Sure, it may be legal, healthy, even inevitable, but to many smokers in South Boston’s Old Colony development, a ban on cigarettes is positively un-American.
“It’s against your rights,” said resident Wayne Pemberton, 58, as he puffed on a Marlboro at the entrance of his building. “I’ve been smoking for a long time and lived here too long. This is America. If I can’t smoke in my house, it’s wrong. This is a free world, I thought.”
The Boston Housing Authority plans to open more than 100 smoke-free public housing units in a rebuilt section of Old Colony slated for completion in 2012, in keeping with a vow by Mayor Thomas M. Menino to have entirely smoke-free public housing by 2014.
But Southie smokers have a message for the mayor: You can pry those cigarettes out of our cold, dead hands.
“I try to quit somewhat for my health,” Matthew Tilton, 21, told the Herald, leaning out of his building’s window after stubbing out a Newport. “But if they force it to, ‘If you’re gonna smoke, you can’t live here,’ then that’s not right.”
Yet, not all smokers were feeling the hate. Some ruefully embrace the ban.
“I’d go for a new unit,” said Veronica Szwanke, 27, of Old Colony where, she said, people chain-smoke in the hallways. “I’d quit if I had to,” the Newport smoker said.
Five-year resident and 13-year smoker Benito Diaz, 56, said he’d welcome the ban, too - for safety and olfactory reasons.
“Some people, they could smoke and fall asleep with the cigarette or something,” Diaz said. “It’s bad, and I don’t like the smell.”
But those concerns mean nothing to those defending what they regard as a fundamental right.
“They’re taking our freedom,” Tilton said. “You should be able to smoke in the house. If I’m paying an arm and a leg (for rent), I expect to smoke.”
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