A plan in Dundee to pay smokers to quit is a long-term recipe for disaster
Jump to full article: Times Of London (uk), 2008-06-29
Author: Gillian Bowditch
Intro: As parenting techniques go, however, bribery is the last resort of the truly desperate and not something about which to boast at the toddler-group coffee morning. Long term it is a disaster, reinforcing bad behaviour and selfishness. It assumes a baseness on the part of the recipients and a cynicism on the part of the bribers.
The news that it is to become official policy in Dundee, where the nicotine-stained palms of smokers are to be greased by the health board in return for giving up the wicked weed, comes as something of a surprise, then. NHS Tayside, in a joint venture with the Scottish government, is planning to pay up to half a million pounds of taxpayers' money to Dundonians who quit smoking. . . .
“The taking of a bribe or gratuity should be punished with as severe penalties as the defrauding of the state,” wrote William Penn, the Quaker and founder of Pennsylvania. But what if it is the state that is doing the bribing?
We have seen what happens in other countries when the state uses favours to further its own ends. It may seem a leap from paying a few wheezy souls in Dundee to give up smoking to the corruption of large swathes of Africa or South America, but there is a principle at stake here.
If Scotland is to become a country which bribes people into behaving in ways deemed acceptable by the government, we should at least have a debate about it. We all know money talks. What it has to say is not always edifying.
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