MY teenage idiocy knew no bounds. I once tap danced on the edge of a railway bridge to entertain a girlfriend. We both thought it pretty cool until I fell off and plummeted 50 feet towards the tracks. Luckily, some trees broke my fall and I just ended up in casualty, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this now. Instead, I’d be a faded memory in my hometown of a long dead halfwit.

After staying out too late at an illicit boozy underage party, I thumbed a lift home from strangers only to discover when I got into the back seat that it was a skinhead couple in a stolen car. Instead of driving me home, they took me on a nighttime joyride of terror. It thankfully ended when they stopped to snog and glue-sniff, allowing me to say my goodbyes and skedaddle.

Perhaps my greatest feat of suicidal stupidity, though, was to teach myself how to smoke aged 14. This was the 80s. Latchkey kids could get away with just about anything back then. So after school one day, I popped on a video nasty – fittingly Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, if I recall correctly – and decided I’d learn how to smoke. I’d bought four single Embassy No 6 cigarettes from the corner shop – because why wouldn’t an adult sell death to a youngster in their school uniform?

I recall the afternoon vividly. I’d also bought a bottle of Raspberryade, reckoning I’d need something to wash the smokes down. Clearly, I was already a sophisticate. I’d tried a few amateur puffs before with friends in the park, but now I was turning professional. It was time to inhale.

This was a Battle Royale I'd entered. The first few drags had me coughing and wheezing – there was even some drool, I believe. But brave wee soldier that I was, I struggled on. After the second cigarette, I needed a break, as I was greening round the gills. I also needed to change what was on TV, because watching psychopaths murdering people wasn’t making the experience of ingesting poison any more fun. I polished off my fizzy pop and switched over to children’s TV. It could have been He-Man, it may have been Noggin the Nog, but whatever the show, by the time it ended I’d learned to smoke … like a big boy.

God help us kids back then – we thought this was cool. Of course, there were millions of folk – young and old – with the basic intelligence to realise sucking cancer chemicals into your lungs isn’t the best plan in the world. But for a long time they were in the minority.

Many of us – especially GenXers – thought smoking was hip right into this century. Intelligent people looked on smoking as a fashion accessory, even though we were fully aware that cigarettes were killing us. But we were in our twenties and death only happens to olds, right? We’d grown up around smoking, and ‘monkey see, monkey do’ – isn’t that’s the sad old truth. Our parents and grandparents smoked – homes were fugs of fag fumes back then; everyone smoked on TV, our teachers smoked in school, for pity’s sake. Doctors even smoked. You could once smoke on planes – but then it was quite easy to hijack aircraft back in the 70s too.

Mercifully, the medical profession eventually stubbed its own cigs out and started campaigning to clampdown on tobacco. Hallelujah, the rate of decline in smoking since the turn of the century has been remarkable. Less than 20% of Scots now smoke. Historians will look back and study what happened as a near perfect example of how social policy can change a society’s habits in the space of just a few years.

However, by the time the 2006 smoking ban arrived, and cigarettes morphed into a pariah symbol, many folk my age were too hooked to stop. We endured huddling in the rain like lepers outside pubs just to suck ourselves a little closer to death. I only quit a few years ago after some ill health – not smoking related, ironically – put me in hospital. By the time I got out, I’d quit. I’ve never looked back. Smoking was my biggest, most dangerous, stupidest, most expensive, stinkiest mistake. I wish I’d never learned to inhale that day back in the 80s with my trusty Raspberryade at my side.

We’re now in the foothills of a complete end to smoking. New Zealand is to ban anyone born after 2008 from buying cigarettes. Denmark will bring the same laws in for those born after 2010. There’s talk that the UK government could do likewise – but with the ban potentially affecting anyone born from 1997 onwards. Scotland has rather amorphous plans to be ‘smoke-free by 2034’.

I didn’t turn into a smoke-nazi after quitting. I hate being around smoking now, but adults are free to do what they want – that’s my view. So the UK government risks taking things a wee bit too far, while Denmark and New Zealand may have hit the Goldilocks zone.

It makes all the sense in the world to prevent the children of today from ever touching a cigarette – unless it’s as some grim teaching device in history class. Britain threatens clamping down on adults, though. If a ban on tobacco for anyone born from 1997 were put in place today, that would mean smokers who are now 25 would effectively be subject to prohibition. We’d face the absurd possibility of adult men and women, still addicted to cigarettes, asking older adults to buy their fix for them – like desperate teenagers seeking an amoral bam to do an off-licence ‘jump-in’. The sale of tobacco should be banned – or rather phased out – but in a sensible way that doesn’t torment adults still suffering addiction.

Here’s a possible equitable solution: today, you need to be 18 to buy tobacco in Scotland. That means you shouldn’t be an addict if you’re under 18 – and if you are, then you’ve done so illegally. Work back 18 years from now and we come to 2004. Perhaps, that date is the point we pick, fairly, to say ‘no more’.

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