About half of all patients in Irish hospitals during the winter months are there because of smoking related diseases, according to a senior respiratory consultant. It is a staggering figure, and reflects the social damage and the medical costs that tobacco companies have inflicted - and continue to inflict - on society. The majority of these patients is drawn from the poor and the elderly; people who took up smoking before its dangers became apparent and before successive governments took tentative steps to confront the killer in our midst. Smoking does kill. Every year, some 7,000 people die from nicotine related diseases. Tens of thousands are disabled. A particularly worrying aspect is that the tobacco industry's glamorous advertising campaigns appear to have overwhelmed government health-based `no smoking' efforts and have established a new market composed of young people, particularly young women.
This week's decision by a Californian court to award more than $3 billion in damages to a lifelong smoker because he had developed incurable lung and brain cancer is a signal penalty. The court found against the tobacco giant, Philip Morris, on six counts of fraud, negligence and making a defective product. It is one of a series of recent decisions in the United States that have heavily penalised tobacco companies for selling addictive and lethal products. While a similar legal action has yet to succeed in this State it may only be a matter of time.
The Minister for Health, Mr Martin, has been promising to introduce radical anti-smoking measures for the past 18 months. A Bill may finally be published before the Dail rises in the first week of July. Even then, it could take the best part of a year for the measure to make its way through the Oireachtas and be signed into law. The Bill will direct the registration of all sales outlets, confine the sale of cigarettes to over-18s, ban the sale of ten-packs and force the industry to disclose details of the additives they put in tobacco. The key to all such anti-smoking measures is enforcement. A recent Western Health Board survey found that a majority of tobacconists in that area sold cigarettes to children under 14 years of age.
The situation in relation to "no smoking" zones in restaurants is absurd. Is the Minister for Health serious when he states that the battle against tobacco is one of the most important public health challenges we face? Is he to be believed when he says his ambition is to make this State a tobacco-free zone? It will take more than the publication of a Bill to convince. The Minister already has legal powers under the Tobacco Act of 1988 to restrict or to ban smoking in designated areas. Banning smoking in all public, enclosed places, including bars and restaurants, would be a powerful statement of his determination to confront this lethal trade. If 7,000 citizens a year were killed in any other way there would be calls for emergency legislation. The sheer cost to society, in terms of deaths, diseases and hospital treatments, is horrendous. Mr Martin should shout `Stop'.