Resist the tobacco Taliban

Rod Liddle
The Sunday Times
Jun. 26, 2006

A taxi driver once told me about a Japanese passenger he’d driven around central London, a chap mesmerised and delighted by one unheralded attraction of our capital. “There are so many elegant, well-dressed prostitutes,” he exclaimed, “and plying their trade in broad daylight outside every office!” He was referring, of course, to that characteristic huddle of temps and secretaries you find in the doorway of every London building, chugging away like billyo on their Marlboro Lights. It is sad to think that the government is planning to abolish a tourist attraction that is by now as familiar as the beefeaters at the Tower.

Lord Warner, the health minister, let slip last week that the health bill which outlaws smoking in pubs, clubs and restaurants, and which has already been voted on by the House of Commons, could be extended to include people who smoke outside too — in areas such as doorways and bus shelters. This is not what parliament voted for and I suspect it would incur the displeasure, on libertarian grounds, of many non-smokers. But Lord Warner couldn’t give a monkey’s.

He will have the support of a vociferous health lobby that feels itself unchallengeable. This, regardless of the fact that doctors and nurses kill slightly more people every year through misdiagnosis or general incompetence than does smoking. My proposal for a ban on doctors in public places, or at least a special sealed room for them in public bars, etc, to minimise the potential danger of being passively killed by one of them, never really caught on.

The official reasons stated for extending this already draconian legislation are, first, that passive smoking kills people — although the only large-scale longitudinal study, of 118,000 people in California over 39 years, concluded there was no causal link between passive smoking and deaths from lung cancer or heart disease. The risk incurred by standing next to a smoker for five minutes in a bus shelter must be vanishingly small, far smaller than damage caused by traffic pollution.

One suspects the health lobby knows this, which is why other, surreal stuff is brought into the equation. It has been seriously argued that groups of smokers puffing away on pavements might cause terrified non-smoking pedestrians to step outside into the road where they could be killed by a car. I have even seen it asserted that children might injure themselves by stepping on discarded cigarette butts.

Nonsense, of course, and the extension to the legislation will save no lives at all. Some 95% of smoking-related deaths are occasioned by people lighting up in the home. Making smoking illegal everywhere, then, might indeed save a few thousand lives every year. It would be a grotesque infringement of civil liberties to enact such legislation — but it would have a certain logic.

It may well come to that — because the sort of people who populate Action on Smoking and Health (Ash) simply cannot stop themselves; they will agitate for more and more legislation because that is the only reason for their existence.

In the case of Ash, what began as a noble campaign to prevent smokers from inflicting their habit upon everyone else has turned into a far more intensive campaign to perpetuate their own salaries. In the meantime this repulsively pious lobby issues forth ever more spiteful and immoral injunctions.

Its American branch has already said that “firing smokers is an appropriate and very effective way to stop burdening the great majority of employees who wisely chose not to smoke”. Burdening them with what, if it’s a non-smoking building? It has persuaded several US firms not to hire smokers in the first place, causing one former anti-smoking campaigner, Professor Michael Siegel from Boston University, to allege that Ash is on the verge of “running amok” and losing “the integrity of an evidence-based approach”.

There is within some people a deep-seated need to victimise those they consider racially, socially, sexually or ideologically aberrant. Smokers are a convenient and politically correct target for those who wish to take out their inchoate anger but are sharp enough to realise that, these days, you can’t vent it on Jews or homosexuals.

Delving further still, we find what the left-wing Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek calls the “absolute narcissism” of the anti-smoking lobby; its collective, irrational terror of infection or disease transmitted by “other” people and a concomitant envy of the “intense enjoyment” experienced by other people when they light up a Raffles or a Woodbine.

It is, he asserts, the liberalism of the politically correct yuppie who, for reasons of self-interest, will not address the real problems of society but nonetheless wishes to register some form of a protest against capitalism — and finds a convenient conduit in the giant tobacco companies and their slavish customers.

We are all addicted to something and our acquired habits are only rarely socially beneficial. But it is part of what makes us human. When Ash has got rid of the smokers, who will it turn its guns on next?