Smoke House Rules

“Smoke House Rules”

I want to star this out by explaining I am not, never have been, and never will be a smoker. The very concept of sucking toxic fumes into my lungs for a high is just…asinine. However, I learned very young what makes this country a great place is we don’t tell other folks what to do with themselves. Unless, of course, the majority of voters have agreed an action is bad for society. Murder, for instance. Beating kids. Buying a cute lil puppy and then cutting him up for steaks. We don’t allow these things here, because they disturb the vast majority of the populace.

This happened to smoking in public places back in 2006. It started when an equal number of people smoked and didn’t smoke. That’s when non-smoking sections popped up in restaurants, and also when people noticed there wasn’t much of a difference. Then doctors began saying it wasn’t just annoying to smell someone else’s smoke; it was deadly. Election day 2006, we voted on a ballot initiative to ban smoking in public. It passed with a 65% majority, my vote included.

Let ‘em smoke away from me, but let ‘em smoke, by god. A new ballot initiative came down the pike saying it was too costly to enforce a public ban so we should just outlaw the damn things all together. I was amazed. For starters, if a public smoking ban is going to be too difficult and expensive to enforce, how in the hell was a total ban going to be any better? I also took exception to the idea that we, as a society, could up and tell someone they couldn’t kill themselves any way they like. We encourage boys to sign up for the Marines and ship them off to a desert to get blown up by a coffee can full of nails. That’s just damn hypocrisy, if you ask me.

I didn’t vote for it. I thought the whole idea was absurd, too much like Prohibition. You know, that little trick we tried to pull back in the Roaring Twenties to cure our society of the ills of alcohol. That worked out great, if you’ll recall. We spent millions of tax dollars to make illegal booze the coolest thing in the world, turned gangsters from common thugs into heroes. Al Capone, Bugsy Morane, Vito Corleone. None of them would have amounted to anything if booze had been legal. On the whole, the excersize was a case study on why it’s plain dumb to obey the whisperings and yelling of the far right.

I evidently overestimated the voters’ respect for history, because they passed the total ban. I feared for my state; I feared for it very much. I already heard that Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia and Pennsylvania were all full of people gearing up to ship contraband cigarettes over the border. The State Highway Patrol spent most of its time over the first few weeks of the cigarette ban checking out every unmarked white box truck on the highway. This led to a slew of probable cause lawsuits against the troopers effectively shutting down the force. We won’t even discuss the fact most shipments were trucked in by pretty blonde women in their thirties, driving mini vans with kids in the back.

Since state officials couldn’t catch the cigarettes coming across an open border, they did the only thing possible: They closed the border. The only ways in and out of the Great State of Ohio was via a few select interstate crossings. Before the closing, you saw a sign and maybe a weigh station to welcome you home. Now, you could see home in the glow of thousands of break lights miles away. It was harder to get in and out of Ohio than if you were a non-native Canadian who wanted to see the Space Needle. Just to reach the check point through the traffic was an estimated eight to sixteen hours.

Once you hit the check point, that’s when the real trouble began. They had all sorts of dogs, sensitive equipment, and specialists to find any trace of tobacco in your vehicle. They were serious about the zero tolerance policy too. I heard a story about a woman who, while she quit smoking fifteen years ago, had stuck an emergency pack of cigarettes under a seat. Just in case going cold turkey was too much for her, you understand. A dog sniffed them out, and she was arrested as a smuggler.

I myself ran afoul of these people when a sensor went nuts over a cigar butt my father—dead three years now—had left in my ashtray. I had no idea it was there; I never used the damn thing. They still tore my car apart and wrote me a ticket. The rebel now had a cause, and shortly after this episode I met with some former smokers from work. I pitied them, forced to go cold turkey with no other options. I told them what happened, and they told me, in the most awestruck and hungry tones, the cigar butt was probably on its way to the big locked warehouse in Jeffersonville. That’s right, across from the shopping outlet mall was a stash of tobacco products bigger than a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.

A plan was born. Taking advantage of the focus on tobacco, one of my cohorts was able to get some ammo across the border for his machine gun.

“Nope, no tobacco here, officer.”

“Well then, you’ve got an army surplus ammo case in your passenger seat, son. What’s in there?”

“Just some rounds for my questionable assault weapon, officer. Oh my god! I just saw that guy behind me flick on a lighter!”

Like a flash, the officer waved my friend on as he scurried to the next car in line, weapon drawn.

In similar fashion, grenades were easier to acquire than in previous years. Living in Hamilton County as we did, the only two items the local mail inspectors were concerned with were sex toys and tobacco. Grenades, even to the most diehard sick fucks, cannot be sex toys. Neither could you smoke one, for reasons similar to why they did not get stuck into anyone’s orifices. We received our shipment from the man in brown with a stamp: “Inspected by x-ray but not opened.” We all said a small prayer to the gods of bureaucracy.

Because of those lawsuits I mentioned previously, an unmarked white box truck was the safest way to transport contraband inside the state. All we had to do was buy current registrations and stay under the speed limit, and no problems. We brought along a jug of chloroform to drug anyone we had to. We hated the idea of fighting our brother Ohioans, even if they were misguided. However, this turned out to be an unnecessary step. When we pulled up to the gate, a short fat man in coveralls came out of the guard house, waving his walkie talkie.

“Gimme a sec, boys. Gate’s broke. Use the dock three.”

As the man wound the thing open with a pulley, my compatriots and I looked at each other, but did not say a word in order to avoid jinxing us. We proceeded obediently to dock three, and the dockworkers were incredibly surprised to see three or four self-fashioned commandos jump out of the back of the truck. Not exactly the cigarettes, or maybe cigars, they had expected. They behaved themselves, helping us as it was the path of least resistance. Silly state employees.


We loaded up as much as the truck could carry. Modern day, smoking Robin Hoods. We were about to make our getaway safely and nonviolently until the floor supervisor came out. Not only was this rat bastard smoking, but he was smoking a Cuban cigar. Double betrayal!

My friend with the questionable assault rifle let loose a howl of rage and began to hurl grenades. Cartons upon cartons of Marlboros, Camels, and Lucky Strikes started to go up in flames. After the first explosions, the rest of our weapons opened up seemingly on their own. We didn’t see any more of the floor supervisor; I think I saw him run for his life through a back door rigged with a fire alarm. He looked like the type who’d be in the NRA, and all those guys know an assault rifle is quite a messy kill.

The rest of the staff had vanished. We had to content ourselves with ransacking and lighting up the rest of the building. Before we hauled ass out of there, moments ahead of the local sheriff’s deputy and fire truck stopped in, the entire place was a glorious monument of light to our efforts to keep American the land of the free. Astronauts on the ISS radioed down, “What the fuck is wrong with Ohio now? Most of it’s on fire!”

Although our descriptions and our “unmarked white rental truck” went out over the police wire, no law enforcement official with a sense of career was about to pull any unmarked box trucks over. We made it home unharassed, and even the warrants for our arrest we had expected never materialized. According to NPR the event at the Jeffersonville compound was termed “incredible spontaneous combustion.” The guy at the gate was fired, however. The dock workers were reassigned to cushy, well paid positions as part of a hush up deal. As for the floor supervisor…no one ever heard from him again, except for one unconfirmed sighting in the Caribbean.

Suddenly and with no warning, the ban was deemed too expensive and costly to enforce. The Department of Homeland Security oddly chimed in on the matter, saying a ban “encouraged radical jihadists to further acts of violence,” although no one from NPR could get the spokesman to explain the connection between a tobacco ban in Ohio and Islamic radicals.

So now I’m back to scheduling for smoke breaks at work, and occasionally have to tolerate a bit of second hand smoke when I’m out drinking a southern watermelon in some bar. I’m proud to be an American who struck a blow for liberty. I think the price of a stuffy nose whenever someone lights up is a bargain compared to the hell Ohio’s government was flirting with during those dark, dark days of border closings and zero tolerance.