THE ban on smoking was a singular public health measure. Unlike most other vices, to use a moral term, smoking has a direct impact on surrounding people. You cannot just shut your eyes or look away, because you have to breath in someone else’s smoke. Their pleasure or addiction can become your discomfort, long term health threat or even life-threatening asthma attack.
So we have no hesitation in saying that the decision to ban smoking in public places, introduced in Scotland in 2006 and England a year later, was without question a good thing.
Bar staff, for example, were found to have markedly improved respiratory health soon after the enactment of the ban, while fears that children would suffer because parents would smoke more at home were shown to be unfounded because of a more general cut in the level of smoking.
Although the proposed ban on smoking in cars is seen by some as a step too far — where next, private homes? — the idea that it is wrong to inflict cigarette smoke on children in enclose spaces will have widespread support.
So what of the latest proposals from the Royal Society for Public Health that the ban on smoking should be extended to pub and restaurant gardens, school gates and parks?
The logic of this is already in place with the universal ban on smoking not just in hospitals but in hospital grounds, although anyone who has visited a hospital recently will see how poorly this is observed.
The truth is that smoke does not observe boundaries. This is why no smoking areas in pubs and restaurants did not suffice. But outdoors? It is a less clear-cut argument but anyone who has had to walk through a fug of smoke to enter a pub or restaurant will know how unpleasant this can be for non-smokers.
Equally, do we really want to hunt down and persecute those of our fellow citizens who are, after, addicted to tobacco and who pay handsomely in taxes for their vice? It can be annoying on a sunny day to find a beer garden unpleasant because of the presence of so many smokers. But it is hard on smokers to say they should be chased out of their remaining redoubts.
One answer would be to encourage the current trend towards e-cigarettes. The argument is that the health effects of these are as yet unquantified, but it is surely obvious that whatever the impact on the individual “vaper” the effect on those around them is clearly less unpleasant and almost certainly less damaging.
It may be that if we are to follow the Royal Society for Public Health in extending the ban on smoking to more outdoor areas we should at least consider a more nuanced approach to the ban on e-cigarettes in public areas. This could act as a further incentive to edge smokers away from an addiction which is clearly harmful to themselves and others and towards a practice which appears to be less harmful to both.
We accept that Ministers have to adopt the precautionary principle when it comes to health matters, but a bit of creative thinking would not go amiss.
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