So now we know: the anti-smoking lobby wants a complete ban on cigarette sales. Wes Streeting, the Shadow Health Secretary, has voiced what the lobby wants, and says he is considering a complete ban on the sale of cigarettes. Meanwhile, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) is demanding a “new Tobacco Control Plan” so that Britain can become “smokefree by 2030”.
Prohibition of alcohol was a disaster in America, and the War on Drugs around the world lined the pockets of criminals. Legislators are starting to understand that the criminalisation of cannabis has been bad for society. Some enlightened countries are legalising cannabis. For example, the cultivation and recreational use of cannabis is legal in Canada, while America is gradually legalising cannabis use state-by-state.
What connects the puritans who get upset at the notion of people enjoying themselves (whether with wine, cannabis and cigarettes) is that they don’t really believe in free choice. ASH, the lobby group, thinks that people smoke because they are oppressed by “inequalities”. In their world, “The more those around you smoke, the more likely you are to start smoking and the more difficult it is to quit, perpetuating these cycles, and transmitting inequalities across generations.”
In this view of the world, humans are weaklings to whom business and society inflicts its will through advertising, peer-pressure, exploitative offers and even the existence of products sold in plain packaging (except for graphic health warnings) hidden behind cupboards. The role for government, then, is first to “nudge” people to stop doing enjoyable things (because that sounds better than ban). But really the aim is to get to the point where outright bans are possible because, after all, if people were capable of choice they would stop making the “wrong” ones.
In fact, most people engage in “naughty” activities like drinking gin and smoking a cigarette because they enjoy it: they find it relaxing. They know you can have too much of a good thing and, in the case of tobacco, that there are clearly health risks. In a free country, people should have the freedom to take part in activities that affect themselves without having hectoring moralisers try to use the power of the state to prevent them.
Far from creating “new Tobacco Control Plan”, politicians should realise that they have already gone too far by preventing smoking rooms in pubs, and abandon the ludicrous, moralising “smokefree by 2030” agenda, which is an attack on people’s free choice and would just expand criminal activity.