Don't Be Burned A Second Time

Peter Hitchens writes:

I used to fall for the old arguments about smoking and freedom – that people were entitled to do this stupid thing if they wanted to. I may even have used the expression ‘nanny state’, though I try very hard to avoid it now. Sometimes even grown-ups need a bit of nannying.

I even campaigned, in an office I worked in, against a planned smoking ban, though I have never smoked myself. I was quite wrong. It is perfectly sensible and justifiable to use the law to try to stop people from harming themselves, unless there are very good reasons for the risk. Because when you harm yourself, you harm plenty of other people too.

No, I never believed the stories about second-hand smoke, and still don’t.

Cigarettes stink and spoil the atmosphere, and anyone who smokes them near others who are eating is inconsiderate and rude. But I think the evidence that they give cancer to anyone apart from the people actually smoking them is very thin indeed.

The real harm to others is quite different. If you fall seriously ill, you are not the only one who suffers. Everyone close to you suffers too, often more than you do. And after your (often unpleasantly lingering) death from lung cancer, it is the others who are left to grieve and cope without the help, company and income of the carefree smoker who said it was a risk worth taking and discovered too late that it wasn’t.

And I have no doubt at all that the bans on smoking, in trains, cinemas, buses, pubs, restaurants and hotels are helping many people give up a habit that is actually much harder to quit than heroin. And one measure of the rightness of these bans is how quickly it has begun to seem strange that smoking was ever allowed in these places.

Did we really watch films through columns of bluish effluent? Were trains on the London Underground stained a noxious yellow, full of stale fug and strewn with butts? Was the back end of every aeroplane a sordid zone of wheezing and spluttering? Yes, it was so, though I really can’t work out why we put up with it for so long.

Something so self-evidently ugly and dirty obviously wasn’t good for us. I realised that I couldn’t really believe – as I do – that the law can be used to discourage cannabis, or drunkenness, or drunk driving, if I continued to support the futile, fatal freedoms of smokers.

So I changed my opinion. The ban on displaying cigarettes in shops will cause fewer people to smoke, as all the other measures have since the first health warning appeared on the first packet. And in time this strange, self-destructive habit, which is actually very new and only really invaded the civilised world during two disastrous wars, will be banished to the margins of life.

Then we will have proof prohibition does sometimes work, if it is intelligently and persistently imposed. And the stupid, fashionable claim that there is no point in applying the laws against that sinister poison, cannabis, will be shown up for what it is – selfish, dangerous tripe. Where we can save people from destroying themselves, we must do so.