Sunday Herald, The: Warning: liberals want to seriously damage your health by attacking

It's easier to pull a gun in America than a cigarette out of your pocket.

Dennis Potter

ACCORDING to Garrison Keillor - next to whom there is no taller spinner of tales - the last cigarette smokers in America were located in a canyon in the High Sierra by two federal tobacco agents in a helicopter, who spotted little puffs of smoke.

Before long a crack anti-smoking unit had the smokers surrounded in their hideout, subdued them with tear gas and made them lie face- down in the hot August sun. There were three females and two males, all in their mid-40s. They had been on the run since the adoption of the 28th Amendment.

"What are you people using for brains?" snapped Ames, the district chief. "Can't you read?" He bent down and snatched up an empty packet of Marlboro and thrust it in the face of a pale, sweaty man whose breath came in short, terrified gasps. "Look at this! This warning has been there for decades! Want me to give you the statistics? What does it take to make you understand? Look at me! Speak up! I can't hear you!" Finally, Ames lost whatever little patience he had been born with. "Move 'em out of here!" he ordered. "They disgust me."

In truth, Keillor's prediction, made in the mid-1980s, that for smokers the end was nigh, was somewhat premature. But it was coming for all that. Last year, Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, introduced a law banning smoking in public places to predictable howls of outrage. Restaurants and bars claimed they would go bust.

Libertarians, arguing that smokers had the right to die a horrible death if they so chose, liberally used the word "gestapo" to describe the health inspectors whose job it is to implement the new law. Meanwhile comparisons were blithely - and ignorantly - made with the prohibition era, when liquor drinkers were forced underground, thus precipitating gang wars.

But when I was in New York last summer I could detect little if no change. Bars did not seem unpopulated, only less fuggy and murky; you still had to queue to get a table in restaurants where the humble hamburger is regarded as haute cuisine and in a members-only club, a room had been set aside for smokers to continue kippering their lungs without affecting anyone else. Though smokers continued to bleat, non-smokers did what they've done since time immemorial and suffered in tolerant silence.

But polls have subsequently shown that Mayor Bloomberg is more in touch with what people want than the vocal smoking lobby. The vast majority of New Yorkers reckon he has done the right thing.

Parents exposing their children to second-hand smoking is the most common form of child abuse in America.

John Banzhaf III, tobacco activist

SOONER or later what happens in America is going to come here. And so, it would appear, it has come to pass. This month the Scottish Executive will launch its Tobacco Control Action Plan. It is apparently the "first ever" tobacco action plan designed specifically for Scotland. This is in response to recommendations from the National Health Service in Scotland and ASH Scotland, both of whom are alarmed at the extent to which young people are taking up smoking.

They would like to see a much more "intensive" approach to discouraging people from smoking in the first place. For its part, the Scottish Executive will sponsor "a major public debate on how to minimise the impact of second-hand smoking", in addition to which it will look at the experience of places such as New York where smoking has been banned in public places. "Through the debate," says the Executive, "the public will get a chance to voice an opinion on smoking in public places and from this we hope to get an idea of the next steps that need to be taken."

You may think this a reasonable and sensible course of action to take and I would not contradict you. But if you have been reading newspapers over the past week you might feel that a decision had already been taken and that Scottish smokers had already been marked out as a persecuted minority, together with asylum seekers and Falkirk supporters. From the bellicose tone of some commentators it was as if the Nazis had seized power and they had only a few days in which to pack their bags and be gone, perhaps to set up an independent homeland where they could smoke to their hearts' - if not their lungs' - content.

Writing in The Scotsman, the normally urbane Allan Massie, a Gauloise fan, was apoplectic even though he admitted he rarely goes into bars, restaurants or cafes. Nevertheless, he added with parental authority, a smoking ban "will play havoc with the social life of my children and their friends". Over at the Daily Mail, you could almost hear Tim Luckhurst coughing up his guts as he added his tuppence- worth. "The Executive," he thundered, "should end its consideration of a ban." For him, the New York edict was "draconian", though one could not tell whether he was speaking from personal experience. For this latest assault on his civil liberties, he blamed the "power- crazed pygmies" on the Scottish Executive.

Meanwhile, at The Herald, Melanie Reid also appeared to have allowed smoke to cloud her judgement. How would such a law be enforced, she wanted to know. "Who to fine when youngsters stand in shopping malls or on street corners?" Who knows. Who cares, since Reid is the only person posing the question. It's certainly not something the Scottish Executive is proposing. "I don't want to live in a country famous for tartan, bagpipes and banning things," concluded Reid. "I am allergic to worthy middle-class law; legislation which patronises the lower classes as stupid and tries to make them more sensible, more like us."

There are not any advantages to smoking. The only advantage it ever had was the social "plus"; nowadays even smokers themselves regard it as an anti-social habit.

Allen Carr, author of Easy Ways To Stop Smoking

HEAVEN forfend that the lower classes would want to be more like us. Or even them several echelons above. I have quoted from these prominent commentators in order to highlight the level of debate the Scottish Executive is likely to get in response to its perfectly reasonable request for dialogue. Alas, it is typical of the way such things are conducted in this country now, where opinion is cheap and misleading and real information is hard to come by.

The facts on smoking speak for themselves. Some 30% of Scotland's adult population, approximately 1.2 million people, smoke. Nobody seriously thinks it is a good thing. Around 27% of girls and 16% of boys are regular smokers by the time they are 16. This is, of course, the beginning of a lifelong habit that is very difficult to break. The average Scottish 15-year-old smoker started at 12 and now has a 40-a-week habit.

Indeed, so difficult is smoking to give up, almost a quarter of women smoke throughout pregnancy with consequences for their children far beyond the effect it might have on their later social lives.

According to health statistics, smoking causes at least 20 to 25% of all deaths among Scots, who have the highest smoking rates and the worst lung cancer record in Europe. In the most deprived parts of Scotland, with which I am sure the above commentators are intimately acquainted, 49% of men and 43% of women smoke with the knock-on effect on life expectancy. In comparison, 28% of men and 26% of women in England smoke.

Moreover, breathing second-hand smoke increases the likelihood of heart disease, lung cancer, emphysema and other conditions. Little wonder, then, that Scots are invariably referred to as "the sick men - and women - of Europe". Scottish women have the lowest life expectancy in western Europe while Scottish men are trumped only by their counterparts in Portugal.

By all means campaign for some phantom "right to smoke", but don't believe that right derives from corrupting the statistics about what smoking does to you. Understand it for what it is: the right to play Russian roulette, as I did, with the immune system.

John Diamond

READING the comments you might think the Scottish Executive was some kind of Mugabean state, with any thought of curtailing smoking akin to banning fox hunting or seizing land. But across the world governments are beginning to realise that smokers will never give up unless legislation is introduced to help them. Norway is scheduled to bring in a similar law this summer while Italy, Canada, Greece and Japan have all recently followed New York's lead. In Italy, for example, where a few years ago you could smoke a pipe in a restaurant without remark, smoking is much less common. What's more, in a country where to smoke was once the epitome of chic, it's beginning to be seen as rather tacky and louche.

It is the beginning of a trend. In part, smoking was so popular because it was synonymous with glamour, which the tobacco companies exploited to the full. Movie stars smoked, as did sportsmen. Writers couldn't scratch out a line until they'd taken a draw. Sir Compton Mackenzie, who wrote a book about smoking called Sublime Tobacco, regarded it as "one of the greatest boons ever conferred upon humanity". He smoked his first cigarette when he was four and estimated that he'd got through half a ton of tobacco in his lifetime. For him, as for many others, from Raymond Chandler to Martin Amis, tobacco was "the handmaid of literature".

No more, though. Many writers I meet nowadays don't touch cigarettes. They've either given them up or never bothered with them in the first place. In the not too distant future, I suspect, smoking cigarettes will be like snorting snuff or slurping laudanum, something old men with urine-stained trousers do. They will refer nostalgically to the days when buses reeked of smoke and you couldn't order a drink without your eyes watering. They will wax catarrhally about how they smoked so much the tips of their fingers turned orange and their breath smelled like sewers and how there was nothing quite as sexy as the voice of a woman on the cusp of lung cancer. Those were the days, when to calm the nerves of cannon fodder the army doled out Woodbines like the navy used to issue rations of rum. If the Hun didn't get you the fags surely would.

Expect, then, to read a lot in the coming months from the smoking nostalgists and from those who will still be puffing on their way to the operating table. Non-smokers will do as they have always done: seethe with quiet indignation, having tolerated for too long the incontinent, invasive habits of selfish others. The genius of smokers is their ability to make non-smokers feel guilty, that it is somehow the fault of non-smokers when smokers are reduced to huddling in doorways, discarding their butts in the street, flicking ash over all and sundry or stinking out hotel rooms. In that context, smoking looks distinctly uncool and furtive, like peeing in an alleyway.

But what became of America's last smokers? Did they live to smoke another day? Or did they gasp their last in San Quentin? Not at all, says Keillor. Charged with conspiracy to obtain, and wilful possession of, tobacco, they were convicted in minutes and sentenced to write 20,000 words apiece on "personal integrity". Soon one of them, a woman, was reunited with her children. One night, crossing a busy intersection near their home in Chicago, she saved them from certain death by pulling them back from the path of her speeding car. However, her husband, who had quit smoking, and "who had just been telling her she could stand to lose some weight", was not so lucky. He was killed instantly.

Anyone care to join me in a debate about banning cars?