If this law is passed, I will learn to drive, teach myself to smoke and buy the smallest car available, writes DONALD CLARKE
RIGHT. FIRST things first. Let’s get the disclaimers out of the way. Smoking is extremely bad for your health. The general reduction in levels of cigaretting has increased life expectancy and ensured that one’s clothes, following nights of revelry, smell less like a fetid rubbish heap. Listen to DJ Donald, kids. Just say no to the fatal weed. Smoking is for losers. Word up!
Now it’s time to start annoying people. Last week, it was announced that James Reilly, the Minister for Health, is considering a ban on all smoking in motorcars. He’s having a laugh. Isn’t he? The notion of prohibiting puffing in cars when children are present – also being pondered – does have some merit to it. But the idea that Garda Plod might be allowed to drag you from your own car for solitarily enjoying a tube of rolled leaves is utterly outrageous. If such a regulation is passed I will have only one option. I shall belatedly learn to drive, teach myself to smoke, buy the smallest motorcar available and spend my idle afternoons creating a carcinogenic fug in some prominent spot near the Department of Sticking Their Nose Where it’s Not Bloody Wanted.
Aside from anything else, the proposal defies all logic. If the rule were passed, it would be illegal to smoke in your car but (for now at least) permissible to billow poison about the adjacent pavement. The law-abiding cigarette fan, eager to observe this Orwellian dictate, must now step out of his vehicle – an enclosed space where his nicotine vapours harm only himself – and exercise his habit among blameless pedestrians, unfortunate pigeons and frail, muddy-faced kiddies. Won’t somebody please think of the children?
Some more extreme anti-smoking groups will say that the practice should be banned altogether. While it is legal, however, a fellow should, surely, be allowed to generate fumes in the privacy of his own mobile space.
So, why is the notion even being considered? Well, now that smoking has (quite rightly) been reclassified as an anti-social activity, those who still puff offer a barn-door sized target for any politician wishing to look as if he or she is “doing something” about such persistent social problems as, well, death. Because this specific civil liberty – the right to immolate dried leaves in private – encourages pesky old annihilation, it does not attract the attention of those groups who campaign for the release of jailed Chinese poets.
Remember all that back-slapping (literally, as I recall) when the Dáil bravely stamped down on the deadly menace that was head shops? The faint pleas for mercy from responsible store owners – those that refused to sell Mephedrone – were inaudible above the governmental crowing about having “done something” about stupid death.
Nobody lost an election by being hard on drugs.
The unhappy truth is that smokers, drug users and heavy drinkers offer those who abstain – the more self-righteous of that number, anyway – delicious opportunities to engage in recreational outrage.
We have all, surely, seen such a person staging an unconvincingly melodramatic coughing fit. In a recent interview, Kristin Scott Thomas discussed the business of smoking in a production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. When she produced her first cigarette, despite the fact that warnings of tobacco use were scattered about the foyer, an audience member still felt obliged to comment loudly from the stalls.
Scott Thomas explained: “This women suddenly said: ‘Oh no. She’s not going to smoke’ and began coughing furiously through the whole thing. Which is very off-putting.”
No person, however sensitive their lungs, is going to be seriously disturbed by one cigarette smoked at that sort of distance. The theatrical cough – like the hand waved pathetically in front of scrunched face – is a way of announcing your own purity and self-discipline. Given that your mock anger is directed against a self-destructive sociopath, you can safely assume that nobody is going to tell you to stop disturbing other people with this pathetic display of amateur theatrics.
Avid smokers enjoy smoking. But avid non-smokers enjoy their habit even more. Mainstream Hollywood long ago established a convention whereby the lighting of a fag indicated that the relevant character was evil, unstable, bereaved or from another planet. Yet that wasn’t enough. Coughing furiously and waving their hands manically before their face, the militant wing of the purity league is now trying to impose an 18 cert on all films featuring smoking. You can murder somebody in a 15A picture. But don’t try and light up a filter tip.
Anyway, what’s most irritating about the excesses of the anti-smoking lobby is the way such bleating can turn even the most easy-going sofa-Marxist – such as your current correspondent – into a member of the Jeremy Clarkson Tendency.
Can I get through this piece without mention of the dread words “nanny state”?
Apparently not. I feel dirty.