I have a basic human right to look at fag packets

Anthony E.Price

I gave up tobacco over ten years ago because it was damaging my health. The decision to smoke in the first place was mine - ditto the decision to stop. Why anyone should regard these choices as a matter for politicians is a mystery to me. But then, so are a lot of things. For instance, although I abstain from tobacco I still enjoy the herb that cheers, but this is set to re-designated as a class B drug and unless I am careful uniformed agents of the state will come round, trash my herb garden and put me in jail.
Funny old world, ain't it?

Ray

The irony is that these same lefties who tell us that at every turn we need to remove the 'temptation' of smoking would recoil in horror at the thought of censoring explicit televised sex scenes just in case they might tempt viewers into thinking that sado-masochistic homosexual incest is acceptable behaviour.

Elephant_In_The_Room

Please let's not miss the nellie in the room, which in this case is EU Directive 2001/37 (“This Directive concerns the manufacture, *presentation and sale* of tobacco products in the Member States of the EU, in particular the use of warnings on packets, the prohibition of descriptions such as ‘mild’ or ‘light’, the maximum tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide yields”). The EU - as with so much else - is behind this latest nannying. Ministers are merely presenting Brussels' legislation as their own.

Martin Morrow

I wonder if the Government thinks that lying , cheating , stealing, immorality, hypocrisy, slander, superficiality and corruption are bad for your health or, at least, not good to teach to children.
I doubt it as it would mean they would have to denormalise themselves.
Pity, the thought of the whole of New Labour crouching under the counter being ignored and used as ashtrays would really improve my day.

ian skidmore

hear hear......and I am a non smoker. How can it be illegal to identify the legal contents of a packet

Sean Dunne

I’m completely baffled by all this ‘detest the smoker’ campaign. I was brought up in the 30’s and according to some of the nonsense promulgated these days, with both parents smoking like chimneys and with thick ‘passive’ smoke in the home, in cinemas, restaurants and the like, I (and all my contemporaries) should be long dead - that’s assuming (according to recent publicity) any child could be born back then in the first place! A schoolboy during the war, I couldn’t help but observe that virtually everyone smoked. Christ, they need a fag just to endure all the hardships living in wartime brought about - and our fighting troops even more so. Frankly, I wouldn’t swop a single person, fag-smoker or not, from that era - for every member of this government and, come to think of it, throw in all the interfering health fanatics of ASH as well.

Dwight Vandryver

To ban cigarette vending machines seems particularly perverse. If you walk into any well managed Gents, or even the Gents at your local Tesco, you are confronted by a condom vending machine that invites all sorts of pleasures to be had with the various adaptations of this item of body armour. Logically, the same people who advocate the removal of cigarette machines should also promote the removal of condom machines in order to eliminate or, at least, reduce the frequency of promiscuous and impromptu sex. But they don't, because they know that the unavailability of condoms never has been a deterrent to such sex. Likewise, their attack on cigarette machines will have no effect. In fact, rather than improving the nation's health, the whole anti-smoking campaign has turned into a vindictive exercise designed to show how easily human rights issues can be flouted by the state. Drinkers beware - it's your turn next.

George Speller

Hmmm. I've swapped from the Grauniad to the Telegraph . . .and from Nu Labor to - well anybody make me an offer? Maybe I should start buying the Spectator . . .

Ellen North

Briliant article!
One of the many effects of this anti campaign is to reverse the legal premise that those achieving adulthood within democracy are automatically assumed to be sane and competent in making legal and pacific personal decision, thereby making whoever - or whatever industry - happens to be 'in power' and producing 'law' the 'decider'.
The legal shift making us all incompetent wards of the State on a global basis is required to make globalization under industrial rule a triumphant reality.

grant watt

In Australia the Anti Smoking Nazis are seeking the return of the death penalty back be to rid the country of smokers.

In my quick calculation Australia should only have a population of between 1 and 2 million if "passive smoking'
wreaks the havoc suggested by the anti-smoking lobby.

This is "nanny state" up in lights but Governments just won't give up the excise and tax ripped off the smoker

Hugh Croft

Of all the dumb things we humans do, smoking cigarettes has got to get a special award for the spectacular stupidity it represents. I support all measures from any quarter to abnormalise it, left, right or anything else.

Jonathan Bagley

Things are never what they seem in the war on tobacco. I think the proposal that tobacco should only be sold in plain packaging is actually intended to make it easier to identify tobacco originally purchased abroad. The next step will be tobacco licences, which certainly won't be given out to your local corner shop with its under the counter supply of Belgian Golden Virginia. France has a very elegant solution to the problem of its citizens going to Belgium to buy cigarettes. It is a crime to be in posession of more than 200 cigarettes.

Coniston

Hugh: single motherhood contributes harms more children than any other factor. Should we denormalise that and demonise single mothers? The case is 100 times stronger than that of second hand smoke. Also, hidden cigarettes, but porn in plainview? Ludicrous. This all results in contempt for the government, though, given the circumstances, the current level seems hard to surpass.

Hugh Croft

Hi Coniston. Good questions. I don't pretend to have a answer to these matters. However, having seen both my parents die of cancer as a direct result of cigarette smoking, I am astonished, on a daily basis, to see people putting themselves on, possibly, the same trajectory, especially given the apparent current level of common knowledge into the risks. It seems though that the message hasn't been clear enough yet.

Norman Brand

Perhaps politicians think about how their policies will be 'spun' by their opponents. The Conservatives should ignore that and recognise that regulations which force dying, elderly people to smoke in the road outside their hospitals; others to leave their clubs and bingo halls to enjoy the tobacco which helped them through the war; and which destroy the social support networks of pubs (and the livelihoods of their managers), is downright wrong in itself. David Cameron should simply come out and say so. And, incidentally, there would be rewards at the ballot box.

mandy vincent

Superb article Claire, thank you.
I will never be "denormalised" I will fight tooth and nail not to be. I will never give up while this social engineering experiment by the smoke-haters continues. I could not bear the thought of becoming one of them.
This was never about health, the "hiding" of the Enstrom/Kabat study proved that in my eyes.
I also agree with the majority of comments left.
mandyv freedom2choose.info for tolerant non-smokers and smokers alike.
Refreshing to see another smoker live to 112 today, "Whiskey, smoking and wild women" do not seem to have taken their toll on him.

David Short

One of the unintended consequences of banning smoking indoors is getting ash all over your clothes whenever you enter a building.

People no longer use ashtrays; what's the point in the open air? So anyone in a dark suit is under attack from the doorway smokers' constant flick flick flicking.

This also happens when you're walking down the street behind a smoker.

Virtually everyone you see outdoors in Canary Wharf now has a fag in their hand.

Alide Kohlhaas

This is obviously going to be minority opinion, but there is nothing wrong with keep fags out of sight of young people. Adults can always choose. Besides, who says that the second-hand smoke issue is pseudo-science. Sorry, it has been firmly established by many studies. One more thing. Scotland and England are already behind the times. Various provincial juridictions in Canada have long since banned the open display of ciggies. Adults can choose their brand from a picture chart on the store counter, and then the packet is taken from a covered shelf. So, there. Grow up. Children are involved in this issue. The only infantiles in this issue are those who want to keep on smoking at any cost. Grow up.

Alex Dick

It is assumed in one comment that deaths from cancer are automatically due to smoking; this illustrates the effect of incessant propaganda - deaths from cancer occurred before tobacco was brought to Europe.
As for "denormalizing", the country is being reduced to a nursery with a vindictive left-wing nanny.
Despite having lived for 80 years in the SSSS (Spiteful Socialist Stinkhole of Scotland) I always voted Conservative until switching to UKIP upon the advent of a "pinko" as leader. Does that mean I shall have to be denormalized, or am I considered to be so already?
Think about that.

terence p hewett

Revenge is a dish best taken cold. In two years time all 15 million smokers will take their revenge and the carnage will be terrible.

Norman Brand

Is Alide Kohlhaas (June 6, 11.10pm) seriously telling people who lived through, maybe fought in, the second world war and coped with bombing, rationing, austerity and bereavements at home, to grow up? For many of these people, the modest social comfort in their final years of a pint and a cigarette, with a game of dominoes and a chat maybe, or a game of Bingo, has been wrecked by this vicious, love-less law. In fact their generation grew up very young.

Kerstin Lewis

I have worked in a hospital in the Chemical Dependency Unit, which treated people with problems with alcohol and drugs, but not smoking cigarettes. I would say that alcohol is more damaging for a person and his surroundings than tobacco. I prefer sitting beside a person smoking rather than a drunk, who usually does not know what he is doing or saying. Any prohibition in my view promotes the usage of the product. Example the Scandinavian countries who did have prohibiton re alcohol during I thin at least 40 years and has always had a population of avid drinkers which in my experience has got nothing to do with their cold climate

F. and U. Adenufyet

I think 'Victory' cigarettes are exempt.

diannavan

Oh get a grip! You have a basic human right to food and clothing and shelter, but looking at cigarette packages??? Come on!!! You are too silly for words.

Craig

Anyone seen ‘Demolition Man’. For those that do not know it is an action comedy but there is a very interesting social commentary running through the whole film: a projection of things to come if we continue along this road.

More specifically I am concerned how this new law will affect specialist tobacconists; after all they can hardly hide the stock of their entire shop behind the counter. Perhaps like ‘Adults Only’ shops they will have to be boarded up and made far more conspicuous.

Craig

Everyone is fooling themselves on this issue. No one – not smoker or anti-smoker – will come out at the end a winner. In the interim period the percentage of young smokers is likely to increase in direct relation to the de-normalization of tobacco (young people after all are always seeking for ways to rebel against ‘normal’). In later years many of these same people will want to stop and the majority of those will seek out aids to do so. Oddly enough this is big business for the pharmaceutical companies who overtly have pressured the government into introducing anti-smoking laws. This is a very clever tactic that actually encourages young people to smoke and older people to stop thus perpetuating the profit base of interested business.
Eventually smoking will be outlawed altogether. The anti-smoking lobby may celebrate when that day comes but they may also be feeling the squeeze themselves as other lifestyle choices (alcohol consumption, dietary choices, sexual behaviour, etc) are infringed upon and their tax contribution rise significantly to cover the lost revenue.
For the record I am a non-smoker that no longer enjoys the increasingly atmosphere-less environments of pubs with their undisguised stink of body odour and latrine waft.

paddy

just put the fags away man !

ben

i think smokers are free to have there idea