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The martyrology of the smoker

by · 14th May, 2007

Is the smoking ban a good idea? | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited

In a few weeks’ time, smoking in enclosed public spaces will become illegal in the UK; such places include pubs and bars, the usual places people go to socialise. The Guardian, today, dedicated its entire G2 section (its magazine-sized feature section) to the subject: of how smoking was perceived, and represented in culture through the decades, and how its advertising changed, particularly with increasing legal restrictions until its advertising was banned in 2003. The lead feature, however, consists of two articles, one by Christopher Hitchens opposing the ban, the other by Simon Hoggart, the paper’s political sketch-writer, supporting it. It’s worth quoting Hoggart’s closing statement:

In America I saw this sign in an office: “My pleasure is beer, and this creates urine. Your pleasure is smoking, and this creates poisonous fumes. Don’t pollute my air space, and I promise not to piss on your desk.” Precisely.

Hitchens’s article concentrates on a familiar stereotype of anti-smokers: that they are people who just want to ban things, to control people, and that they will do this to ridiculous excesses, such as his example of the condemned Florida men denied his last cigarette (one presumes that his last cigarette had in fact been smoked some years previously, and that he would have been well and truly over it by the time he was taken to the chamber). Besides this, his piece is long and rambling, resentfully rambling on how life’s pleasures are being eaten away, apparently for the pleasure of these control freaks:

There have been moments of reverie, wreathed in smoke and alone with a book, and moments of conversation, perfumed with ashtrays and cocktails and decent company, which I would not have exchanged for a year of ordinary existence.

What does Hewitt know of this and by what right does she presume to arbitrate it? I have probably written more books than she has recently read, and I object, mildly but very firmly, to her having any say in my personal decisions. I object to her poisoning my relationship with my favourite bartender, who must now pull a face and regretfully decline, and furthermore act as an enforcer, lest he be fined. Now I cannot go there again, can I? And I do not much want to. One small defeat for me: one giant triumph for Hewitt. The little sum of human happiness - the public stock of harmless pleasure, as it was once defined - has been radically reduced. And who is better off for it? Nobody had to come to that joint if they didn’t want to.

Of course, the fact that while he was enjoying his reverie clouded in smoke, someone else, who perhaps was sitting there reading his book because he was waiting for a friend, or because the library was closed or whatever, was having his concentration interfered with by the smell of Hitchens’s smoke. You might notice how he glosses over the rights of the workers in these place: they should, it seems, just have found somewhere else to work if they did not like it. Tough! But, given that Hitchens has not really had to find a job for probably decades, it really is not as easy as some people find saying “get a job”, like the man in the silk suit in that Bruce Hornsby song. When I was 16, it took me months to find a job in Woolworth’s, and they only had to pay me £2.50 or so per hour.

He also notes the supposedly swift victory of the anti-smoking lobby, apparently ignorant of the fact that it has taken years, and that other jurisdictions have taken such action sooner than we have. Surprisingly, we are behind the USA on this, and even Ireland; the industry lobby, you might remember, sowed false doubts about the health effects of smoking for years, using the same tactics now being used regarding global warming.

He complains that the anti-smoking measures are about changing people’s behaviour. Well, that’s true, and quite rightly so. It’s important that smoking be de-glamorised - which it largely has been - and turned into a miserable habit that nobody would really want to take up - hence the fact that a smoker may end up smoking in the rain and the cold. Smoking, at the end of the day, has few of the attractions of harder drugs: apart from anything else, you cannot get high on it, unless you have only just started. It just dulls your sense of smell and taste, and invades other people’s. While I think it is premature to ban it now, its attaction is not such that people would kill and steal for it as they do for harder drugs. In my family, the people who still smoke no longer do so in the house, even those who live on their own.

The fact is that there should really be nothing glamorous about a habit which is unhealthy and which produces foul-smelling fumes which are also damaging to the health - and it is damaging, something I know because someone I know developed asthma from working in a smoky bar. Want to say “tough” to her face, Christopher? The capacity of the advocates of smoking to make martyrs of themselves, and to claim persecution, is amazing. Hitchens even comes up with a Hitler anecdote, about how the Führer kept his staff gasping for a fag while the Germans lost the war, and how they all lit up gratefully when he shot himself. The way some of them go on, you would think they were on the verge of being sent to the gas chambers, when really, the nearest things to gas chambers in modern society are the enclosed spaces that are to be cleaned up by the impending smoking ban.

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