Smoking Bans

The Dirty Dozen: Twelve reasons why smoking bans stink

By Joe Jackson

1. It disregards property rights. The air in a pub ‘belongs’ neither to smokers nor nonsmokers, and certainly not to politicians, but to the publican, and it is the publican who should decide the smoking policy on his or her own premises.
2. It sets a terrible precedent by blurring the boundary between public and private. A ‘public place’ should be defined as somewhere that (a) you have no choice but to enter, and/or (b) is financed by your taxes. Civic offices, libraries and law courts are ‘public places’ – pubs, clubs and restaurants are not, and neither politicians nor doctors have the right to dictate what people do in them. If we concede to them that right, they will inevitably extend it to other behaviours and other places: e.g. to our cars (as they are now trying to do) and then to our homes (which has already happened in parts of the US).
3. It removes freedom of choice – not only the smoker’s freedom to choose a place where we can enjoy a legal habit, but everyone’s freedom to work out their own compromises and solutions.
4. It is un-democratic. The Labour government’s own Office for National Statistics found 68% opposed to a total ban, and they promised in their Election Manifesto to ban smoking only in places serving food. But a total ban was imposed regardless. The only opinions lawmakers have listened to are those of medical authorities and lobby groups, and directly or indirectly, the pharmaceutical companies which frequently fund them.
5. It is socially divisive and encourages intolerance. Government is blatantly stigmatising a particular group, who must change their behaviour or be excluded from ‘correct’ society (a recent NHS campaign used the slogan ‘If you smoke, you stink’). Well-intentioned or not, antismoking authorities have created tremendous animosity between friends, neighbours and family members. They have also encouraged people to think that government can, or should, intervene to stop other people doing whatever they personally don’t approve of.
6. It is hypocritical, since tobacco remains legal and the Treasury makes around £10 billion per year from taxing it. And, incidentally, there is a smoker-friendly bar in the House of Commons.
7. Despite ever more contrived efforts to ‘prove’ otherwise, it is bad for business. Pubs and clubs are dying, and although the ban may not be the only factor, only the most blinkered smoke-hater would deny that it’s a significant one.
8. It is technologically backward, since it is not difficult, with decent modern air filtration, to make smoke virtually unnoticeable, and certainly harmless.
9. It does not stop people smoking. Even if we find it appropriate in the first place to ban smoking in pubs in order to pressure people into quitting, it doesn’t work. In many places (including the countries with the longest-standing bans in Europe, Ireland and Italy) smoking rates have risen since bans have been imposed. Antismoking zealots refuse to recognise that they have already reduced smokers to a ‘hard core’ who will not quit, and their increasingly bullying tactics will increasingly backfire. Even if tobacco were made illegal, millions would continue to use it.
10. It expects hospitality industry employees to enforce the law – rightly the job of the police. This sets another bad precedent, especially when members of the public are also encouraged to report violations of the ban. These are the methods of the Gestapo or the Stasi, who maintained control by making ordinary citizens fear each other.
11. It does not get rid of smokers, but displaces us, to the only places we can smoke: the streets and the home. In the first case, it’s pretty hard for us not to become more visible, and to create some degree of obstruction, noise or mess; and in the second, we are, according to antismokers, poisoning our family members – or at least, setting a ‘bad example’.
12. Finally, and most importantly, the government claims to be dismissing all the above considerations in order to tackle a deadly health threat: ‘secondhand smoke’. But there is no actual proof that even one person has died from this phantom menace. After 40 years of studies, antismokers can still only produce computer projections based on dubious statistics, and ‘relative risk ratios’ which sound scary but mean nothing in the real world. That’s why we see, for instance, posters telling us that tobacco smoke contains various nasty-sounding chemicals, without mentioning that they are present only at infinitesimal, harmless levels.

If we accept that such feeble evidence justifies a smoking ban, we are setting the level of acceptable risk so low as to justify banning just about everything else, too: cooking (which produces carcinogens), candles, incense, open fires, perfume, etc. Thousands of products, from household cleaners to cosmetics, contain higher levels of toxic chemicals than tobacco – and are still harmless.

It is also absurd to forbid adults from choosing to accept the ‘risk’ of working in a smoking venue, when they are free, for instance, to work down mines, on oil rigs, fighting fires, etc etc.

Ultimately, the problem here goes way beyond ‘to smoke or not to smoke’. There is a worrying general trend towards more and more intrusive legislation, justified by more and more dishonest and misleading junk science and fearmongering. (Typical of this are recent claims that the continuation of a long-term decline in heart attacks is ‘caused by’ smoking bans, and the invention of a new threat, ‘thirdhand smoke,’ on the basis of no scientific evidence whatsoever).

What’s needed is not just the repeal of the smoking ban and other illiberal laws, but a return to healthy scepticism, fairness, and common sense.