No Smoking!!

As a former smoker I feel oddly compelled to live up to the stereotype and get stuck into smoking. While reading Quadrant I came across Matthew R. Digby's 'Tobacco, Seduction and Puritanism' and was disturbed by what I'd found.

Page after page delivers the history of tobacco and how great it is until the end where he embarks on an attack on the anti-smoking lobby, and attempts to connect the, in my opinion, un-connectable. He claims that the rise of fundamentalism and growing stability have seen the retreat of secularism and tolerance therefore, since cigarettes are 'symbols of the bohemian and the creative... draconian smoking laws are passed with...little argument'. And here I thought that 'draconian' smoking laws were passed because cigarettes kill the smokers themselves and, incidentally, possibly those around them.

He then takes issue with workers having to smoke outside rather than in their tea rooms, and how cold and wet they become as a consequence of our hysterical attitude to smoking. As a non-smoker I resent having to sit in a room full of smoke because someone feels that they're so important that their wishes override mine or anyone else's. Since smoking is a choice one makes, then why should the non-smoker be subjected to that choice purely because they have the misfortune to work with a smoker. If you choose to smoke, choose to go outside.

Therefore I'm relieved with the new smoking laws. No longer will I have to wash my clothes because I stepped into a bar for an hour, and just maybe, maybe, the odd old lady at the pokey machines will step outside for a cig and rethink how she's spending her money.

Digby then comes up with this beaut:

'The carnage is almost inconceivable-in 2006 around five million people died of tobacco related disease. Every person should know the dangers of smoking, and they do.
But we have demonised tobacco.'

Doesn't it appear that he'd just explained why it's demonised?