Simone WilsonJust like sex offenders, cigarette smokers are being pushed out of Los Angeles one ordinance at a time.
Following a new U.S. Food and Drug Administration mandate for graphic warning labels on cigarette cartons, the L.A. City Council voted 13-0 to make virtually all public spaces into no-smoking zones today. Their attorneys should have a final draft ready for approval by 2011.
The message: Crawl back in your ashy caves, assholes. We don't want your cancer breath.
(Of course, along with your dank apartment, you'll still have the No. 1 hangout in the city to smoke in: hours worth of gridlocked freeways and backed-up surface streets. Thank god for traffic!)
In image-conscious Los Angeles, the 72 proposed carton labels [warning: giant ugly PDF] are also a sizable diss — basically big 'L's for your forehead. Observe a few choice designs:
Credit: U.S. Food and Drug Administration
Whoa… why hasn't anyone ever thought of heroin cigarettes?
Credit: U.S. Food and Drug Administration
The acting skills of above fogey reminds us of those retro “I'm having a heart attack” commercials (skip to 00:28). The old-fat-guy-in-pain strategy is always slightly ineffective, considering we sort of want him to die, just to see the face he'd make.
Credit: U.S. Food and Drug Administration
And that last one is just straight joyous. Making us think about how wonderful it is to be alive with things in our mouths. Like cancer sticks. Mmm.
The FDA will narrow its design pool down to nine favorites in June, then slap them on cigarette packages by September. But compared to other countries, this FDA fluff is for wussies: Check out the gnarly warning labels they require in Brazil.
The L.A. City Council is going to similar extremes to put smokers in the corner with dunce caps on. City Councilman Bernard Parks — who proposed at the council meeting today to extend L.A.'s no-smoking zone to all businesses, parks, apartment common areas and beaches — is approaching the ban from a righteous legal angle.
Parks told NBC Los Angeles that smoking is not protected by the Constitution, “yet secondhand smoke harms an involuntary population which has a right to clean air and a clean environment and which is protected by many public health laws.”
New Yorkers were up in arms last month about a similar proposal by their City Council.
In L.A., however, no one except DWP employees really knows where City Hall really is, so this one will likely pass through without too much fuss. Plus, who wants to be the jerk with the smoker's cough proposing he continue to endanger innocent children?
Guess we'll just have to stick with weed for now.
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