Dalrymple on anti-smoking campaigns

Theodore Dalrymple discusses the less-than-clean tactics of some anti-smoking campaigners:

The British government is proposing to ban smoking in all pubs that serve food but not in those that don't. You might think this a sensible compromise, allowing for separate public places for smokers and non-smokers. But a recent paper in the British Medical Journal attacks the proposals, on the grounds that they might well increase the differential in the life expectancy between the rich and poor, which has stubbornly refused to yield to 60 years (so far) of profound social engineering.

The reason the proposals, if implemented, might increase the differential is that there are more pubs that don't serve food in poor areas than in rich, so the poor would be subjected to more passive smoking in pubs than the rich. The authors therefore propose a total rather than a partial ban of smoking in pubs. For them, a widening of the differential would be undesirable, even when everyone's life expectancy was rising.

This pattern has been repeated over and over again, as anti-smoking campaigns in many countries have rejected any compromise that would allow non-smokers to enjoy facilities if it also permitted smokers to continue smoking. It's no longer a case of non-smokers demanding their rights — it long ago transmuted into depriving smokers of theirs.