I go away for three days and while I'm away ASH publishes a report about smoking in the home.
The Times headlined its report. 'Plan to stamp out smoking in social housing':
I was quoted (in print and online) by The Times and a number of regional newspapers (online only) but my soundbite was restricted to the first sentence so the points about discrimination and prohibition got lost.
That's important because – despite the evidence before us – ASH is determined to deny the suggestion that they want to ban smoking in people's homes.
Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health has said it is “unreasonable” to stop people from smoking in their own homes, but more has to be done to reduce smoking in social housing and privately-rented properties.
Deborah's colleague Hazel Cheeseman said much the same thing when we were interviewed together on LBC.
In Hazel's case she emphasised that the aim was to make new developments 'smoke free'. But that's still prohibition, right?
It strikes me that ASH is playing down the idea of stopping people smoking in their own homes because they know how that sounds to most people.
The reality is, ASH is deliberately obscuring the truth of the situation, as prohibitionists always do.
How often, for example, did we read that ASH didn't want to ban smoking in every pub and restaurant in the country until, one day, they did.
"No-one is seriously talking about a complete ban on smoking in pubs and restaurants," said Clive Bates, director of ASH, in September 1998.
Or what about the ban on smoking in cars carrying children? When we voiced concern about banning smoking in private vehicles the British Lung Foundation responded:
'Smoking in cars results in concentrations of toxins much higher than are normally found elsewhere ... Suggesting that other bans will inevitably follow insults the intelligence of the public ...'
If anyone is insulting our intelligence it's Deborah Arnott and ASH who want to create 'smoke free' housing developments where residents are not allowed to smoke while insisting "we certainly do not want to ban it".
If that's not a real-life example of George Orwell's Newspeak I don't know what is.