Photos: Fire aftermath at Mariner's Cove Motor Inn in Point Pleasant

Glenn Grillo, right, listens as James Giannuzzi tells the story of escaping the fire at Mariner's Cove Motor Inn in Point Pleasant Beach. Sunday March, 23, 2014 (Patti Sapone/The Star-Ledger)

( Star-Ledger file photo)

The top two stories on the front page of the Tuesday Star-Ledger concerned fires caused by smoking. The lead story told of a school that burned down after a custodian allegedly threw a cigarette butt into a trash can. Underneath was a story about four men killed in a motel fire likely caused by careless smoking.

Now let’s suppose the substance in those cigarettes was not tobacco but marijuana. Can you imagine the politicians’ howls of outrage against the demented drug users whose horrible addiction caused all that wanton destruction?

But you didn’t hear a peep from the pols about tobacco-fueled destruction. Any outrage was reserved for a proposal featured on the front page of the New Jersey section that day.

This story told of a state senator who proposed that marijuana be treated the same as tobacco, as a recreational drug that is highly taxed and produces millions in annual revenue for the state.

That brought a predictable response from the governor’s office. A spokesman cited an anti-marijuana spiel Chris Christie gave the prior week in which he stated, "I will not permit recreational use."

Of pot, that is. Tobacco’s a different story. Let’s imagine that the big marijuana growers had a habit of giving half a million bucks a year to the Republican Governors Association, as does Big Tobacco.

Would the head of that association somehow be persuaded of the moral rectitude of their position? The question answers itself when you consider the favor the Christie administration did for the car dealers by kicking Tesla out of the state after they contributed mightily to him.

As for me, I find all types of smoking abhorrent. From an early age, I recognized that the dumbest thing a person can do is to start a fire a few inches from his face and inhale the results.

As for the contents of that smoke, that’s none of my concern — as long as the smoker in question keeps it to himself. Here the pot smokers are preferable. I’ve never had one sit down next to me at a bar where I was enjoying an aromatic ale and proceed to fill the air with foul-smelling smoke.

Chris Christie: Tobacco yes, Tesla no.

The pot smokers don’t litter either. That sheds light on another smoking-related bill now before the Legislature. The bill would ban cigarette smoking on the beach. Opponents are suggesting that this ban would represent some great imposition on the liberties of the smoker. It might even keep smokers from going to the beach, they say.

If so, that’s all the more reason to support it. The beaches would be free of such characters as comedian Bill Maher, a smoker who has included in his act a line about how "the beach is an ashtray."

That’s certainly the way smokers treat it. The ground around the platforms at every beach in my town is littered with cigarette butts. The trash can is 10 feet away, but I have yet to see a smoker test his endurance by trying to cover that distance. Smokers are slobs.

From the visual evidence, you might be tempted to say the same thing about beer drinkers. But from the bottles and cans I see littering the dunes on my evening jogs, that applies only to those who drink that dreadful light beer. You don’t see empty six-packs of Pliny the Elder strewn out on the sand.

Nonetheless, just about every town in Jersey bans beer on the beach. I don’t like these bans, but at least they are imposed for practical rather than moral reasons. In a free country, this is the way all such issues should be handled. No one put that more succinctly than the governor’s musical hero.

Back before he became obsessed with places like Nebraska and South Dakota, Bruce Springsteen wrote many songs about the Jersey Shore, where such issues are addressed quite practically. In the song "Blinded by the Light," he penned the immortal line "Do what you like, but don’t do it here."

That is the way in which such matters are best handled. If the bar owners run one town and the Methodists the next, then there is a place for everyone.

That is a wonderful governing philosophy. Too bad the governor doesn’t take orders from the Boss.