WHY NOT take up smoking? It's glamorous and it will make you popular with successful, good-looking bon vivants. Export A, du Maurier, Benson & Hedges - they're all good brands. And you kids out there, this goes double for you. Get with it.

Taking a trip? Visit South Africa. Never mind all that race relations stuff, this place has beaches that are unsurpassed. I particularly recommend Sun City. Whether it's golf, tennis or a spot of rugby you fancy, South Africa is a sporting paradise.

Your every erotic fantasy fulfilled. I urge you to enjoy the cinematic delights of the all-new, all-nude 3-D ''Schoolgirls at Play,'' every one of whom gives the appearance of being under 18. At Central Cinema West, through Friday.

Each of these paragraphs violates current or pending restrictions on free expression introduced by the federal government. The first defies the ban on advertising tobacco. The second breaks the embargo on promoting South African tourism. The third touts an illegal pornographic display.

BAN PARAGRAPHS

Would these paragraphs be banned? Is, therefore, this column illegal? If so, does this not raise troublesome questions of freedom of the press? I wrote these words. This is the editorial page. I am a columnist, and these are - let us assume - my views.

Ah, you will say, but these aren't advertisements. They're opinions. Different thing. Oh? What's the difference? Well, you haven't paid for the space. But then it cannot be the harm caused by the expression of these ideas that is at issue, as the government and its apologists claim. For the effect on the reader is the same, whether the space is paid for or donated by the publisher.

But all right, to set that issue to one side, I have just paid Neville Nankivell, publisher of The Financial Post, $3 - $1 per paragraph being the going rate for advertising in the Commentary space.

What is the government to do? The offending paragraphs are clearly advertisements now.

Will it prosecute? If it does not, merely because the ads are on the editorial page, in a columnist's space, then every newspaper wishing to take cigarette company money can simply call the page carrying the ad an editorial page, and every columnist can make himself rich as a shill for tobacco campaigns.

DISAGREE WITH VIEWS

But if it does prosecute, we are back to the problem we started with: can it be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society for a government to go locking up columnists whose views it disagrees with, even if those views are on the pleasures of smoking, the joys of visiting South Africa or the esthetic merits of actresses dressed as underage volleyball players? I think not.

But don't take my word for it. Sixty-eight percent of the public thinks the same. And 17 million Canadians can't - what? Oh. It appears I could have broken another law. You see, under proposed legislation, it is illegal to publish the results of polls without including details on the sample size, the margin of error, the wording of the question, etc.

Why? The government wants to ensure that poll results are used truthfully, and not twisted to suit narrow, self-serving ends. Just as it was most concerned a few years back to see that private citizens should not be allowed to buy political advertising, to prevent public opinion from being warped in election campaigns.

Well, who better than the government to prevent the abuse of polls and political advertising? And hasn't censorship always been a force for social progress in the past?