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The British Government just enacted a law which takes affect in roughly one year which will ban cigarette and other tobacco products from being displayed in shops. Instead they will need to be stored below the counter and asked for directly by the customer.

This week I was in London every day for work and on the way home read the free evening newspaper “The Evening Standard”, which ran multiple opinions and stories about this news event. Two in particular struck me as interesting.

In the first one a politician was arguing for this ban by saying: (paraphrased) “[The Government] has to do everything it can to cut back on cigarette availability to curb the number of smokers in this country”. If I was inside of his head during this interview I wonder if I would have heard the extension to that sentence: “… with the exception, of course, of making them illegal, because we couldn’t survive without the copious amounts of taxes they bring in.”

As a non-smoker living in a free country these political games of attempting to coerce our behaviour sicken me. The millions spent on this futile fight surely would be better served elsewhere; which leads to the second article.

In this opinion letter the writer argues (only half tongue-in-cheek) that we are being socially irresponsible by not smoking. An interesting premise, and here is why. He argues that because of our advancements in health care and medicines we are living much longer. Life expectancy ranges between 75-85 in the western world. However, most countries have a retirement age of 60-65. Which means for 15-20 years people who live in social service countries are drawing on pensions a lot longer than when these original legislations were passed. His argument is that by stopping people from smoking, you are losing valuable tax money, and then paying that person, who may have died younger because of smoking, for more years of his life you saved. The government is actually shooting itself in the foot twice! On top of that, because treatments are getting cheaper everyday, it is now or soon will be cheaper to treat that person for his eventual disease, then pay his pension. Economically speaking the government has made a very irrational decision. By ‘protecting’ their constituents, they are in fact hurting their cash flow, which in turn will hurt their constituents.

The problem is that the government’s motivations have nothing to do with the public well being. Their motivations are to please activist and lobby groups to solidify votes so the can be re-elected again and continue to draw their paycheques.

I mentioned this during the Environmental Summit meetings a while back; world leaders aren’t experts on things. They are experts at being politicians, not scientists who understand the environment, economists who understand financial models, doctors who understand healthcare. So having governments make decisions about these things without completely researching the subject with the top members of the specific field is asinine.

There is a good reason why I am not allowed to prescribe medication to someone or to sign off on designs for a traffic bridge. Why do we allow non-experts in our government make these uninformed decisions?

Of course, thorough research and investigation cost money and take time, neither of which the government really has in their relatively short terms.

There are certain prejudices that people fight and die for: Race, gender, religion, disability. Yet others we not only accept, but openly perpetuate without any sense of moral infraction (Gender based car insurance premiums is probably one of the most prolific). You could argue that smokers are now a part of this list. A few western countries seems so preoccupied with discriminating against smokers by forcing their habit underground it is like we are entering a state of prohibition on cigarettes, and we all know how well that worked.

In Germany offices, airports and other buildings have smoking rooms. Sealed off areas for smokers, which have ventilation and provide a warm, indoor place which doesn’t disturb the non-smoking crowd. Also their vast number of automated cigarette dispensers, check your age and dispense cigarettes at anytime of the day. The public there must be horrified to be forced to look at cigarette s and smokers everywhere! Or perhaps they realize that people make choices and in a free country they shouldn’t be persecuted for them.

Governments need to stop focusing money attempting to adjust a relatively small proportion of the public’s habits and put that money into healthcare and education programs that can benefit everyone. A child without a textbook in his classroom doesn’t give a shit if cigarettes are on display, because without those textbooks he’ll be too illiterate to read the display anyway.