Smoking - a true test of liberty

Quick report following my trip to a wet and overcast Edinburgh at the weekend.

I drove home on Monday having been invited to speak at a meeting organised by Students for Liberty Edinburgh on Sunday.

SFL is an 'international libertarian organisation' founded in the United States in 2008. It now has groups all around the world, including a handful in the UK, and doesn’t appear short of money, internationally at least. Local groups operate on more of a shoestring.

The biggest events include LibertyCon, an annual US-based conference described as 'the largest international pro-liberty gathering in the world', and LibertyCon Europe,‘the continent's largest annual pro-liberty gathering'.

Ironically, while we were shivering under Edinburgh's grey and leaden skies, LibertyCon Europe 2023 was taking place in a rather warmer location - Lisbon.

Back in Edinburgh the topic of Sunday’s discussion was 'Smokers’ rights and the war on nicotine' and kudos to organiser Josh Cheshire for tackling what some might say is an increasingly unfashionable, even niche, subject.

It’s not of course because, as I’ve said for many years, the war on smoking should be of interest to anyone who cares about individual liberty because what's happening to smokers today (the so-called tobacco template) is merely part of a much broader attack on people’s lifestyles, whether it be smoking, eating or drinking.

Defending the right to smoke is not - as some idiot suggested on Twitter yesterday - the same as defending the right to drink bleach or eat glass.

Anyway, Josh had put together a rather interesting panel that also featured Tam Laird, leader of the Scottish Libertarian Party, and Steven Warden, an associate of the Ayn Rand Centre UK and a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute.

Given the reluctance of anti-smoking groups to share a platform with anyone who supports smokers' rights (ASH Scotland didn’t reply to Josh’s invitation), there is a danger that events like this become very one-sided, with everyone preaching to the converted.

On this occasion, while we were all roughly on the same page when it came to defending the right to smoke, there were enough differences to make the discussion interesting and occasionally challenging.

Tam, for example, believes that all drugs, including heroin, should be legalised. (I don’t, although I can see the argument for it.)

Steven's position was arguably more erudite and scholarly. However, I suspect that, if it came to a street fight (in the battle of ideas), Tam might be more persuasive.

Like me, neither of them have ever been smokers. The big difference was that Tam and Steven appeared to actively dislike smoking.

Tam’s antipathy seemed to stem from his childhood, while his memories of Scottish pubs are very different to mine.

Having experienced countless pubs and bars in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dundee and St Andrews over a 25-year period from the mid Seventies to the late Nineties, I don’t remember smoky pubs ever being an issue.

I'm sure they existed but I don’t recall a smoky environment ever being a problem, either for me or anyone I drank with.

Tam however remembered pubs and bars being thick with fug and he hated it.

The funny thing is he didn’t strike me as the type who might be overly sensitive to such things. A former soldier, he has presumably experienced far worse, but it just goes to show we are all different.

Steven didn’t like smoking either but here’s the thing. Although neither like it, they were both prepared to give up a Sunday afternoon to defend smokers (and smoking) and support the right to smoke.

That, to my mind, is the true mark of a genuine libertarian, not the type who (for example) advocates vaping in order to “beat smoking” with little or no regard for the millions who enjoy smoking and don’t want to quit.

Ironically one group that does precisely that is the World Vapers Alliance which is owned and funded by the self-styled Consumer Choice Center that was founded in 2017 by ... Students for Liberty.

CCC says it is now independent of SFL. Nevertheless it's worth repeating what I wrote here (Back Choice, Beat Prohibition). In summary:

There are millions of adult smokers who don’t want to quit and in a free society their choice must be respected and publicly defended. Abandon them and you're no liberal, however much you try to convince yourself that you are.

With that in mind, and having spoken to several SFL groups in the UK (including an SFL training day at the IEA), I look forward to being invited to address LibertyCon (or LibertyCon Europe) in 2024.

Forest and the World Vapers Alliance – who wouldn't want to see that?!

See: 'World Vapers Alliance - stoking up a stink about smoking' and 'Why are so many 'libertarians' anti-tobacco?'.

Above: One of several 'No smoking and vaping in the Quad' signs at Old College, Edinburgh, ironically the location for our meeting on Sunday.

Comments

[Pat Nurse]

Let's face it Simon, both sides have entrenched views and it isn't as if the anti smokers are unheard in the public sphere. In fact, the truth is that it is mostly those defending smokers' rights to be left alone without harassment in the name of free choice and liberty who are more likely to be silenced so I don't think the debate loses anything because the anti smoker industry is not present. It is refreshing in fact that they are not there because I, for one, am sick of hearing them. We have, after all heard it all before so many, many times over decades and decades, that the alternative view of an issue which does have two sides is a welcome one.

The antis simply won't attend such events because they prefer the voice of smokers and their representatives to be silenced if they go against the narrative that ALL smokers hate themselves and are desperate for the likes of ASH to "save" them by forcing them to quit using the heavy hand of law if need be.

Like you, I can't ever remember "fuggy" pubs full of smoke nor anyone complaining about it except a handful of extremist hand wavers in later years who hated even the very distant whiff of smoke anywhere in the vicinity. They would often walk past the pubs where smoking was not allowed to go a smoker's pub just so they could moan about being "forced" to be there. See this link and where in this underground pub is the "fug"? All I see at one of my old locals (now closed) is happiness and people having fun which itself seems to be an outdated concept now gone along with the hairstyles https://thelincolnite.co.uk/2023/01/unlocking-the-vaults-memories-and-photos-of-iconic-former-lincoln-pub/

A technological solution to smoke in the air was found with state of the art air conditioning which did work but the anti smoker industry preferred to ignore 21st century technology in favour of a backward medieval solution to a minor problem by calling for the total social exclusion of non believers of their cause and treating fellow human beings as lepers. We know the SHS scam was invented for political purposes because when does the anti smoker industry ever talk now about the lives allegedly "saved" from SHS now pubs are clinically sterile, and boring, I might add?

They only ever brag about how the ban was the biggest motivator in forcing people to quit because that was it's true aim for the desire of a world without smokers by the 21st century which was decided back in 1971 before any study on so called "passive smoking" was done. The idea that smokers harmed others had to be pushed for decades in a slow drip, drip campaign of fear as the only hope these ideologues had of reaching the target of ridding the world of smokers by the date they set themselves.

Let's not forget Arnott's brag about pulling wool over the eyes of Government with the smokescreen of making a fanatical minority of extremists seem like the majority of public opinion at the time the ban was forced through Parliament using health as the excuse.

People look back and pretend there was huge public support for a ban on smoking in pubs but the truth, for those of us that lived through it, was very different. After all, smoking bans decimated the pub industry. The army of non smokers promised by the anti smoker industry who would allegedly rush to the new "smoke free" pubs never happened and years later even Pat Hewitt who forced the ban upon us, admitted that the loss of the pub industry was "a price worth paying" to pamper to the intolerances of the few smoke hating extremists who got themselves far too close to Government for an alleged democratic society that once aimed to take the views of all its citizens into account.

You are right in saying the same template is now being used on many other consumers and the puritan march forward to price the poor, via high and unfair tax, out of simple lifestyle pleasures enjoyed by generations before them is moving up apace. It seems to me that the only reason to despise a pub where smokers went, when there was a choice to go elsewhere because there were many non smoker venues opening up to cater for the opposite view, or to force people to stop eating cheap burgers or coco pops is simply snobbery and an arrogant belief that some are born to tell others what they should do, how they should live, and those that don't listen to their "advice" are simply stupid or puppets of Big Bad Eviiiiiil Industrialists.

[Misty]

Never a truer word spoken than your title, Simon. A person (or organisation’s) stance on smoking is, these days, a really good, and really accurate, litmus test to indicate the likelihood of a whole host of other unpalatable attitudes, many of them nothing to do with smoking.

Of course, the question remains: Does becoming an anti-smoker turn people or organisations into bossy, self-important bullies with a touch of the self-appointed would-be dictator about them? Or have people or organisations who were already bossy, self-important bullies with a touch of the self-appointed would-be dictator about them simply been emboldened by the sanctioning of bully-style anti-smoking attitudes into showing their true colours in other directions, too?

But either way, one thing’s for sure: anti-smoking attitudes never travel alone – they always bring along with them a whole company of other, equally unpleasant, and often hitherto-unacceptable, attitudes for the ride.

A handy little tip for everyone – smokers and non-smokers – to keep in the back of their mind next time they have to make a decision about, well, pretty much anything really.