Originally Published: Sunday, April 3, 2005
Written by: Helen White
The UK’s Public Smoking Debate
In the UK the government has proposed a smoking ban in all public enclosed places in the next four years. This will mean all clubs and pubs which serve food. Pubs which don’t serve food will still be smoking environments. As normal, those smokers this will affect have complained that they are being ‘demonized’, and they want their right to choose to smoke.
From Smoker to Non-Smoker
Having been a smoker for ten years before becoming straight edge, I feel I can speak from both sides. As a smoker, I hardly ever even stopped to think about the damage I was doing to people, as with most young people I assumed that ill effects would be so far off in the future, I didn’t need to worry about them.
Now I find being inside a club where everyone is smoking all night, and the ventilation is hardly making a dent in the atmosphere really horrible. I have asthma and going out with my friends makes me wheezy, and takes all the enjoyment out of the time I spend with them. It seems odd to me that a smoker can try to argue their right to smoke when a non-smokers right to breathe healthy air when they go out is being taken away from them.
The Reality of Smoking’s Impact
Nobody can argue that smoking is good for you. I’m not militant either, my friends smoke and drink, as did I once, and that’s fine with me, but now I notice the effect just hanging out with them has on me physically, and I wonder how people can really imagine that a smoking ban isn’t the only way to go. In some ways, as crazy as it sounds, someone who knowingly does something to put carcinogens into the air in an enclosed space where others are should be demonized, in real terms, they are physically hurting others. It would be different if we had all been born with a cigarette in our mouths, and our lungs weren’t made of the delicate tissue we use millions of times throughout life to supply our bodies with oxygen to survive, but unfortunately, smoking is not natural and is certainly not good for our body systems.
I had a typical smoker Father, 30+ years of smoking 30 a day, every year telling me his lungs were healthy and nobody in our family had a history of cancer until aged 56 he had 2 heart attacks and had to have a double bypass to repair the damage. This, plus narrowing of the arteries in his brain, was caused by smoking. He now says he wishes he’d never done it.
In Defense of Clean Air
So I gave up smoking with enough time for my body to recover I hope, but now I get the same poisoning every time I go to a show (which is my career, I have a band and I play shows every week), or go to a club, and I have no choice in the matter. If someone hit me in a club then rightly they would get into trouble, but it’s fine for someone to spark up a cigarette, which may trigger my asthma (and asthma is no joke, it can kill), and lead to an attack, and for that to be accepted as normal. It really is time we woke up to ourselves, I’m not talking about militancy, violence is definitely not the way to go, but a big drive for a ban on smoking in enclosed spaces is long overdue.
Business vs. Health: The Pro-Smoking View
Pro-smoking bodies say that civil liberties are taken away when smoking is banned in the workplace and that it would damage business in casinos and bars if the ban were introduced. Obviously the health of their fellow man is of little importance when it comes to losing money, what a sad outlook.
