The Tasmanian Greens today celebrated the passage of the Public Health Amendment Bill (2011) through the Lower House as an important step to help protect Tasmanians from the harmful effects of second hand tobacco smoke.
Greens Health spokesperson Paul O’Halloran MP said he was particularly pleased at measures focusing on reducing smoking around impressionable children in places such as playgrounds, sporting venues and swimming pools.
“The Greens welcome this as a serious step to reduce the impact that smoking in public places has to our children, workers, and other non-smokers, as well as the long term costs on our health system,” Mr O’Halloran said.
“Hopefully these changes will also help to raise community awareness about the ill-effects of smoking on the smokers themselves, while acting as a deterrent to young people who may be tempted to try smoking for the first time.”
“In the past passive smoke exposure in outdoor venues has not been considered as serious as indoor exposure, but it can still cause serious health problems for children, pregnant women, workers and many other people who suffer from allergies or medical conditions like asthma and heart disease.”
“The Greens also welcome the inclusion of provisions in the legislation for the enforcement of the laws, along with measures to further tighten restrictions on the sale and display of tobacco products.”
“The Greens have been calling for these measures for some time as a crucial part of our preventative health campaign.”
“Reducing the harm from cigarette smoking and addiction is the single most effective way to improve the health and welfare of Tasmanians and help to reduce the impact of smoking-related illness on Tasmania’s health budget,” Mr O’Halloran said.
• Jane Rankin-Reid responds to comments by Kathryn Barnsley, HERE
Kathryn, so you’re placing this erstwhile public health campaign – officially albeit rarely enforced by a medically untrained para military outfit- in the hands of the public who were previously too scared to go to the mall because of uhm… smokers? In other words, the very people you’re claiming to be helping by preventing them from smoking in public, disgust you? Talk about an appropriate bedside manner!
Your remarks about “anti-social behavior” are also immensely worrying, in spite of the apparent success in reducing public displays of young smoking in Launceston. What qualifies the general public to make decisions that intrude on civil liberties? Being anti smoking never used to be sufficient legal qualification to act as either a health worker or law enforcement agent. What has changed?
We are well aware of the facts about passive smoking although you’ve failed to tell us why the Australian government is yet to classify nicotine as a drug, as has occurred in the US? Why also has our current government failed to take any real steps to improve the lot of smokers addicted to an unregulated drug by adequately funding effective quit smoking campaigns. Is the ALP as addicted to nicotine taxes as it is to pokie machines?
I enclose sections of Mind if I Smoke, published by McMaster Museum, Canada earlier this year.
“Historically, the state sanctioned oppression of adults’ right to smoke swiftly became integral to nicotine’s existence in society. Author Iain Gately’s “La Diva Nicotina; the Story of How Tobacco Seduced the World” (Scribner UK 2001) relishes the unpopular King James’ “Counterblaste”, a 16th century royal outburst on the evils of smoking. King James’ subjects would be stupid to assume the habit, he claimed. But under his reign, the king wrestled the right to tax tobacco from English physicians and increased taxation on the filthy weed by a massive 4,000%. Economically, hypocrisy has always surrounded the use of tobacco. King James double dipping was a sinister foretaste of today’s political efforts to stamp out smoking. Adolf Hitler also hated smoking with a passion: under his regime, posters showing smokers’ heads being crushed by Nazi jackboots were commonplace. Germany’s per capita intake of tobacco increased between 1932 and 1938 from 570 to 900 cigarettes annually making it the world’s largest tobacco importer throughout the entire war. Tobacco taxation contributed up to 12% of Hitler’s war time treasury. Simultaneously, German scientists were discovering links between smoking and lung cancer, but the Reich’s treasury had other ideas.
What has changed today? In countries like Australia and Canada, close to two decades of socially engineered anti-smoking “health” campaigns have reconditioned citizens to become actively intolerant of smokers. This is as dangerous culturally, as it is cruel to smokers. Demoted to the doorsteps of our communities, these uncelebrated tax payers are outcasts, exiled and so toxically unpopular they may as well hang from public squares. Smoking cessation success rates became static in both Canada and Australia in the last decade; even hijacking cigarette packaging for gruesome advertisements of smokers’ missing teeth and ulcerated feet has done little to shift an apparently stagnant 18% of the Canadian population’s need to light up according to the Canadian Cancer Society.
Author Richard Klein’s “Cigarettes are Sublime” (Duke University Press, 1993) analyses the literary history of cigarettes and re-situates smoking’s “status” as an enduring cultural symbol of freedom and tolerance in today’s world. We smokers may be at risk medically, Klein argues, but such risks are part of the contrariness of human existence. “Cigarettes are bad for your health, like many things that are consumed thirty times a day; perhaps they are worse than most. But historically, the laws that are devised to suppress them fail to do so, may in fact produce the opposite effect of what they intend and this paradox gives rise to suspicions about the motives and attitudes that underlie their imposition” (Klein p 182)
Cigarettes are the only consumer products invented purely to capture permanent public usage through chemically managed addictive ingredients. Tobacco is also the first commercial product to claim a global market, fed on deathly profits. In our emerging smoke free world, the question of how cigarette manufacturers’ commercial insights operate is more relevant than ever. Yet, Big Tobacco’s ugly profiteering and those unhelpful lung cancer statistics predominates. Discredited in the US’s stage managed 1998 Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, nicotine science has become one of the lost areas of human development, the unwritten gap in the history of addiction and consumerism. While the highly publicised multi-million dollar suit succeeded in extracting some $206 billion dollars from Big Tobacco to be paid over the next 25 years, the Food and Drug Administration’s powers to control cigarette ingredients were sacrificed in the bargain. In the last decade, US smokers became unwitting consumers of genetically modified Brazilian tobacco and goodness knows what other undeclared additives. According to Dr. David Kessler, former Commissioner (1990-1997) of the US FDA, Y-1, the new breed of tobacco contains up to 50% higher levels of nicotine. “You don’t insert nicotine without the intention of controlling it…”
A Question of Intent: A Great American Battle with a Deadly Industry. Kessler, David A. Public Affairs; 1st edition. January 9, 2001
More recently, Dr. Kessler has asserted that; “The FDA should quickly move to reduce nicotine levels in cigarettes to non addictive levels. If we reduce the level of the stimulus, we reduce the craving. It is the ultimate harm reduction strategy…The law prohibits banning of cigarettes and reducing nicotine levels to zero, this policy does neither” Legacy for Health Foundation (US) media release 16.6.2010.
US President Barack Obama finally signed legislation giving the FDA full regulatory powers over cigarette’s ingredients, in mid 2009. This news should have made headlines throughout the free world, but the epic victory in the protection of smokers passed with little comment.
Ethical contradictions flourish in the war against smoking. Even television is required to tell us whether animals have been injured in the testing of products or pranks. Unlike Clairol or Kelloggs however, tobacco companies are still not legally required to print their menu of contents on their packaging.
From this perspective, nicotine addicts are the chemically modified front-runners of all dependency inducing products characterising much of the current consumer marketplace. Ian Gately suggests smokers are as necessary to retail capitalism as canaries are to the mining industry. Underground birds dying from lack of oxygen forewarn humans of perilously unstable air conditions below. The 20th century’s epidemiological history of lung cancer’s well described links to smoking cigarettes should actively compel a questioning expansion of regulatory scrutiny of most commercially available habitually-used consumables and activities, so as to limit future degenerative effects upon unsuspecting users. Creating an awareness of a shortcoming, so as to compel dependency on commercially available solutions for anything from pre-menopausal “in case” continence pads, to “body odour” and “naturally” flavoured water; artificially derived shortcomings are critical to marketing strategies. Children are especially vulnerable to being manipulated by introduced commercial dependencies. Yet there’s virtual silence over such adversely calculated cultural manipulation.
“Healthism in America has sought to make longevity the principal measure of a good life. To be a survivor is to acquire moral distinction. But another view, a dandy’s perhaps, would say that living, as distinct from surviving, acquires its value from risks and sacrifices that tend to shorten life and hasten dying. A life, in that view, is judged by the suicide it commits” (Klein p 184-185)
One of the most compelling claims against smokers is that it is simply a disgusting habit, whether or not we light up within inhaling distance of non-smokers who’d rather avoid second hand smoke. The legitimisation of “disgust” as a moral condition has also permeated the political discourse on gay marriage while playing a dangerous role during Bush’s last term in the regulation of American children’s literature. Smoking disgusts non-smokers. US legal philosopher and author Martha Nussbaum’s “Hiding from Humanity” (Princeton 2004) adds little in defence of smokers’ rights or diminished social image in our society, but her intricately argued philosophical insight into the politics of disgust, are readily consumable in our defence. After all, Nussbaum believes that inciting collective acts of revulsion is unhealthy in a free society.
“…I think that the moralized form of disgust is problematic. When people express disgust about a group whom they take to be a source of social decay, citing moral grounds, there is often something much uglier going on. …even when the moralized disgust is not a screen for something else, it is ultimately an unproductive social attitude. Its content is, “This harm should have occurred, and the imbalance should be righted.” Most philosophical definitions include the thought that the wrong should be punished or somehow made good. Disgust by contrast, expresses a wish to separate oneself from a source of pollution; its social reflex is to run away.”
“Discussing Disgust; on the folly of gross-out public policy.” An interview with Martha Nussbaum, by Julian Sanchez, Reason Magazine 2004
