New York to ban novelty cigarette lighters. That reminds me ...
Monday, June 17, 2013 at 14:04 Courtesy of Dick Puddlecote I see that New York State senators are going to ban novelty cigarette lighters.
This allows me to dust off a story I have told before.
Many years ago Forest hosted a party at Little Havana, a Cuban-style cigar bar off Leicester Square in London.
We combined it with the Forest Annual Awards and one guest, Daily Record columnist Bob Shields, travelled all the way from Glasgow to receive our Smoker-Friendly Journalist of the Year award.
Bob had earned the accolade because a few months earlier he and a Record photographer had joined a group of Forest supporters who had 'escaped' to Paris rather than submit to the hell that was No Smoking Day in Britain.
The subsequent double-page spread in the Record, featuring photographs of Bob lighting up in front of the Eiffel Tower with my then colleague Juliette Wallbridge and some of our party blowing smoke rings in a Eurostar smoking coach remains one of my proudest Forest moments.
But that's another story.
Anyway, to mark his achievement we presented Bob with a novelty lighter that was an actual size replica of a hand grenade. He was delighted.
We purchased three from a tobacconist in Victoria Street, close to our old London office. I liked them because they were made of metal, were quite heavy and came in different colours - gold, silver and bronze.
To cut a long story short, Bob's lighter was confiscated by security staff at Gatwick shortly before he boarded his flight home.
The following year we tried to buy more but the Victoria Street tobacconist no longer sold them. They came from Germany, apparently.
We searched online but eventually gave up and apart from very small ones I've never seen anything like it again.
Now New York is banning all novelty lighters. Whatever next?
See: State Senate approves bill banning novelty lighters (New York Daily News)
Reader Comments (3)
Does anyone else on here, like me, see this latest move as just a little bit – err, well – pathetic? We’ve got New York with its draconian smoking ban, outside restrictions, bans on beaches and in parks, bans on smoking in apartments etc etc etc – all these big, big restrictions on smoking, and what have they come up with now? Oh, bans on lighters shaped like tourist attractions or cartoon characters. Hmm. Isn’t that just a bit, sort of, well, “small beer” for these Great Heroes of Public Health?
One might almost be forgiven for thinking that they’ve run out of really meaningful things to do in terms of smoking and are now clutching wildly at any little straw connected with smoking, no matter how tenuously, in order to justify their very existence. Maybe the fact that so many of their erstwhile Public Health Hero Friends have now moved on to the far more fertile area of fast food and super-sized soda drinks is starting to make them just a little worried about their funding …
Precisely what I was thinking, Misty. What does it matter?
It does not matter at all ......... except that the Zealots NEED legislation/regulation of any sort to justify their existence. It would not matter if they got a regulation passed banning smoking under water. It would do.
For what, other than trivia, is banning smoking in cars with children present? Having said that, it is obvious that the 'next logical step' would be banning smoking wherever children are present.
Sometimes we fail to see the deviousness of Tobacco Control. They know exactly what their plan is. Banning smoking in cars where children are present is an antecedent to banning smoking anywhere where children are present. As far as TC is concerned, getting legislation banning smoking in cars where children are present is PROOF that children are harmed by SHS. We must disrupt the plan. As regards children, it is imperative to declare that children do not suffer from SHS. It is imperative to demand proof that they do suffer harm (epidemiology is not enough - actual damaged children are required).
The Smoking Ban was and is an obscenity. It was and is an obscene distortion of reality. The reality is that Tobacco Control cannot produce one single individual who worked in a bar who suffered an illness as a result of SHS. Not one.
Is this surprising? No it is not! The fact is that when TC had the opportunity to PROVE that smoking causes lung cancer, they totally chickened out. That was in the McTear V Imperial Tobacco Case in the Scottish Supreme Court before Judge Lord Nimmo Smith which conclude as recently as 2005. You can read a summary of that case here:
http://boltonsmokersclub.wordpress.com/the-mctear-case-the-analysis/
You cannot prove the negative. You cannot prove that children do not suffer harm from SHS. THEREFORE, it is even more important to DEMAND proof of the positive. Do you see? As an example, you cannot prove that the Queen cannot order the tide to reverse (a la King Canute), but what you can do is demand that the Queen proves her power to reverse the tide.
There are degrees of inability to prove the negative, but we would have to move into esoteric areas such as electrical effects. I do not propose to go there. Suffice to say that the more difficult it is to prove the negative, the more important it is to demand proof of the positive.
The numbers of Golden Orioles have significantly declined - there are now just 10 pairs in the UK. The reason? It's the fault of cigarette smokers, says the Beeb (R4's 'Tweet of the Day' - scheduled at 5.50am for those who want never to miss another one :)). GOs nest in poplars, matches are made from poplars, cigarette smokers are not using matches, therefore there are fewer poplars and, as a result, fewer golden orioles! Add the RSPB to our list of enemies!
If the Beeb were being a tad mischievious (unlikely since it's too earnest) it was lost on me at 5.50am.