Stubbed Out

The city of New York, at midnight on Sunday, banned smoking from all its bars and restaurants. Though there was a fair amount of clamour beforehand (many New Yorkers pointed out how stressed they were, what with the war and whatnot), the New York Times yesterday was absolutely silent on the matter. The ban is in place; the city stands firm; anyone who thinks that you have to smoke while you drink, on account of how a drink is slightly too wet and a fag is slightly too dry, will from now on have to explore that belief from the heady moral decrepitude of their own front room.

If I were a smoker, I would take this opportunity to point out what profoundly silly and mistaken people the Americans are. Smoking and anti-Americanism go together almost as well as smoking and drinking. In fact, I remember the ability to get into an instant bate about Americans being one of the chief joys of smoking - their double standards, their ridiculous fearfulness, their pockets of Puritanism, their absurd single-mindedness. Here seems like a good time to admit that I've actually only been a non-smoker for 36 hours; that's why the anti-Americanism was so easy to revivify.

Anyway, the ban's overall aim is to "save 1,000 New-Yorker lives a year". This, of course, assumes that everyone will give up, which is by no means certain. The mechanics of addiction are pretty hard to fathom - everyone always says that making things illegal doesn't work, because prohibition didn't work. But looking at Britain alone, criminalisation has worked very well, most notably for laudanum, which was banned here in 1920 and is now basically unheard of - sure, there are still people on heroin, but you don't get given it at parties, and Tony Blair, I feel sure, doesn't take it in his tea. Yet it didn't work for dope, which was banned eight years later, but is still used intermittently by a narrow majority of UK adults. Go figure. Maybe dope is just nicer than opium.

Making things socially unacceptable, the only viable alternative to legislation, seems by a whisker the more effective measure - nobody's taken snuff since everyone else decided to stop taking snuff. But maybe social unacceptability has to be defined more widely than what goes on in a tiny, crackpot little island metropolis (I am talking here about both Manhattan and Britain), before its effects can be fully measured. So, what will become of New York's smokers, we'll have to wait and see. But let's imagine that we have waited: it's all been a lovely success, and smokers no longer exist. How good is that on balance? A lot of people won't die of cancer.

Of course, there is one threat posed to health in America that is greater than smoking, and that's obesity. It's fair to wonder whether the city might not be better served by banning fatty foods in restaurants, while it's in the business of putting its citizens' health above the citizenry's choice. Of course, there's nothing to stop it banning both fags and cakes. It won't, though.

For bar workers, the ban is a good thing: passive-smoking is a proven reality, and nobody should have their health put at risk by their work environment. Having said that, though, working in a bar is not the most dangerous job you could have - if you work in an abattoir, you have a one in six chance of sustaining an injury before you're even liable for health insurance (one in three meat-workers injure themselves every year; most employers demand six months' full-time work before they'll include a health package), and those injuries are real horror show. But legislators can't do everything at once - one pro-worker act of law is better than none at all. Naturally, non-smoking bar punters no longer have to passive-smoke either. Brilliant! It may be a hoary old line, used more often than the eternal truth that men don't turn into their mothers, but fags are not the greatest threat to air quality in America (cars are), and even if they were (the tabs, I mean), America is not in a million years the most vigilant protector of its environment (never mind everyone else's).

So, while smoking is a manifestly flawed pursuit, there are reasons quite beyond the quiddity of the fag for the campaign against it. There simply must be - why else would it be so singled out, above cars and burgers and planes and sweets, beyond real ammunition and iniquitous workplaces, as the greatest modern threat to health?

There's an old Republican line that's always used against the anti-gun lobby in the Democrat party: it's not the guns you don't like; it's the people who like the guns. While I think it perfectly rational not to like people who like guns, this conflation is taken as the final word in any debate: people before facts.

Well, exactly the same applies to the anti-smoking lobby - the sheer verve of it, the grinding inevitability of its triumph, its wilful refusal to see any equivalence in other aspects of life that are harmful to health. It's not the cigarettes they don't like; it's the people who like the cigarettes. They should bear in mind, these opponents of the smoker - even after we've stopped, we are the same people. We're the same, only we're in a worse mood.