How to make smoking cool again
Tuesday, July 16, 2024 at 12:00 Excellent piece by Kara Kennedy in the Daily Mail today.
Like most opinion pieces on the Mail website it's behind a paywall but the headline gives you the gist:
Alternatively (and I strongly recommend this) you can pay £1.10 for a copy of the print edition.
Readers may remember that Kara was a panellist at an event Forest organised at the Institute of Economic Affairs in March last year. (See Smoking Gun: Prohibition and the Infantilisation of Britain.)
We invited her to take part after reading 'An ode to smoking' which she wrote for The Spectator World, the US edition of The Spectator, and she didn't disappoint.
At the time she was working as a staff writer for The Spectator but she subsequently went freelance, moved to Washington DC, and has since written for various publications including the Telegraph, Mail, Tatler, and the New Statesman.
She also got married and is currently seven months' pregnant, hence this introduction to her piece in the Mail today:
It has been 162 days since my last cigarette, not that I'm counting or anything. I won't and can't smoke until the baby I'm carrying is born in September, but already I know this doesn't mean I'm giving up.
Tongue-in-cheek (?) she adds:
I've asked my husband to deliver me a nicely wrapped packet of Newports as my 'push present'.
As it happens I wouldn't be surprised if Kara has smoked her final cigarette because a lot of parents quit permanently after they've had a baby.
Then again she may go back to smoking ‘no more than five or six’ cigarettes a day, and not even every day.
That will make her, like many people, a social smoker who smokes because she genuinely enjoys it, not because she's hopelessly addicted.
Either way it's her choice and any liberal-minded person ought to respect that.
Instead it’s anticipated that the new Labour Government will use the King's Speech tomorrow to announce that it will reintroduce a bill to ban the sale of tobacco to future generations of adults.
The policy won't directly affect Kara, 26, but it won't be long before people of a similar age WILL be prohibited from legally purchasing tobacco.
When this happens there are three likely outcomes.
One, fewer people will smoke.
Two, it will drive more smokers to the black market.
Three, it could make smoking cool again because, as Kara rightly points out, one thing many young people don't like is being told what NOT to do.
None of these outcomes are mutually exclusive so a generational ban could result in all three.
Anyway, credit to the Mail for publishing the article (a double-page spread, no less) the day before the King's Speech and a week after Cancer Research UK made the absurd claim that cancers caused by smoking have hit a record high - despite a huge fall in smoking rates since the 1950s.
It even includes a quote from me.
PS. Quelle surprise, today's ASH Daily News bulletin has just landed in my inbox and the anti-smoking lobby group has chosen NOT to include Kara's piece.
Instead they sent the following links to their subscribers:
More NHS cash ‘not feasible’, adviser tells Labour (The Times)
Hospital discharges limiting home care in England, councils say (Guardian)
Labour pledge on junk food adverts aimed at children may still face delay to 2025 (i)
Dad demands vaping ban after both his daughters hospitalised (Cumberland News)
And, from the USA:
Campaigners target Philip Morris' flagship heated tobacco US launch (Daily Mail)
It begs the question, why would they NOT want their subscribers (many of them politicians, civil servants, and public health sector workers) to know about Kara's article?
I think we know the answer but draw your own conclusions.
Below: Journalist Kara Kennedy at Smoking Gun: Prohibition and the Infantilisation of Britain last year. Photo: Stuart Mitchell
Reader Comments (4)
Not until around 1980 were women who smoked told to stop during pregnancy. My sister, who gave birth twice in the seventies, when she asked, was told by her doctor that the only difference was babies born to women who smoked might be an ounce or two smaller. Incidentally, smaller babies are less likely to require C-section than larger babies.
I surveyed many women who smoked during their pregnancies and none had any difficulties which could remotely be blamed on smoking. My sister and I were born in the 1940s and I'm quite sure my mother smoked non-filters while pregnant and encountered secondhand smoke almost everywhere. Yet my cohort, baby boomers, has less asthma, autism, allergies, and sexual identity dysphoria than succeeding generations whose mothers did not smoke during pregnancy. Also, smoking helps pregnant women not put on excess weight.
I'd be interested if women, who've smoked while pregnant, might share their experience.on this blog,
I can see tobacco usage broadly going into to line with cannabis usage with less people smoking daily but more smoking socially at house parties etc. it may also under the law of unintended consequences exposed more people to hard drugs as no doubt some of the illicit sources will also sell these substances.
Smoke free is an illusion and we may learn the law unintended consequences the hard way particularly if we look at the tabbaco wars down under.
The smoke free aim is unachievable
As feared, the King's speech did indeed include the revival of Rishi Sunak's evil & illiberal generational smoking ban. This was despite Sir Keir Starmer's promise of the 5th of July, to "tread lightly" on people's lives.
He was no doubt goaded by his health minister, Wes Streeting - a man that, in my personal opinion, is a social control freak. Whether Sir Keir actually believes in social control & the nanny state or not, I would argue that he has allowed himself to be made a liar by Mr. Streeting.
This is not only a disastrous & draconian policy, it is also a shame, because it undermines the good things that the new government have also announced, such as the new deal for workers for example.
As well as being wrong in principle, the generational smoking ban is also wrong in practice, as Simon points out. Nobody has learned the lesson of the USA in the 1920s. Prohibition doesn't work, and it fuels organised crime.
We can but hope that common sense will eventually prevail, as it already has in New Zealand.
Keir may have said he would tread lightly on people's lives but the problem is that politicians have stopped seeing smokers as people. We are now simply targets to use as a measurement of how "tough" these social bullies can be on a deliberately stigmatised group of people subject to decades of misinformation, junk science, and abuse.
The ban will not stop smoking but will make law abiding people who smoke criminals and criminalisation was what the anti smokers always wanted in the end. It's never been about health. It's always been about hate.
They despise smoking and they despise people who smoke. Alleged concern for health is a smokescreen. That's why only science paid to support the prejudices of the anti smokers is the only science accepted. Any science that shows results to the contrary is ignored or discredited.
In a true fair and free society, there would always be representatives from both sides of an issue who get the listening ear of Government but the war on smokers and the control of politicians and manipulation of law by anti smoker lobbyists infiltrating government institutions proves that we live in neither a free nor fair society anymore.