Jump to full article: spiked (uk), 2009-06-30
Author: Rob Lyons spiked review of books
Intro: I'm sitting in the corner of a bar, talking to author Christopher Snowdon and doing something almost unheard of in Britain these days: enjoying a cigarette under cover. Admittedly, it is a pretty open-air kind of 'under cover' in a specially adapted part of the Boisdale restaurant and bar near London's Victoria station; still, the novelty value is not lost on me.
We are here because Snowdon is launching his book this evening, a history of the anti-smoking movement that has been three-and-a-half years in the making. . . .
Tobacco is also popular with soldiers. Soothing, yet stimulating, it is just the ticket for those faced with the possibility of brutal death and horrifying injury. Snowdon quotes the US general John Pershing, who was asked what was the key to winning the First World War. 'I answer tobacco as much as bullets', he said, before urgently cabling Washington: 'We must have thousands of tons of it without delay.' By one reckoning, 95 per cent of the military used tobacco in some form during the First World War. . . .
While Hill and Doll's conclusions have been confirmed time and again, it is the link between 'passive' smoking and ill-health that has driven the debate in recent years. Anti-tobacco campaigns largely failed to make much headway when they simply called for prohibition or for a smoke-free atmosphere. As long as smoking only involved potential harm to the smoker himself, the irritation felt by some non-smokers was never considered enough to justify intervention and the restriction of people's smoking habits.
Then, changing the focus from harm-to-smokers to the alleged dangers of second-hand smoke for everyone proved crucial in building momentum for a variety of smoking bans. Yet, as Snowdon writes, the evidence of second-hand harm has always been flimsy. . . .
Snowdon is once more in demand and dashes off to sign books. I light up again. Funny how pursuing what should be nothing more than a bad habit can seem like a single, raised finger to those who want to restrict our personal freedom and micromanage our lives.
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