Anti-smokers in California weren't happy with usurping the property rights of bar and restaurant owners, so now they are taking aim at public beaches. Several coastal beaches have already passed smoking bans, and Los Angeles is well on the way. While the puritans have always made false claims that second hand smoke causes cancer, now they are claiming that it is important to protect people from trash.

"This is really a very basic issue, which is that the community is standing up to protect its youth and citizens from tobacco smoke and litter," says Judy Strang, executive director of Youth Tobacco Prevention Corps.

Smoke nazis already air TV ads that claim smokers are stupid, so painting them as litter bugs is just another form of demonization. But you'd have to be a crackpot to believe that a cigarette butt lying on the ground is somehow harmful.

As for the amount of litter, the anti-smokers are indeed making some dubious claims.

After a routine beach cleanup produced 6,300 butts in one hour at the 1.5-mile-long Solana Beach, the group took a tub of cigarette refuse to city hall.

6300 cigarette butts in an hour is 105 per minute, or 1.75 per second. If there were 100 volunteers cleaning up the beach, that would mean each volunteer found one cigarette butt about every minute. That isn't exactly a hard feat to accomplish, but it still makes me wonder, if they found a cigarette butt every minute what were they picking up the rest of the time? If they found 6300 butts, how many used condoms did they find? What about medical waste, and fast food debris? And just who was counting all these butts? It just seems to me like they were out there purposely looking for cigarette butts, and passing over other forms of litter. My theory is bolstered by this little gem:

Months later, a more formal Solana Beach cleanup event still garnered 230 pounds of refuse, 60 percent of which consisted of wet cigarette butts.

(More formal cleanup? I can just picture them out there in tuxedos.) So 60% of the 230 pounds of litter collected was wet cigarette butts. (How did they get wet?) That works out to 138 pounds of cigarette butts. If you still don't think they were purposely targeting cigarette butts, check out this claim.

Cigarette butts do not biodegrade, and they contain 200 known poisons, 63 of which are shown to cause cancer.

That's right, according to the pleasure police, the cotton and paper in a cigarette butt don't degrade, and they are packed with cancer causing poisons. Just how a cigarette butt causes cancer isn't stated. I'm not sure if people are eating the cigarette butts, rubbing them on themselves, or if simply getting to close to them will cause the cancer demons to jump into your body. If that's true, the surgeon general should start putting warning labels on ashtrays, gutters, and other places that cigarette butts have been known to congregate. I'd hate to get to close to one of those nasty things and get some of that cancer poison on me.