Smoking ban proposed in England.

Is it the case that about 87% of smokers are unpleasant people, or that about 87% of unpleasant people are smokers? Although the difference is statistically significant, I don’t intend to find out which is correct, since it seems quite obvious that there is at least a correlation between smoking and being a bit dodgy.

Nevertheless, I’m not convinced it’s the government’s job to tell louts what substances they can put in their bodies. What business of mine is it if these people take a cheesegrater to their lungs? Oh wait, I pay for their healthcare.

Personal decisions such as smoking, binge drinking, overeating and sticking one’s face in a fan all cost the NHS (and via the miracle of taxation, everyone), dearly. To what extent should I be forced to subsidise the expensive lifestyles of others? When the public takes control of everyone’s health, everyone’s health becomes their personal business, and encourages things like smoking bans, junk food bans and fan guards. If it were left up to the individual to provide his own health insurance, I think said individual would voluntarily quit smoking pretty sharpish, because it’s only by making someone a stakeholder that you can effect change in his behaviour.

I heard some Tory bloke on the radio (yes, it’s true, I find radio more pleasant to wake up to than fifteen minutes of the alarm bell klaxoning at 90 decibels, but only just) say how the smoking ban in Ireland had reduced sales in pubs, but increased sales in off-licenses, supposedly indicating that more people were smoking at home, possibly in front of… gasp!… children! Despite being a Tory and despite being on the radio at 7:00am, he has a point. People who subject their children to 3 passive packs a day don’t belong in the pub or the off-license, they belong in jail, and there’s no need for new legislation since it’s clearly in violation of existing child abuse laws. Practically speaking it’ll never happen, since I imagine most children would correctly prefer crippled lungs to foster parents.

As far as an English ban goes, I see it as inevitable for as long as the NHS still exists, but the current proposal is backwards. Smoking banned in pubs but allowed on the streets? Pubs and clubs are private property, and I see not what business of the government’s it is what consenting adults do on private property. The streets, however, are public property, and when in public, it’s reasonable that we should abide by a certain social contract. People can subject their vital organs to whatever weird fetishes they like, but when in public, I consider that my right to fresh air trumps their right to smoke. Cigarette smoke is basically littering, and we already have laws against that.

And since we established above that, if at least the weaker of the two statements is true, 87% of unpleasant people smoke, they will be removed from the streets and forced to go home for their fix, where they can be as chavtastic as they like without bothering anyone. Smoke ‘em in, as Bush might put it.

What about a pub employee’s right to fresh air? Uh, I’m working on that, but early results indicate that he doesn’t have one.

Air

The fundamental problem with smoking is the fundamental problem of the environment. Who owns the air and who are its stakeholders? It seems to me that nobody owns the air, and everybody is a stakeholder, which in turn seems to justify a high level of government interference in keeping it clean. I expect nanotechnology will allow the atmosphere to be partitioned into chunks, the flux through which can be measured, and thus a chunk owner can charge a neighbour for any pollution leaking in. But until a scheme of private property is technologically feasible, we seem to be stuck with treating the atmosphere as a fundamentally public, and socialised, resource.