Smoking is troops’ right

No one disputes that using tobacco, in whatever form, carries dire health consequences for users while driving up the costs of health care for everyone.

The Department of Veterans Affairs spent $5 billion last year to treat smoking-related emphysema alone. Now, in a study funded by VA, the Institute of Medicine has proposed ending tobacco sales on military bases and setting a deadline for a smoke-free force.

Certainly, there is cause for worry about the health of the troops. Oddly enough, in a culture in which fitness is a measure of job performance, one in three troops is a smoker — far more than in the general U.S. population, where one in five people smokes.

Like it or not, however, tobacco use is legal for adults. As long as that’s so, efforts to regulate its use must first resolve inherent issues of individual rights.

In recent decades, this has been done successfully to impose legal bans on smoking in many public spaces and workplaces; aboard commercial airplanes; and in bars and restaurants in many states.

But these initiatives focused mainly on protecting nonsmokers from secondhand smoke; they did not otherwise deny tobacco users the right to indulge.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in response to the IOM study, indicated interest in a smoke-free force as a broad, long-term goal, but was also adamant that he will not ban tobacco use for troops in the war zones.

He’s on the money on both points. It’s hard to argue against a long-term goal of ending tobacco use in the military or in any segment of society.

But summarily denying tobacco to deployed forces in high-stress war zones would be to unfairly and unwisely deny them the same rights enjoyed by their fellow citizens for whom they serve in harm’s way.

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