I smoke one cigar a year. I know that smoking is harmful. I know that by smoking I dramatically increase my risk of getting cancer as well as a list of other smoking-related ailments.
Yet I still choose to smoke. What's more, I enjoy smoking. I enjoy all those injurious little tars and resins. It is my choice to smoke. I have exercised my free will and accept the negative health consequences. Yet in what constitutes the present debate about smoking, I am denied the simple courtesy of having my free choice recognised.
According to the anti-smoking lobby, I am an addict. The addictive characteristics of nicotine are so overwhelming that I have lost my capacity to exercise my free will; it's probably my addiction driving me to write this article.
Under this conceptualisation of addiction, addiction negates free will because it is argued that it results in the destruction of free will. As I understand it, in the case on smoking handed down last week, when plaintiff Rolah Ann McCabe started smoking, the risks were not public knowledge, the information suppressed by tobacco companies.
Once a smoker, she was hooked for life and, as an addict, was not able to exercise her free will. Of course cigarette smoking is difficult to quit, but it is possible to stop smoking.
After all, half of all non-smokers are former smokers. There are patches, gum and pharmaceuticals that can assist, in addition to the more longstanding treatments. Look around and there are invariably reformed smokers all over the place. What's more, the evidence shows that people who quit enjoy better health.
The recent decision involving a smoker is symptomatic of a broader trend in Australian society to reject any notion of individual responsibility; a trend to reject individual responsibility and instead seek to assign blame to the deepest pockets. It's an ugly development that is having a serious effect on the fabric of life in Australia. This development has been fanned, in no small part, by public liability lawyers who see this area as an extremely lucrative practice.
Looking at a recent landmark tobacco settlement in the US, it is easy to see why. Lawyers acting for the plaintiffs received about $US8.2 billion ($15.3 billion). It's time for a real public debate about smoking. At the moment, this issue is being driven in the courts. As I don't have much faith in our courts and the legal profession, I think it's time that we had a proper public debate about the rights of smokers in society. I'm not talking about revisiting the past.
Make no mistake, the smoking debate has been lost for smokers. All that remains is for smokers to hear their terms of surrender. We haven't had a real debate about how society will accommodate smokers. I'd like to know what anti-smoking activists see as the endgame for this issue.
Where are they driving this? Are they seeking prohibition by legislation or do they plan to do this effectively by driving tobacco companies out of business? So what happens to smokers like me? As a citizen who smokes, what rights am I entitled to? It's a reasonable question that no one is addressing.
If the anti-smoking activists say I have no rights, then I would like to hear this. Governments, the anti-smoking lobby, the legal community and the media have to accept that a significant minority of society will always smoke and that they have a moral obligation to treat smokers with a degree of tolerance and accommodate their choice to smoke, and not treat smokers such as myself as criminals.
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