Like their equivalents on this side of the pond, the anti-tobacco jihadists of Britain’s Royal Society for Public Health believe that smoking outside can be a menace:
The BBC explains:
The public smoking ban should be extended to beer gardens, al fresco eating areas of restaurants, parks, and outside school gates, a report says. The Royal Society for Public Health said smoking should be seen as “abnormal” and more controls are needed to cover areas where people gather.
Interestingly, the reason given is not ‘passive smoking’, but a nastily totalitarian variant of ‘for the children’.
BBC:
Shirley Cramer, the body’s chief executive, said: “Children are hugely receptive to the behaviour of the adults around them. The sight therefore of individuals smoking at prominent locations risks teaching them that smoking is a normal and safe habit.
“We believe that banning smoking in these locations via an exclusion zone could further denormalise smoking, ensuring that it is seen as an abnormal activity and potentially, prevent children and young people from beginning in the future.”
So the mere sight of smokers has now become a threat to public health, an idea not so removed from the belief on the part of some neo-prohibitionists that e-cigarettes are dangerous because they mimic and thus ‘normalize’ the smoking of the real thing.
But to their credit, however, the Royal Society for Public Health recognizes that e-cigarettes are not cigarettes, and that they are in fact a safer alternative.
The organisation also called for:
- All places selling cigarettes to be forced to also offer e-cigarettes
- Greater use of e-cigarettes by smoking cessation services
- A new system to license places that can sell cigarettes
- And for e-cigarettes to be renamed vapourisers or nicotine control products as the term was misleading.
To be sure, those suggestions come wrapped in an unpleasant authoritarianism, but at least they represent a recognition of something that Obama’s lethal CDC is unwilling to accept. E-cigarettes save lives. What’s more, they are not (whatever the logic of asinine laws such as that passed in New York City in 2013 might imply) “smoking.”