tobacco free day

The Queen's Head up the road held a wake last night, and auctioned off their ashtrays. There was something terribly poignant about the chalkboard announcing this - wish I had a photograph - on a par with all the excitement preceding one of England's disastrous football matches.

I'm in two minds about this. It's about 30 years since I gave up, but in my heart I'm still a smoker. I dislike the smell and taste of smoke more than I ever did before I started. So there is a selfish gain for me. Yet I would far rather be free to choose to go to a pub like The Free Press, which has been smoke-free for years, and leave smokers free to go to theirs. I'm not persuaded that staff are obliged to work in smoky atmospheres if they don't want to. There is no shortage of bartending jobs.

As for other workplaces, the more enlightened have been smoke-free for years. But the idea that two builders sharing a van about their daily work can't enjoy a cigarette while driving between jobs, or parked up in a tea break, is laughable. Even more so the long distance lorry driver, on his tod.

The health arguments are strong, but don't persuade me that change should be brought about by legislation. There is something horribly self-righteous about all this hectoring. Forcing smokers back into their own homes and the bosom of their families, where they will smoke and booze to their heart's content - or discontent - isn't going to improve anything, least of all the health of the alleged victims, or their children.* What has happened to the right of consenting adults to damage each other? Don't even get me started on the bureaucracy (pdf file) of enforcing the new law, the utter waste of time.

Oh, and what would the Chancellor do for an income stream if the tobacco revenue dried up? Allegedly, smoking isn't cost-efficient. ASH claims that the Government earned a mere £8,103 million in taxes in the financial year 2004-5 (excluding VAT)**, citing 'Tobacco Factsheet November 2005. HM Revenue & Customs', which I haven't found or read. ASH suggests that there is a net cost to British society when you factor in the cost of treating tobacco-related illness, whereas Philip Morris argue (wrt Czech Republic, but surely extrapolatable) that premature deaths actually save money. Yes, of course, killing people off early will save money, so long as they don't die a horrible lingering death - or sue you. ASH fisking of Philip Morris here. BMA article arguing an economic basis for the ban here.

In my dreams I'm still a smoker. And I still write smoking poems.

*It's only a journalist's interpretation, so caveat lector.
**Why exclude VAT from the calculation of revenue? That's another 17.5% of the pack price the Government spends.


Recommended: Jane Holland's Elegy for the Ashtray.