Good News for Smokers in the Skies

Welcome to your local airport security line. Kindly place your carry-on items on the belt and walk through the metal detector while our pleasant TSA staff examines your luggage. Let's see, shoes, PDA, wallet, Marlboros, cigarette lighter, thank you sir and have a nice flight.

Welcome to your local airport security line. Kindly place your carry-on items on the belt and walk through the metal detector while our pleasant TSA staff examines your luggage. Let's see, shoes, books, comb, cell phone, hey hey HEY! What's this water bottle doing in here!? This is dangerous stuff! SECURITY!! This woman just tried to bring a bottle of water inside the secured perimeter!

Do you see a problem here? TSA recently announced that cigarette lighters will once again be allowed on board aircraft in carry-on luggage. Just a few years ago, courtesy of dumbass Richard Ried, we were told that a Bic was a threat to national security and must be surrendered, and we were made to scuffle barefoot (or, sockfooted) through security checkpoints. But now, it's okay again. That incendiary device? Go ahead and bring it on board. But that water bottle and those shoes remain weapons to be confiscated or carefully examined.

They're lightening up on security at airports for items we considered petty bans in the first place. Isn't this a sorta good thing? Sure. My problem arises in the motivation behind the lift though. According to a blog on USA Today, TSA confiscated 11,616,217 lighters in 2006 - 22,000 a day, and the disposal of said 11,616,217 lighters cost $4 million because they are considered HAZMAT. You can draw your own conclusions about whether lobbying from the tobacco industry played a role (the blogger thought so), but there's that price tag hanging out there that is potentially a bigger reason. It's better to lighten restrictions because it's expensive and a hassle to confiscate and dispose of them (although it wouldn't kill the smokers to just put your damned lighters in their checked luggage, would it? You have to stop smoking outside the airport anyway, and you can't smoke until you exit the destination airport, so just open the zipper and tuck it inside!) than to keep them banned for national security reasons.

TSA's official statement is that the scrutiny for lighters was distracting from the scrutiny for bombs. To begin with, I say that the scrutiny of my sneakers is probably equally unnecessary, since the cases that prompted both the shoe and lighter persecution were one and the same. And to follow I say, if looking for lighters is honestly going to cause you to overlook the unusually squared-up device with wires coming out of it, then TSA has bigger problems than we're even prepared to go into. But then again, didn't we just hear about how most of the airports whose security was tested with fake bombs in luggage failed?