follow the morals As the auteur behind the brilliant Showgirls, Joe Eszterhas got a lot of respect from me. (For the last 6 years I've had a stuffed owl named Nomi on the dashboard of my car.) And then he proceeded to blow it all with this ludicrous anti-smoking screed in the NYT. Eszterhas looks back on his years of glamorizing smoking in movies:

Remembering all this, I find it hard to forgive myself. I have been an accomplice to the murders of untold numbers of human beings.

Did you catch that? Selling cigarettes is now "murder." And with all the sexy smoking in Basic Instinct, Eszterhas has blood on his hands and a conscience that won't shut up. Rather than suffer alone, he wants to share the wealth:

I don't think smoking is every person's right anymore. I think smoking should be as illegal as heroin.

And we all know how successful prohibition efforts and the war on drugs have been.

A cigarette in the hands of a Hollywood star onscreen is a gun aimed at a 12- or 14-year-old.

What an apt analogy -- pointing a gun at a teenager causes a harmful (but pleasurable) habit to appear more attractive and increases the odds that the kid will partake. Wait -- that's not how guns kill at all! Cigarettes are cool. I've known it ever since I saw a poster for Rebel Without a Cause. When I was a kid we had candy cigarettes with which we'd pretend to smoke. And yet I've never taken up smoking as a habit. Nor have most of my friends. Perhaps that's because we're not all the movie-imitating automata that Eszterhas thinks we are. I'm sorry that Eszterhas has suffered as a result of his smoking. But I'll be much sorrier if we end up living in the kind of police state that Eszterhas wants, with edgy would-be smokers, violent tobacco gangs, jails full of "war on tobacco" victims, and ruined families. It's easy to blithely propound tobacco prohibition -- it's another thing to actually consider the costs of creating and living in such a world.