We are not members of the group that gathers for coffee most mornings at a downtown Smithfield restaurant. But we understand the group’s debates on the day’s news are lively and enlightening. The debates also show, on occasion, just how far out of touch politicians and bureaucrats are with real people.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, the group came to a consensus after reading that Johnston County schools would be tobacco-free come Aug. 1. The consensus went something like this: It’s comforting to know the schools are going tobacco-free. When will they be free of drugs and weapons?

The group was expressing a sentiment shared by many Johnstonians, especially those who grew up in the county’s tobacco fields. That is to say, tobacco is an easy target for politicians and bureaucrats who hope to score points with a health-conscious public.

Tobacco is an easy target because everyone knows it’s bad for you. That’s true even of the folks who grow the stuff. Tobacco is also an easy target because its use is easy to detect. That makes a tobacco ban easy to enforce: Just follow the smoke.

Drug use, on the other hand, is not so easy to detect. A teacher might suspect that a student is high on, say, a prescription medication, but proving that is a different matter altogether. As for weapons, short of searches of bodies, lockers and vehicles, well, no one knows who’s packing what.

In other words, politicians and bureaucrats go after tobacco because doing so is much easier than cracking down on drugs and weapons. But we suspect parents, if asked what they could rid the schools of, would say weapons first, followed by drugs. Tobacco would rank no higher than third.