The Indifferent Antismokers

Several other people have covered this one already.

Anti-smoking campaigns and laws have turned smokers into a despised underclass, a study by a Department of Health adviser warned yesterday.

It said smokers have come to be seen as disgusting and dirty and are increasingly becoming regarded as outcasts.

The vilification is also stoking up prejudice against the poor because those who are already on low incomes or at a disadvantage are most likely to be smokers, the report by Professor Hilary Graham found.

Smokers are like ‘migrant and indigenous groups’ in past centuries who were seen as contaminating the rest of society and threatening the way of life of normal, healthy people, Professor Graham, of York University, added.

The idea of smokers as “contaminating society” is a thoroughly Nazi way of considering them. And it is, in fact, probably how Professor Hilary Graham would like people to regard smokers.

But, in my experience, most people don’t regard them that way. In the 5 years since the smoking ban was introduced, nobody has ever suggested that I am dirty or disgusting, and contaminating society. I’ve stood or sat smoking outside pubs all over southern England, and nobody has ever told me to put it out, or move along, or go away. Never. Nor have I seen anyone tell any other smoker to do so. Nor have I seen anyone theatrically wave their hands at the sight of smokers.

Smoking remains as normal as it ever was. The smokers have just gone outside, or gone home. The likes of Prof Graham would probably be delighted if smokers really were despised and publicly reviled. That’s the aim of ‘denormalisation’, after all. Antismoking zealots want to see citizens snatch cigarettes from smokers’ mouths, and hurl abuse at them. Prof Graham wouldn’t dare do it herself, of course, but she’d like to get other people to do it for her.

The truth is that the British people are far more decent than the antismoking zealots give them credit for. And the same is no doubt true more or less everywhere else. Most ordinary people don’t hate tobacco smoke, and they don’t hate smokers.

Apart from one or two zealots I’ve known, most of the “antismokers” I know (or knew) aren’t and weren’t zealots at all. Some of them disallowed smoking in their own homes, but I don’t recall any of them saying that smoking should be banned in all pubs too. They either didn’t go to pubs because they were “too smoky”, or they carried on going to them anyway like they always had. It was only when smoking was banned that they announced their approval. And even then, their approval was lukewarm. Most of them hardly noticed the ban. It was a non-event in their lives, because it didn’t affect them. If you asked any of them what happened on 1 July 2007, most likely none of them would remember. Only smokers noticed that day.

If I have any gripe with any of these erstwhile friends of mine, it’s not that any of them were zealots – none of them were, not even the very old friend who turned out to be working full time in a university on smoking cessation research -, but that, when the draconian smoking ban drove their smoking friends out of pubs and cafes, they failed to see the sheer hate-filled Nazism of it, and they did not protest against it, nor stand in solidarity with their excluded smoking friends. Or most of them didn’t. There were a number of exceptions where ex-smokers and never-smokers came out to stand with the smokers outside. But most were indifferent to the ban because it had no effect on them. And they were largely indifferent to its effect on smokers too. In fact, they were so indifferent to the ban that, even when I expressed my loathing of it to them, they couldn’t comprehend what I was saying. It didn’t matter to them, so why should it matter to me? The only people who weren’t indifferent were the real zealots, and angry smokers like me.

There never was any public call for a smoking ban. Nobody really wanted one, not even the indifferent, run-of-the-mill antismokers I knew, whose antismoking was only skin deep anyway.

The antismoking crusade isn’t a popular campaign. It’s an attempt at top-down social engineering by an elite minority of antismoking zealots. These people somehow always seem to be found in government or universities, and nowhere else. Like shit, they have floated to the top. And like shit, it might be added, they will one day be flushed away.

I’m not even sure whether even the government really wants a smoking ban either. If David Cameron and Nick Clegg ever wanted a ban, they don’t seem to have ever come out and made enthusiastic speeches in favour of bans, restrictions, plain packaging, and so on. They were (and maybe still are) both smokers. David Cameron never talks about it. And Nick Clegg has simply said that it’s about as likely that the smoking ban will be relaxed as capital punishment will be re-introduced. It’s largely left to the professional antismokers – the Arnotts of the world – to speak up for the bans on TV and radio.

It’s really as if smoking bans were as much imposed upon Cameron and Clegg as they were imposed on the rest of us. And most likely they were indeed imposed on them – by the EU and the WHO and other similar Nazi organisations. After all, we live in a time when the EU has installed “technocratic” governments in Greece and Italy over the heads of the Greek and Italian people. Cameron and Clegg are most likely obeying orders, and if they don’t obey those orders, someone else will replace them, just like in Italy and Greece. In the EU power game, smokers had to be sacrificed. “OK, we’ll ban smoking if you let us keep the pound.”

And smoking bans have little or no effect on reducing smoking prevalence anyway. Here’s Italy, where a smoking ban was introduced in 2005:

the Italian smoking ban had no lasting effect on smoking prevalence and quit rates. The researchers found that there was a brief decline in the number of smokers when the ban came in, but that the smoking rate returned to pre-ban levels shortly afterwards.

 And here’s Northern Ireland:

Smoking prevalence among adults has remained around 24% since 2007 and for manual workers that rate is 31%.

So what’s the point of these bans, apart from being exercises of arbitrary and undemocratic power?