In Great Lakes country . . .

. . . they're counting butts.

Nearly 20,000 pounds of trash were removed from Great Lakes beaches by Adopt-a-Beach volunteers last year, and according to the [Butt-Counting] Alliance for the Great Lakes, about 154,000 cigarette butts were a part of that mess.

And a cig butt weighs what? Here's an estimate of 1.5 grams for a whole stick. Let's be generous and say that half of that is the weight of the butt.

So, .75 grams is one cigbutt. 154 thousand of them would weigh 115500 grams, or 254.633 pounds.

265.633 pounds of butts divided by 20,000 total pounds of trash comes to 0.01328165.

So if you banned beach smoking and this somehow kept upstream cigarettes from washing in, thus removing ALL cigarett butts in the area, you still have 98.671835% of the trash to deal with that you had before. Virtually NO difference.

Is freedom so worthless that it is to be given up for virtually no gain?