My right to cough up blood
Smoking may not be good for you, says Rod Liddle, but the anti-smoking fascists must be resisted Did you know that smoking stops you getting cancer of the endometrium? Well, apparently it does. I was alerted to this fact not through some shady tobacco-industry sponsored website, but from those depraved, humourless, crypto-fascists at Ash, the people who want us all to stop smoking. It cheered me up enormously. Until, that is, I looked up endometrium in the dictionary and discovered that it referred to the lining of the womb, at which point my hopes crashed. If I had a womb, I’d have been in seventh heaven. Maybe I should sue the tobacco companies because I don’t have a womb; they should have told me that smoking was beneficial only if I possessed an endometrium. It should be on the packets in big letters. Protect the lining of your womb: smoke more fags.
Smoking also stops you getting Parkinson’s disease, according to Ash, which is at least a small comfort. From a less rigorously scientific basis and after several drinks I’ve been heard to argue that smoking guards against the common cold, influenza, constipation, obesity, pregnancy, morbid arrogance, herpes simplex and halitosis of all kinds except that caused by the inhalation of tobacco smoke. I don’t suppose anybody believed my anecdotal evidence. And to be honest I don’t believe Ash.
I will just about concede that there is a direct relationship between smoking and lung cancer (although not passive smoking and lung cancer) and that smoking makes you cough and that if you already have a cough and you do as I do and attempt to manfully step up your intake of cigarettes, then, in the end, blood will make an unexpected and unwelcome appearance in the expectorant. I will not attempt to gull you about smoking; I don’t believe that it is good for your health, even for those blessed with a womb. I’m sure that if you smoke it will probably damage your health, although I doubt very much that it damages the health of those around you (the evidence here is inconclusive and often contradictory). I am much more likely to die of lung cancer as a result of my nicotine habit — but even that ‘much more’ is a complex and chimeric notion; if one person in a thousand dies of lung cancer without smoking and ten die because they smoke like laboratory beagles, then that is indeed an enormously increased risk — but still a pretty low probability, all in all. Recently we were told that smoking shortened one’s life by an average of four and a half years whereas obesity shortened one’s life by seven years. So maybe cigarettes should be compulsory in restaurants — they are, after all, a proven appetite-suppressor (of which more later). But whatever — a fat smoker should, then, see his or her life shortened by a total of 11 and a half years. Meanwhile, driving a car shortens your life by a good few years too, as does drinking large amounts of alcohol, being stressed at work, getting divorced, living in Scotland and being working class. Somewhere in the UK there’s a fat, pissed, stressed-out, car-driving, blue-collar jock who smokes 40 a day and is just about to pick up his decree nisi: statistically speaking, he should have been dead at about the age of 15. As they say, there are lies, damned lies, and stuff produced by the health quangos to frighten us all.
I am simultaneously confused and appalled, though, by the government’s proposed measures to stop us smoking. For a start, I don’t understand why we should be allowed to smoke in pubs which don’t serve food but are prohibited from doing so if they flog the odd pie over the counter. Nobody is arguing that the prevalence of tobacco smoke is more injurious if inhaled while eating — so why, logically, make the distinction at all? Already the government is squirming because unlike the rest of us it has been unable to define what is constituted by the term ‘food’, for the purposes of this fatuous legislation. And a measure of the misery inflicted by previous health guidelines can be seen in the statement of clarification from our hapless public health minister, Ms Caroline Flint. She reckons that ‘food’ should be defined as comestibles which are required to be kept in a ‘chiller’, like sandwiches, but not, say, pork scratchings or BBQ roast chicken’n’ thyme-flavour potato crisps. Do you remember those wonderful days when sandwiches were not kept in a bloody ‘chiller’ and how much better they tasted? How you could bite through the flavoursome cheddar cheese and tomato without your gums screaming out in pain? But someone — in the EU, I believe decided that there was a one in a million or a one in a thousand chance of us getting a mild stomach upset from some rogue prawn sandwich left out in the warm for too long and so now, by law, we have to suffer tasteless freezing lunches — and in the future, without the pleasure of a swift cigarette to thaw the mouth out afterwards. Pies and pasties these days, meanwhile, are also kept in the ‘chiller’ and then zapped for 30 seconds in the microwave so that they eventually explode upon the palate in a scalding gloop of taste-free recovered meat by-products, the flavour of the vegetables and the gravy and the pastry obliterated by the chilling process and the rapid, scorching blast of radiation. Not even bombs of filth, as Orwell once described modern fast food. More accurately, bombs of nothingness, nuked well beyond the point at which they would melt lead. Hiroshima food.
But I digress, derailed by nostalgia for a time when we were allowed to calculate risks for ourselves and make the appropriate, or inappropriate, decisions. Most of the opinion polls suggest that the population believes we should have the right to smoke if we wish to do so and that areas should be set aside in pubs and restaurants so that smokers do not inflict their habit upon other people. Further, most people seem to believe that it is the right of the landlord, or restaurateur, to decide whether or not smoking should be allowed on their premises. As is entirely usual, the public has this whole issue in perspective: there is a fundamental public belief in the autonomy of the individual and the notion of individual responsibility which our politicians simply do not share. They do not trust us. They do not trust us to behave with consideration towards our fellow human beings; they do not trust us to look after ourselves. And even now, in the wings, the authoritarian bores from the health watchdogs are screaming that the whole thing doesn’t go far enough, that smoking should be banned in public parks, lest the Canada geese and the rhododendrons and the very grass itself have their rights violated by the establishment’s most hated and vilified miscreant, the smoker.
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