Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, said California’s new governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the final days of his campaign in response to allegations of his harassing women. At the time, it seemed as though he was speaking metaphorically but, in retrospect, maybe he was pondering on the issue of what Californians smoke and where and what should be done about it.
This week comes news of the latest extension of the various bans on smoking in the state. California has one of the strictest no-smoking policies in the world: no cigarettes in bars, restaurants, public buildings and some public parks. Now a Los Angeles city council member, Jack Weiss, wants to extend the ban to LA’s beaches. A small town, Solana Beach, down the coast near San Diego, has just voted for such a ban. LA may follow suit.
Venice Beach, the city’s premier seaside area, remains one of the bastions of free expression in California. It is one of the first places I take visitors to the city and indeed, if an alien were to arrive from outer space and I only had 20 minutes to show him/her/it what the world was like, I would take him/her/it for a stroll down Venice boardwalk on a weekend.
All human life is there. Every age, race, colour, creed, religion, gender and mode of dress and transport are there. There are also many smokers puffing away on everything that there is to be smoked. This would be the first place to be affected by a ban.
Now on a recent visit to Palm Springs - the only place in the country where the average age of inhabitants is the same as the average Fahrenheit temperature (80) - I visited the local casino run by the Agua Caliente band of the Cahuilla Indians. The tribal chairman, Richard Milanovich, took us on a tour of the Spa Resort Casino and one of the most striking things about it was that all the gamblers wrestling with the one-armed bandits - mainly middle-aged women - seemed to be smoking. How could this be? Smokers in a public building in California?
The casino is built on an Indian reservation and thus is sovereign territory. The casino reckons that if people want to indulge one vice, they might as well indulge another. Venice Beach is not, however, built on sovereign territory, so when the ban comes, smokers will either have to head out into the Pacific or quit.
In fact, this has been a big week for local smokers of all varieties. First, we now have a cigar-smoking governor. But could this lead to the thawing of relations with Cuba? Amazingly, it is still illegal to bring a Cuban cigar into the United States. Second, we have the proposed ban on smoking on the beaches of LA. And third, the supreme court has rebuffed the Bush administration by ruling that doctors in California and six other western states are free to recommend marijuana to their patients.
The supreme court ruling was in response to an appeal by the Bush administration against a regional court decision to uphold a doctor’s right to recommend marijuana. This does not mean medical marijuana is legal, but offers some protection to doctors who might suggest its benefits to a patient.
President Bush flashed through the state this week to raise $1.8m (£1.08m) for his re-election campaign and to gladhand the new governor. The non-smoking president is against medical marijuana, the new cigar-smoking governor is in favour of it.
Perhaps the solution is for the tribal areas in the state, which have come under attack from Mr Schwarzenegger for their financial donations to the Democrats, to assert their sovereign status and allow the sale of Cuban cigars and the use of medical marijuana on their land. And then the governor could tell the president to put that in his pipe and smoke it.
