If cigarettes were new, we'd ban them

Eighty-three per cent of smokers regret starting smoking, according to the HSE. If they had the choice again, they say, they would never take that first puff. This is a worldwide reality which is also the background to a debate ignited last week by the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak.

Speaking at the Tory Party Conference, he proposed that the legal age for buying cigarettes should be raised by one year every year. If turned into law, the effect would be that no one in the UK now aged 14 would ever be able to legally buy them. British MPs are going to decide the matter. But should we be thinking about something similar here?

We all know that smoking is a terrible habit. Again, according to the HSE, one in two smokers will die from a tobacco-related disease. Every week, 100 people die and over 1,000 people are hospitalised due to smoking-related illnesses. It causes and worsens any number of terrible illnesses. And – in a parallel to many other debates we are having today – do you remember when the tobacco companies used to dispute the evidence of countless experts that their product harmed people? Well, guess what, the experts were right, and not even the tobacco lobbyists dispute that now.

Instead, they talk about choice. The critics of Sunak’s proposal, as well as the tobacco companies themselves, will say this should be about the choice of free people to make their own decisions about their lives. They will say that it is no business of the state to be interfering in what people choose to do. That point is a great one – as a piece of rhetoric. Personally, I am all in favour of the state getting out of the way of people and letting them live their life. That’s also a piece of rhetoric. But let’s test the rhetoric against reality and evidence.

The state should allow people to make their own choices and not interfere? Ok, so you can drive anything you like, with no seat belts, no safety standards of any kind and you can start driving at whatever age you think is best for you. Want to live free? Ok, so no minimum building standards. We all know how well that worked in Ireland even when we had them. Eat where you like free person! And do so with no food safety standards or animal protection rules and in a world where pubs can stay open all night. Think you are good at healing people? Well, you can set up as a ‘doctor’ if you like, and if someone calls to you assuming you might have some kind of qualification, that’s just one of the hazards of living in a world where people can make their own choices.

You might call living in such a world the sweet smell of freedom, which would be very pleasant, so long as it is not invaded by the waft from a cigarette.

Despite the rhetoric, we of course know that the state bans and regulates things all the time. The real question is how to strike the right balance, a question that is at the heart of our sense of ourselves. Are we free actors? What role does the state have to play to make us behave ‘better’?

And what should the test be for whether the state should intervene or not? In Ireland today, there are a lot of people who want the state to fix an awful lot of things that they are unhappy about. So, for the state to get involved in any subject, I think there are two key questions to test the proposition: is there a need to do it, and can the state do it?

In the case of smoking, the need to stop people doing it is clear. If you doubt that, you have probably never been addicted to tobacco. If you are lucky enough to be in that category, you can rely on what those 83% of smokers are saying. When you are addicted to it, the notion that you make a ‘free choice’ to smoke is absurd.

It would be a laugh if it were not so – literally – deadly serious. Look at the figures: smoking is a Grim Reaper.

Is smoking different from other things that we would not ban outright? Fast and processed food, as well as alcohol, are not good for you, even if you eat and drink them ‘sensibly’.

They result in a lot of deaths too. But they are different in the most straightforward of ways: there is no safe limit to smoking. It is always – and in any amount – bad for you. The number of deaths and illnesses is disastrous and causes widespread human misery. That, surely, passes the test for action by the state.

And as regards the question as to whether the state can do what Sunak is proposing, the practical arguments about what’s possible, let us get through them quickly. Yes, of course, older adults could buy cigarettes for younger people, but the point is that anything that makes it harder for young people to access them is a good thing, most especially at that age when habits are formed. Banning their sale to young people will reduce the pool of older people who will do it. And this proposal means that those already hooked can still buy them. It is, rather, about choking off new customers.

Some will say that it would lead to an increased illegal market, but this is an argument we hear every time we increase the price of cigarettes. The best you can say for it is that its tiredness as an argument does not prevent its weary return to the debate starting line.

Some will say that the decline we already see in people taking up smoking shows that measures other than an outright ban should be continued. That might have some merit if it was not for the ingenuity of an industry that is continuing to find new ways to hook young people to inevitable future misery.

Pulling it all together, we can rely on both science and common sense to inform us on this. Rishi Sunak made a great point on the latter aspect last week: no parent, he said, not even a smoker, wants their child to grow up needing a cigarette.

There were other immediately positive aspects of the speech last week. Sunak’s announcement knocked about a billion pounds off the share price of the tobacco companies, a sign that the idea must have some merit.

Capitalism was first described as a moral idea, and its proponents argued that the pursuit of self-interest would lead to beneficial impacts for society, making the masses of people wealthier and freer. For much of the past 200 years, that argument has had much evidence to back it up.

But no industry discredits the concept more than tobacco. After years of trying to cover up that you know your product directly kills people, you still produce it, and as laws change you spend all your time trying to figure out new ways like vaping to get more people hooked to it. Gee.

If cigarettes were new, we would ban them. If there is a way to aid and speed up their demise, we should all take a deep breath, and go for it.