California Has A Cigarette Cop

America, meet the new prohibition:

It was Friday, Jan. 9, and Kirk Buckman was working the day shift out of Belmont. “I carry a badge,” Buckman said. “It’s shiny and gold. Pretty neat.”
As code enforcement officer for the community development department, Buckman is the tip of the legal spear that Belmont has enacted to break up the Peninsula city’s smoke ring.
A controversial ordinance that became law Friday extends the ban on smoking even to residents’ apartments and condos.

Break up the city’s smoke ring?
Gotta love the way smokers are being cast as criminals. I mean, tobacco is still a perfectly legal product to be sold, purchased, possessed and used right?
What I don’t get is why smoking in apartments and condos needs to be banned by the government. I know that smoke from one apartment can bleed over into another, but isn’t that a problem for the landlord and renters to settle? Where have our property rights gone?
I’ve said in the past that the big-government nanny staters have learned their lesson well from the failure of alcohol’s prohibition. Instead of going for an outright ban they’re angling to make our freedom die the death of a thousand little cuts. They know full well that an outright ban on tobacco sale and use would never work, so instead they’ll just regulate smoking to the point where it’s so hard to do nobody wants to do it.
It’s the same thing they’re trying to do with guns (look at all the forms, laws and regulations). Smoking is a nasty habit. I don’t like being around people who smoke, or being in smoky restaurants or bars, but the degree to which we’ve allowed the government to impede our individual and property rights for the sake of essentially banning what is a pet peeve for the public at large is ridiculous.
This is a slippery slope we’re on, and the government will be using the precedent set with these smoking bans across the nation to ban things like unhealthy foods and drink. It’s already happening, in fact.
But most of the public can’t see the danger to our liberty, because they’re more than happy to see the government use its power to attack habits they don’t like. Of course, they won’t be as happy when the government uses that same power to attack habits they do like.