It was reported yesterday that hospitals in Wales are considering on-the-spot fines for people caught smoking on hospital grounds.
BBC Wales quoted me as follows:
Simon Clark, director of pro-smoking group Forest, said the threat of fines "was absolutely abominable".
He added: "It seems extraordinary to us that NHS administrators would be spending time, and probably money, coercing people like this.
"Hospitals are very stressful places, not just for patients but also for visitors and staff.
"We can understand them not wanting people to smoke around hospital entrances, in which case the compromise should be a comfortable smoking shelter."
I was also quoted by Wales Online and the South Wales Evening Post.
Well, my comments prompted an email from a consultant anaesthetist:
I am writing with regard to the proposed enforcement of smoking bans in Welsh hospitals.
I have no objection to smokers subjecting their bodies to health risks. As a doctor of 24 years experience I used to approach young smokers with a blunt statement of the facts in order to persuade them to quit. Usually they were completely nonchalant about my efforts.
I still advise patients to quit when appropriate. But what I object to is the smokers in hospital grounds who seem to think that they are entitled to continue negatively affecting other peoples' health.
If they want to smoke, by all means carry on but away from those of us who do not wish to inhale the noxious fumes. It continues to amaze me what an inherently selfish self-centred bunch of people are those who smoke near staff and patients who cannot move out of range.
Personally it is no skin off my nose if smokers, drink drivers, base-jumpers wish to kill themselves, but just stay away from those of us who don't!!
I'll leave you to comment but before you do I suggest you read an interview with another anaesthetist.
I published it on this blog in 2010 but it was originally conducted in 2006. See: Dr Phil Button: the "lost" interview.
I'd also like to draw your attention to a passage in an essay by the late Lord Harris, former chairman of Forest. It's anecdotal but I have no reason to think it's not true:
Privately I have encountered Very Important Persons in the medical world who, in response to my earnest enquiry about 'passive smoking', have dropped their voices and looked around furtively before assuring me there was "nothing in it" except for a possibly adverse effect on serious asthmatics.
The full essay ('A Challenge to the Chief Medical Officer') appears as the foreword to a 2005 Forest report, Prejudice and Propaganda: The Truth About Passive Smoking, which you can download here. A decade on it's still worth reading.