Today's Sunday Times Scotland reports that:
Anti-smoking campaigners in Scotland are seeking to stop people lighting up at home as part of a drive to reduce the harmful health effects of inhaling secondhand tobacco smoke.
No-one should be surprised. Banning smoking in the home has been one of tobacco control's less than secret ambitions for years.
It took a while for them to admit it, of course. When they were campaigning to ban smoking in the workplace we were repeatedly assured there was no question of smoking being banned at home.
Then, in December 2011, ASH published a briefing note, 'Smoke drift in the home and workplace'. See ASH: how to ban smoking in the home (my title not theirs).
Since then tobacco control has been chipping away, getting people used to the idea. Earlier this year, encouraged by the ban on smoking in cars with children (the first time smoking had been banned in a private space, if you exclude private businesses) it was reported that 'Smoking could be banned in some new council homes in a bid to protect the health of children'.
Today's report in Scotland also focuses on social housing so the tactics are clear - first, discriminate against those who can't afford their own homes, then extend the ban to every private home and garden. (Have you never heard of a tiny bit of smoke drifting back in to the house? It's a serious health risk!!)
Children, inevitably, are the Trojan horse through which this and other prohibitionist policies are being slipped in.
Ban smoking in cars with children? Tick. Ban smoking in children's play areas? Tick.
Ban smoking in parks and beaches (to prevent children from being exposed to the sight of someone smoking)? Tick, tick, tick.
Now smoking in the home is under threat because, we are told, "hundreds of thousands of people in Scotland are still at risk from exposure to secondhand smoke in their homes."
I'd like to see hard evidence to justify this claim, not to mention the insinuation that people's health is at serious risk as a result. The level of risk is important. We're surrounded by chemicals and particles in the home. The dose is the poison and most of the time the dose is relatively benign. Same goes for tobacco smoke.
The Enstrom/Kabat report, which most readers of this blog will be familiar with, remains the largest ever study of the impact of secondhand smoke on non-smokers in the home.
The results and conclusions were unambiguous and in the absence of any study with a similar database or longevity must never be forgotten.
The study, published by the BMJ in May 2003, focused on "35,561 never smokers who had a spouse in the study with known smoking habits".
In plain English the authors concluded that:
The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality, although they do not rule out a small effect. The association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed.
The report, as we know, provoked a huge outcry with tobacco control activists falling over themselves to dismiss the report and smear the authors by any means possible.
ASH's response, reported by the BBC, was particularly interesting:
"This could be very damaging as it will be used by industry lobbyists to argue against laws to ban smoking in public places and workplaces."
In other words, ignore the study, the largest and most authoritative of its kind, because it could derail our authoritarian plan to impose a smoking ban on every workplace in the country which is based on the claim - never proven - that passive smoking is a serious health risk.
Today few people seem willing to fight the 'passive' smoking myth but that's exactly what we have to do because it will be very hard to win this battle on the sole argument that people have a right to behave exactly as they want in their own homes. (Clearly this isn't true on a host of issues.)
What I find frightening is the way younger generations have been indoctrinated to believe all the propaganda about passive smoking. This isn't scientific so it isn't the first argument I use when discussing smoking in the home, but I do like to point out that if the scare stories about passive smoking are anywhere near true then it's amazing that the generation of children most exposed to tobacco smoke (the baby boom generation of the Fifties and Sixties) is living longer than ever before in human history.
Imagine that. A generation of children – at least 50 per of whom must have been regularly exposed to tobacco smoke in the home for much of their childhood – has largely survived to tell the tale.
I accept there have been medical advances during that time but if regular exposure to tobacco smoke is as dangerous as we're led to believe all the medical advances in the world wouldn't have kept the overwhelming majority of that generation living long into their eighties and, increasingly, their nineties.
Btw, the Sunday Times sent Forest an email at 8.30 last night inviting us to comment "within 30 minutes".
Normally that wouldn't be a problem but I was driving home from Derbyshire at the time and didn't see the email until 10.30, by which time it was too late to reply.
We will however be fighting this all the way. I hope you will too.