Support smokers’ freedom and sign the ‘Review the smoking ban’ e-petition
Click the image to sign the petition
I ask you to spare a minute today, to pop over to the e-petitions site and sign the petition “Review the smoking ban.”
The petition is created by Anthony Worrall Thompson, TV chef and publican, and has been backed by Forest – the excellent, pro-tobacco lobby.
The proposal itself reads:
“We petition the Government to review the impact of the smoking ban on pubs and clubs and consider an amendment that would give licensees the option of separate well-ventilated smoking rooms.”
The smoking ban has had a dramatic impact on British pubs and was yet another stripping of freedom for smokers. The proposed amendment would not fully reverse the ban, simply give freedom back to smokers, club-owners and publicans by granting them somewhere to smoke.
Smoker or non-smoker, I urge all of you to sign it now.
13 Comments on “Support smokers’ freedom and sign the ‘Review the smoking ban’ e-petition”
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I like this! Also I think cafes should be able to choose whether or not to enforce a ban, as a lot of cafes will have a vast majority of customers who smoke and want to smoke with their coffee!
I imagine for most establishments providing separate, well-ventilated smoking rooms would be at least as inconvenient and expensive as providing outdoor space. In most cases it simply wouldn’t be workable.
So what the proposal really means is either a de facto uplifting of the smoking ban – a terrible idea – or an unworkable piece of legislation that is not worth the time spent on it. I’d urge you all not to sign this one.
I disagree. First, I do not demand that these areas be ‘well-ventilated’ – I would say a window would suffice, as I’m sure it would for many smokers. Second of all, thinking of a number of local pubs to me, over half of them could easily separate areas for smoking without much adjustment.
Alternatively, well-ventilated areas of pubs or bars would work equally well. When I was in Paris, one club I was in had a smoking ‘area’, which had open doorways to the rest of the club, no windows, just a pretty good ventilation system in that area. The rest of the club was smoke-free.
Landlords are already forking out lots of money for outdoor heating so their patrons can smoke outside as they need to keep the customers. The alternatives to this ever-increasing cost – especially considering the sharp increases in fuel costs soon – I imagine, are far cheaper than this.
Plus smoking areas will bring back some of the many ex-patrons who have left due to the ban.
Pubs should have the freedom to make their own choices on the matter as well. Wetherspoons along with many independent pubs chose to ban smoking on their own prior to the ban – those who were ardently against smoking could go to these bars, and if you were a smoker, you accepted that you would have to stand outside. This system provided the freedom to smokers and non-smokers, now that freedom has disappeared.
You may not demand it but that is the wording of the petition you are asking readers to sign.
The important part of the petition is to seek a review on the ban. The well-ventilated room is but one option that I hope would be debated, should this go further.
But if well-ventilated room is not part of the proposal, then you might as well just open up smoking completely again, bringing with it all of the health problems associated with passive smoking and infringements upon the liberties of people who do not smoke. Civil society is about compromising freedoms for the greater good. We want to be free but that does not mean I should be free to harm others. A desire to smoke cigarettes does not out-trump a basic necessity for a free society to prevent harm to others. As an aside I would say that the smoking ban does shoulder the sole responsibility for the decline of the pub. There are a whole host of reasons why pubs are not as popular as they once were.
This petition, fundamentally, is to have a debate on the issue. It is not set in stone that the exact wording would need to be met if Parliament passed it and so I do not accept that it is just opening up smoking completely again.
The smoking ban does not shoulder the sole responsibility no, but it has had a significant effect on it – as it has with the cafe trade as well. Yet following the smoking ban, there was an increase in the number of pubs and the rate of pubs that closed down, compared to before.
As for the ‘harm’ issue. As I have blogged before, the longest longitudinal study into passive smoking found that ” The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality, although they do not rule out a small effect.” And this was based on evidence of non-smokers living with smoking spouses, who smoked in the home over a thirty year period. It was published in the BMJ in the early 00s (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC155687/?tool=pmcentrez).
Smoking is anti-social which I will accept; the smell of smoke is undesirable. Yet I do not consider a negative smell a ‘harm to others’.
Come on Joshua, you must know that study was funded by tobacco money and widely discredited. The very same journal condemned the evidence it used as fundamentally flawed. “Full of speculative assumptions of doubtful scientific value” is how I believe the Journal of the American Medical Association described it. Stop being contrarian for the sake of it.
I’m afraid I’m not being contrarian for the sake of it. For all ‘evidence’ that passive smoking has ‘significant’ or ‘considerable’ links to health, there is equal evidence on the contrary. Of course that study was linked to tobacco money, likewise all the research that shows damaging links between passive smoking and disease is funded by anti-smoking lobbyists. Research, whenever funded, will always be one sided. You see it with AGW, you see it with drugs, you see it with everything. It is our role to consider all evidence in front of us and weigh up the balance – and by this method, I have read more convincing evidence that states the link between passive smoking and illness is drastically overplayed.
I pick that study as one of my preferred for making the case, because of the numbers involved and the length of time it was used for – no other study comes close to measuring such a large group over a long period of time.
Likewise, if you want to talk about reports being discredited, read this paper by the Cato Institute that shows the extent of terrible methodology and the waste of public money amongst the anti-smoking lobbies (http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv30n1/v30n1-5.pdf).
This argument is superfluous to my actual point, however, as a smoking room would remove such concerns for passive smoking anyway. I would choose to have that, over a fully smoking pub – unless the pub wanted it – not for health reasons but for social reasons.
Actually, that study was paid for by the American Cancer Society. They tried to kill it off when it became clear that the result would not be what they were expecting. Only the publishing costs were funded by a tobacco company, and only on the insistence by the authors that they weren’t allowed to see any of the data or conclusions beforehand.
There is still a considerable conflict of interest with the tobacco lobby in that they have a significant profit motive that undermines their research in a way that does not exist for the non-smoking camp. And the fact that the piece of research you have settled on to prove your case is so riddled with problems, that it does not draw on any of it’s own data, that it only uses 10% of another study’s data and uses it in a way that undermines it’s own conclusions, has no non-smoking test group and a number of other problems across it’s test period makes me think your are approching this from an ideological perspective and then working backwards.
So you also condemn the main study used worldwide to bring in smoking bans then, the EPA report of 1992. It was vacated by a Judge for committing to a pre-determined conclusion, for cherry-picking studies for the meta-analysis, changing the degree of confidence, and loose scientific standards, but is still held up as a standard of anti-smoking science to this day. I do hope you’ll be consistent.
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