This was originally written on August 1, 2024, as a letter to The Guardian, and it was published on August 6 with the title “Better Methods to Discourage Smoking”. Apparently the UK has now passed a law that anyone born after January 1, 2009 will never be able to legally purchase tobacco. (Even for Pictish ceremonial use?!) I suppose it’s the kind of thing you can expect from a country where you need a licence to own a TV.
Dear Editor,
I am writing in response to the proposed generational ban on tobacco sales.
I do not smoke tobacco and do not intend to start. When I was growing up here and going to school in Dundas, I was inundated with anti-smoking messages. “Lung cancer is 99.9% preventable by non-smoking,” said the experts on the radio, and the school halls were full of creative bristolboard postings against smoking. And it’s not just cancer: most career smokers end up with COPD, leaving them permanently short of breath. This stuff really is bad news.
What I object to is the attitude that if there’s a problem, there’s a ban for it.
It is problematic that government asserts the ‘right’ to control what goes into our own selves (bodies) and what we may peaceably do with them. My father once told me “We are the government” but I see this as more of a forgotten principle than current practice. Meaningful accountability is limited to electing “representatives” that are inevitably aligned to all-or-nothing partisan package deals. Political correctness is so far removed from following natural truth that it doesn’t even deserve the word correct.
This is just one more thing to make “big government” even bigger. And it always gets bigger, never smaller. Always one more tax, one more regulation, one more enforcement body. Does anyone remember that income tax was a “temporary wartime measure”? How is that working out?
And let’s not forget why people smoke. It is addictive, and very hard on the body, but it is not without its salt. It helps people focus and also encourages people to take regular breaks (and we need both) – in fact, in some industries, smoking is the only way to get a break at all. And many of the greatest minds in history were seldom seen without a pipe in hand! Not that I would gift such to a child in hopes they become the next Tolkien; the average smoker loses ten years of life.
The average smoker also starts as a teenager, notwithstanding that most jurisdictions notionally prohibit them from purchasing tobacco products. The proposed generational ban would just exacerbate this “more honoured in the breach than the observance” situation, and drive up smuggling, which is already incentivized because of the sky-high taxes.
I favour maintaining the extant measures to discourage smoking, which on the whole are working. It used to be that the only place you wouldn’t be surrounded by folks lighting up was the doctor’s office. The air in public indoor spaces is now much cleaner, and one can enjoy evening libations with friends without their clothes smelling like an ashtray afterwards. Only about 10 percent of people age 15 or older smoke today, whereas in 1980 it was more like 40 percent.
The province shouldn’t try to force it to 0 percent. This is entering the asymptotic realm where diminishing gains require more and more tradeoffs of our natural rights and more and more onerous regulation. Sometimes, the best answer is to just leave well enough alone.
– William Matheson
Souris, PEI [my birthplace, and I was staying with my aunt and uncle just then]