The late show
Thursday, September 19, 2024 at 10:30 I was on LBC last night.
It was very late, after midnight, when I was interviewed by Ben Kentish about the Government’s plan to extend the smoking ban to outdoor areas including beer gardens.
I was told we were going to discuss the backlash, which is still being reported two weeks after the plan was revealed by The Sun, and I prepped to talk about the reaction from publicans, commentators, and politicians such as Labour’s Mary Glindon.
Instead, the discussion stuck to the merits or otherwise of an outdoor ban, with Kentish playing (quite rightly in a single person interview) the part of devil’s advocate.
There were two areas where I came a little unstuck, and began to waffle.
First, he pushed me on why, if I believe that adults should be allowed to smoke (given that it gives many people pleasure), other drugs - such as cannabis, cocaine, and heroin - shouldn’t be legalised or tolerated as well.
It’s a fair point, and one I have always struggled to answer because I am aware of the inconsistency, although I am also aware of the terrible impact heroin addiction can have on individuals and families so I wouldn't like to see heroin, in particular, legalised.
In the limited time we had I restricted myself to saying that, unlike the illegal drugs he mentioned, smoking tobacco isn’t mind altering and doesn’t affect your ability to do your job.
(I could have added, as another example, that you can smoke a cigarette and drive without being a danger to other people, but the same can’t be said of those other drugs.)
He also raised the issue of seatbelts, which were made compulsory by Margaret Thatcher’s government in the Eighties. It’s an old argument but the gist of it is this.
People opposed the compulsory use of seatbelts at the time but few people object to it today because they’ve saved lives, so what’s the problem with banning smoking if that saves lives too by ‘encouraging’ smokers to quit.
Again, I got myself in a bit of a tangle because, while I do think it’s wrong that wearing seatbelts is compulsory, I’m conscious that it makes me sound a bit of a flat Earther to say so and I didn't want to go down that cul-de-sac.
Decades later I don’t think it helps to revisit that debate, so instead I pointed out that wearing a seatbelt doesn’t change your lifestyle in a way that smoking bans do, so the two are not the same.
In truth, the seatbelt law was less of an issue that it might have been because of the gradual adoption of inertia reel seatbelts that allowed for some movement, unlike the early seatbelts that strapped both the driver and front seat passenger firmly in place, rather like the seatbelt on an aeroplane but with an additional immovable strap across your chest.
Anyway, I thought Ben Kentish asked some interesting probing questions that I hadn’t fully anticipated at that time of night!
He did eventually agree/sympathise with one of my points, but I can’t remember what it was. By then it was very late and I just wanted to go to bed!
Reader Comments (6)
I was on radio Lincolnshire a week or so ago about this. The question about why I should be allowed to "harm myself" and smoke being no different to taking crack cocaine or harmful drugs came up. I replied that the same could be said about people who enjoy mountain climbing, horse riding, or any other extreme sport which costs the taxpayer, pressurised the health snd emergency rescuse services, can kill and cause life threatening or permanently debilitating injuries - I should have pointed out quite rightly that smoking is not like jacking up heroin and is more akin to drinking coffee which can also have health effects if done to excess.
And even if the argument about heroin being like smoking is taken seriously then perhaps the government can answer why it is thinking of having public heroin injection rooms, like in Scotland, but it won't allow a smoker to stand outside a pub for a few minutes in peace without constant harassment.
Good points.
We have to question whether people are "harming themselves" when they smoke. There are so many benefits, physical and psychological, to smoking that one must ask would smokers be in better health if they didn't smoke? We know many never smokers who died young; smokers who quit and their health declined; and many smokers who lived healthfully into their 80s or 90s.
We have to question whether smokers are "harming themselves." There are many benefits to smoking and one must ask would smokers be in better health if they hadn't started? We know many never-smokers who died young; smokers who quit and their health declined; and stalwart smokers who lived healthfully into their 80s or 90s.
This is why it's best to be properly liberal on these issues. I remember campaigning against the tobacco ban in Oxford and a woman confidently came up to me and asked 'Are you in favour of legalising all drugs?', and, she thought she had got me, I just said 'Yes' and she walked off.
Are you going to suggest people shouldn't be allowed to commit suicide? Also, if you can harm yourself with cigarettes to the tune of losing 13 years of life, why, for the same reasons, could a person not simply have a ration or heroin or cocaine which equates to the same damage you permit with smoking. If you accept this, and, you're concerned about PR, you might as well just go the whole hog and become a full liberal.
Never have I ever seen a coherent justification in the ethics of paternalism for these threshold approaches to paternalism, because, in my mind, they don't exist.
I thought the country was ready to debate and face the issue of decriminalisation or legalisation of drugs back in the late 90s and early 00s and then Blair threw a curveball and began the prohibition of tobacco with indoor smoking bans. So instead of progressively finding a way forward to stop the damage that illegal drugs can do, the country began to regress backwards towards yet more prohibition of pleasures we then took for granted.
I have always believed that drug use is made more harmful because it is illegal. It criminalises those who take drugs both "soft" like cannabis and "hard" like "heroin" and that is because it puts people into the hands of ruthless criminals who gain huge power and tax free wealth from the illegal drugs trade. This is why many are rubbing their hands and are already adding tobacco to their assets.
Of course criminal products don't go through rigorous product safety tests nor are they content tested for such issues as contamination. No one actually knows what they are putting in their body and this will be the case if the puritans also get their way with criminalisation of tobacco.
Taking drugs doesn't make you less able to function, unless under the influence like alcohol, but because you are criminalised for it you cannot function because your life is binned by the state unless you comply and toe the line. How much better would it be, for example, for serious addicts to get controlled heroin on prescription or from a registered and controlled supplier, rather than from a drug dealer who will break their legs, and maybe even kill their families, if they fail to pay up. It's that which then leads to criminality, such as robbing old ladies and because it harms others in that way, many support continued prohibition of drugs.
Education is always better and more effective than legislation
The debate that began in the 90s and ended with Blair in 2007 seems so far away now as the country has plunged into puritanism and has become more morally outraged and less tolerant of other people's behaviour and choices and more punitive.
Until we can get back towards that, to argue that of course drugs should be legal just like tobacco is to fall prey to anti smokers who would just claim they were right all along to suggest smoking is like heroin and therefore it should be banned because heroin is - the sooner the better - and the current climate of opinion would agree with them.
Step by step is how they took so much. Step by step is how we get it back starting with absolutely making sure they don't get to take another jackboot step forward with outdoor smoking bans.