheme of things, but the tell it represents is enormous. It tells us the unprecedented assault on civil liberties during the pandemic is far from over.

Built on a myth

So let’s start with the facts, as any rational policy discussion should, though the governor’s office increasingly treats facts the way your garbage disposal treats scraps of food. Again, the proposed bill—which passed the state Senate on an 18-15 vote and the Assembly 57-37, with some Democratic support—was a narrow expansion of Wisconsin’s existing law.

Under the bill, new cigar lounges could open only if they met stringent requirements. There could be cigar and pipe smoking only, no cigarettes or vaping. They could not serve food. They had to clearly post signage that smoking was allowed, employees had to sign a written acknowledgment of exposure to second-hand smoke, and sufficient air filtration and exhaust had to be documented.

What that describes is not a Wild West of public smoking but a highly structured niche environment that adults would voluntarily and knowingly enter, with ventilation systems better than those in most apartment buildings and restaurants, and, for that matter, in many medical buildings.

In his testimony at a June public hearing on the bill, Sen. Nate Gustafson (R-Omro) cut through the anti-competitive architecture like a cigar cutter through cellophane. For 15 years, he pointed out, Wisconsin’s smoking ban has arbitrarily frozen the industry in time, with only cigar lounges existing before June 4, 2009, grandfathered in.

“This legislation seeks to allow more of these businesses to open through the issuance of more licenses to meet the increasing demand across the state,” Gustafson testified...

Monopolistic practices aside, the bill would have addressed other discriminatory features of the current landscape. That discrimination becomes clear when compared to industries Democrats have no trouble blessing. As multiple testimony at the June hearing observed, vape shops allow indoor vaping, existing hookah lounges thrive, and marijuana venues will soon be legal in Wisconsin—if Evers and these same Democrats get their way.

Yet cigar lounges—one of the least inhalation-heavy forms of smoking—are singled out for eternal damnation.

“A person can choose to visit a strip club, adult store, bar, etc., without laws more restrictive than that placed on cigars and pipes,” Wisconsin resident Chad Karl testified at the June hearing. “Cigars are not cigarettes or vapes as they don’t have toxic additives, just pure natural tobacco, which you don’t inhale. It doesn’t make sense to lobby for freedom of choices in more toxic industries and then restrict choices elsewhere.”

No, it doesn’t make sense, but then it isn’t supposed to because this isn’t about toxicity. It’s about ideology and control.

All the more striking given that Evers is stricter than many in his own party. Connecticut now allows cigar bars under tight rules, and even Illinois permits indoor smoking in certain exempt retail tobacco shops. This difference matters because it exposes the veto for what it is, not a mainstream public-health position but a uniquely aggressive one. Notice, if you will, that the governor’s veto message mentions but never addresses the bill’s safeguards, such as its age, tobacco, and food restrictions, its notice requirements, its tobacco and food prohibitions, or its ventilation requirements. Evers couldn’t care less.

Instead, the governor accused it of rolling back clean-air protections—a “reversal,” he said, of progress toward public health. But that’s only true if the public health establishment is presumed to be the moral police of personal conduct. That has become the Democrats’ default operating schema, namely, that personal conduct, unburdened by government restrictions or bureaucratic approval, inevitably creates unacceptable social ills that only government action can solve.

Public health is always the answer; liberty is always the problem.

The overriding threat of left-wing public health

The list of organizations that opposed the cigar bar bill reads like a roll call of serial sinners at a Public Health confessional. It is the same constellation of interest groups that constantly agitates for more mandates, more restrictions, more prohibitions, more compulsion, more government direction of personal life.

All of which brings us to the heart of the matter and to the reason a single veto of cigar bars is anything but trivial: The public-health establishment—state and federal agencies along with their nonprofit and professional association allies—is no longer a guardian of public well-being, if it ever was. It has become the most powerful, least accountable, and most ideologically aggressive force in American domestic life.

The American Lung Association, American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, UW Health, Wisconsin Medical Society, Wisconsin Public Health Association—together these federal and state agencies and their alliances are more powerful than even the military-industrial complex, which only wants your money to fight its forever wars. Fork over the dollars and shut up about the killing, and you can do what you want.

The public health complex is also more powerful than Big Tech, at least for now, though compliance with Big Tech’s algorithms may be that industry’s ultimate goal not too far down the road.

Right now, though, no one tops public health. It wants your compliance, and it wants it now. It has the money, the political muscle, and the propaganda machine to make it happen, too. Power, and all-powerful power, is in the very DNA of public health, and has been throughout its history in this country. Its roots lie in monarchical police powers and early American quarantine authority, both of which were expanded through 19th-century litigation.

The idea took hold in pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary America. As Jorge E. Galva of the University of Iowa wrote in “Public Health Strategy and the Police Powers of the State,” in 2005, state police power was validated for the first time a few years following the Revolutionary War, when Philadelphia was threatened by an outbreak of yellow fever.

“By the time the federal constitution was drafted, quarantine was already a well-established form of public health regulation, and was considered a proper exercise of the police power of the states; the Supreme Court, in its affirmation of this power, noted that the state had the power to quarantine ‘to provide for the health of the citizens,’” Galva wrote.

The uncontrollable nature of epidemic diseases led the Supreme Court to uphold such extreme measures in the name of defending the common good, Galva asserted, and the communitarian doctrine held sway all the way through the middle part of the 20th century.

Then, briefly, just briefly, in the mid-20th century, civil-liberties jurisprudence reined in those powers. As Dr. Amy Fairchild of Columbia University described it in “The Exodus of Public Health,” that short-lived respite, lasting for a few decades after World War II, ended for good in 1970 when Paul Cornely, the new president of the American Public Health Association, unleashed what Fairchild called a blistering attack on the complacency of his profession, accusing his colleagues of wasting their time on “piddling resolutions and their wordings.”

Public health, Cornely charged, remained “outside the power structure.”

“Cornely’s address was a clarion call for more aggressive action against a host of health problems integral to modern industrial society,” Fairchild wrote in her own call for activism inside public health.

His colleagues responded with a strong push for reform, and the timing could not have been better for the progressive cause, coming at a time when ideological belief was intersecting with pharmaceutical money. Big Pharma and public health agencies such as the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) became intertwined, forming a syndicate that at its heart was about powering the institutional interests of the public health bureaucracies and simultaneously furthering the interests and profits of major pharmaceutical companies.

Public health’s push for states to enact its Model Emergency Health Powers Act (MEHPA) after 9/11 was the syndicate’s classic prototype, a wish list of the movement’s most treasured goals: broad authority to quarantine, restrict travel, nullify laws, seize property, compel medical treatment, mandate vaccination, and surveil citizens. And that was just on Mondays.

Sound familiar? Wisconsin did not adopt the MEHPA model verbatim, mainly because the progressive state had already enshrined many of its powers in state statute. So when Covid hit, Evers and DHS acted like they had won the lottery and went on a banger: home confinement, school closures, travel restrictions, economic shutdowns, medical coercion, and a moral framework in which dissent was tantamount to murder.

That line of thought has continued in federal public health agencies, at least until the ascension of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to the top of the federal health agencies’ power pyramid, and it obviously continues today in the state DHS.

The point is simple: public health never relinquishes authority and always finds a crisis to impose it upon. Eventually, everything becomes a crisis. Smoking becomes a public health crisis. Lagging vaccination rates become a public health crisis. Hate speech becomes a public health crisis. Gun violence becomes a public health crisis. Dissent becomes a public health crisis because it is so dangerous to democracy.

Even cigar lounges—niche, adult-only, highly ventilated venues for legal products—are a crisis, an unacceptable threat to public safety.

And so, the cigar bill veto is not a policy decision made in isolation by an obsessed and victimized anti-smoking governor. It is an extension of a worldview—one in which public health always outweighs liberty, and in which government expertise always outranks personal judgment. It is the same logic that undergirded Wisconsin’s pandemic governance and that animates the ongoing Democratic campaign to delegitimize serious scientific inquiry after decades of its suppression.

As I wrote about recently, this same desperation erupted when the CDC updated its autism-and-vaccines webpage with a modest, scientifically accurate clarification: that evidence has not definitively ruled out all possible contributions to autism, and research continues. That rant occurred for the same reason the cigar bar bill had to be vetoed. It isn’t about cigars or autism; it’s about control. The veto preserves an existing monopoly and makes no logical sense but more than that it reinforces the primacy of the public-health priesthood in dictating which adult pleasures are permissible.

And it does so while Democrats in Wisconsin pursue policies far more intrusive than anything envisioned by the cigar bill’s supporters.

Some doctors can see it

In a debate at the 2007 annual meeting of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, which was published in the September 2008 edition of the Annals of Thoracic Surgery—back when actual public health debate was still allowed—Dr. Mark Cherry was tasked with making the case against smoking bans in general, addressing a hypothetical situation.

His argument and his ultimate point bear repeating not only because they are relevant to the cigar bar ban but because they show how entrenched this unparalleled public health power has become. Just 17 years ago, as this debate shows, doctors could and did debate the dangers of authoritarian public health tendencies.

There are no such public debates today. They are simply not allowed in “respectable” journals.

But Cherry did in his thankfully preserved essay, and he argued that public health had become a very willing agent of coercive political authority. He may have been steelmanning, or not, but he argued nonetheless and was in fact encouraged to do so.

“The power vested in the public health community has become increasingly significant,” Cherry wrote. “Its judgment is sought on nearly all aspects of life, from appropriate births and deaths, diets and sexual behaviors, to methods of child rearing and permissible lifestyle choices.”

Because the concern for ‘health’ has become a pervasive aspect of modern culture, Cherry wrote, this new public-health power has the potential to be particularly insidious, and nowhere, he argued, was that more obvious than in the push to ban smoking everywhere, even on private property.

However, legislative smoking bans could not be justified either in terms of private good or public good, Cherry argued.

“To justify a smoking ban in terms of private good, the state must overturn longstanding legal and moral considerations that highlight individual autonomy and individual authority of persons over themselves,” he wrote. “The weight of this moral and jurisprudential tradition establishes persons as an authority over themselves and as the presumed authoritative judge of their own interests.”

To justify a smoking ban in terms of the ‘public good,’ Cherry contended, the state would need to demonstrate that accidental exposure to secondhand smoke in public places significantly increases actual personal risk above the level of background health risks that routinely exist in public.

“Otherwise, smoking bans simply enact a facile, hyperbolic, and discriminatory solution to what is a very complex moral and scientific issue,” he wrote.

The official public health line is that the whole issue of bans was about “involuntary” exposure to secondhand smoke, Cherry observed, but he called that inaccurate in private venues. Today, I would point out, the term is ‘gaslighting,’ not inaccurate.

“The rhetorical force of this depiction is that nonsmoking patrons and employees are forced into breathing secondhand tobacco smoke, a purported harm, which somehow violates their rights,” he wrote. “At least with regard to businesses, bars, restaurants, and other private venues that the public freely choose to patronize, this characterization is inaccurate. Although such establishments are the usual target of legislative public smoking bans, these are not genuinely public places; rather, they are privately owned and operated businesses that the public freely chooses to frequent.”

Patrons who choose to enter thereby volunteer to breathe the air inside, Cherry argued, including influenza bacteria spread by the sneezing person next to you, bad breath, body odor, smelly food, flower pollens, nauseating perfumes and scented candles, not to mention the tobacco smoke.

“Those who do not wish to inhale the establishment’s internal air may leave; each is free to seek establishments with a personally acceptable (by whatever criteria) internal atmosphere,” he wrote.

People routinely accept serious risks, Cherry posited, whether it be climbing mountains, donating a kidney, parachuting out of airplanes, or engaging in promiscuous sex, precisely because they value other goods, such as money, adventure, pleasure, and love. Not least, Cherry argued, that same respect for self-rule underlies the practice of informed consent in medicine.

In the end, Cherry contended, sweeping smoking bans don’t look like neutral health policy.

“Morally permissible legislation does not extend to the coercive imposition of paternalistic regulations on free citizens, as if they were mere children,” he wrote.

Well said. There was counterpoint to this essay, and the situation addressed was hypothetical. The actual positions of the presenters were irrelevant, however. That such a point of view was presented at all in a mainstream medical journal is what is important. Today, such arguments are deemed to be the territory of the “far right,” whatever that is. Just 17 years ago, it was part of a serious political discourse within mainstream medicine.

That such dialogue is now taboo in those quarters shows just how far down the road to totalitarianism we have traveled. It’s certainly no cause for lighting up a cigar and having a nightcap, as our liberty goes up in the smoke and mirrors of medicine’s modern mythology.