Norm asks two questions:
People on the wrong end of social and economic inequalities don’t just experience health disadvantages from smoking, but disadvantages across the board – in every area of health, in life expectancy, in the pattern of life chances in general. Shall we impose compulsory legal norms about diet, about exercise, about whatever else, on the grounds of wanting to protect the worse-off from the effects of inequality?
Sometimes we should and we do—if the inequality is gross enough, if evidence of the effectiveness of a policy is solid enough, if the consequences of not implementing it severe enough, and if the compulsion we impose is modest enough. In fact, if a health problem is sufficiently serious, we already do far worse: we break normal medical confidentiality and isolate individuals. In the UK, the poor are disproportionately affected by infectious disease, just as they are disproportionately affected by smoking. The link between cigarette addiction and premature death is stronger than that between smallpox infection and premature death. In both cases, we use the law to protect those around the victims as well as the victims themselves.
Inequality itself closes down – or impinges otherwise negatively on – the freedoms and the choices of those with fewest resources. (It does it already.) For this we should deprive them of the freedom to have a smoke in a pub, somewhere?
Yes.
Many people who smoke die horrible deaths. Far fewer people who give up smoking do. The legislation against smoking in public places has resulted in a massive fall in the number of smokers in this country and changed the public perception of smoking in general—much as changes in legislation changed the perception of drink-driving; when I write this I am not drawing any moral equivalence between these practices, though they both used to boost pub takings and kill poor people.
I have no doubt that if such a smoking ban had been qualified or partial it would have had a limited effect on the consumption of cigarettes by the general public, rather like the limited effect that “partially” giving up smoking has on a smoker’s habits. When the Institute of Cancer Research and its clinical partner the Royal Marsden hospital only enforced a ban on smoking within their buildings, rather than their entire sites, you could see patients (and their relatives and friends) lined up outside for a desperate gasp at the tobacco that helped to put them there. They were occasionally accompanied by some of the medical equipment that was helping to keep them here. This is the horrifying nature of the disease. Even (especially?) when the Grim Reaper is sitting in a visitor’s chair on the palliative care ward asking for the TV remote control so he can put Bargain Hunt on, some of its other occupants won’t stop stuffing death sticks into their own rotting mouths. Some—God help them—even ask others to do so for them because they can no longer do it themselves.
Unlike, say, injecting heroin, smoking cigarettes in itself kills. (Passive smoking kills too.) Half of all smokers eventually die of cancer or a smoking-related disease. Smoking tortures and destroys its victims in a variety of ugly ways. If they are lucky, they only suffer bronchitis or heart attacks or lose limbs; if they are unlucky, they die as uncontrollably growing blossoms of their own flesh foul their bodies. Lung cancers caused by smoking are among the commonest and deadliest forms of cancer in humans.
Where they have been enforced, public smoking bans have improved the health of smokers and those who have to work around them. They save lives. Like vaccination programmes, these effects are seen amongst the rich and the poor. Weighed against the appalling toll of smoking on humanity as a whole, even weighed against the inevitable suffering of a few thousand of those who would otherwise have not given up had it not been for public prohibition in England and elsewhere, talk of “depriving” smokers of a “freedom” is morally obtuse.
When it comes to protecting the disadvantaged from the effects of inequality, superficially “illiberal” evidence-based public health programmes are the anti-Marxism. Marxism seemed a good way to reduce inequality in theory—to those with a dangerously incomplete understanding of history, science, logic, and human nature. The lack of evidence to support its utopian revelations didn’t shake the confidence of many Marxists in their anti-human, pseudoscientific cult. Sadly, they didn’t stop at being wrong in print, but urged their prescriptions upon their fellows and continued to do so as the corpses piled up. In practice, Communism resulted in the murder and enslavement of more human beings than any other ideology in the history of mankind. A relatively small sub-pile of Communism’s dead were the victims of “biologists” who elevated political theory over scientific fact, to the point when thousands starved. (As cultists often do, they also persecuted those of their professional peers who continued to pursue open enquiry into nature.)
In contrast, real scientists and doctors predicted that even thoroughly tested public health programmes would result in the forced extinction of species, the inflicting of pain on innocent children (sometimes against their parents’ wishes), restrictions upon individuals’ freedom of movement and association, and the deliberate administration of substances that would almost certainly poison and/or kill a proportion of recipients. It was up to governments to consider these consequences and choose whether or not to accept them in pursuit of predicted improvements in general well-being. Despite these awful side effects, such programmes have—even nett of those that have failed or done actual harm—saved many millions of lives and freed millions more from pain, disability, and disfigurement.
Evidence-based public health policy is about counting the corpses before devising ways to reduce their numbers, rather than devising a supposedly practical political philosophy and then later trying to divert the blame for, or simply hide, the slaughter that results when people attempt to use it to change the World “for the better”. No form of state intervention in the lives of individuals has done more to reduce inequality than evidence-based public medicine, but, exactly unlike Communism, most of the time that hasn’t even been its purpose. I know which I prefer, in theory and in practice, for rich and poor.
Norm accuses Libby Brooks of a “narrowness of focus” because when she writes in support of the ban she points out that smoking damages the health of the poor more than that of the rich. Narrowness of focus, the judicious application of reductionism, is one of the great strengths of science. If more political theorists adopted a similar philosophical humility in the face of complex problems then they might, one day, construct a theory worthy of the name. Such narrowness often works in practice. Even now, when we should have long ago learned the bloody lessons of the 20th century, we have to listen to commentators complaining about a lack of a “vision” or an ideology on the part of some politician of whom they disapprove, as though that were a bad thing. The bodies of those sacrificed to big ideas are stacked high enough already.
In the past, coercive public health measures far more illiberal than banning smoking in public places have spared the poor suffering and death, even absent relative improvement in their material circumstances. Indeed, before the development of antibiotic treatment, the best hope of impoverished victims of tuberculosis was the forced imposition “of norms about diet, about exercise, about whatever else, on the grounds of wanting to protect the worse-off from the effects of inequality”—the rich could already afford their own sanatoria and knew the value of their regimens.
If preventing thousands of miserable deaths today means that some people are merely “deprived” of the “freedom[!] to have a smoke in a pub, somewhere”, then that’s just tough. British citizens are still free to kill themselves and their families slowly in private. I can think of worse things in this world than being made to go outside for a public smoke. I’ve seen too many of those things. There’s more than one good reason why the first patients you meet at medical school are dead.
Quite right. There is an awful lot of twaddle said and written in the name of “freedom” and too much of it by alleged liberals. Would they want returned to me the freedom to empty my chamber pot into the street which some small-minded pettifogging health and safety obsessed bureaucrat seized some years back d’yer think? It’s amusing how often Magna Carta is trotted out – that gave a privileged few certain rights wrt the King and huge rights wrt to great mass of the population. Similarly now the freedoms claimed are often freedoms for the few to make life a little worse for the many. Much of it comes from an overblown sense of self; for example do they really think that Big Brother is going to trawl through speed camera records just to find out what they get up to in their dull little lives? And don’t get me started on thin ends of enormous wedges or slippery slopes to nowhere….
Weighed against the appalling toll of smoking on humanity as a whole, even weighed against the inevitable suffering of a few thousand of those who would otherwise have not given up had it not been for public prohibition in England and elsewhere, talk of “depriving” smokers of a “freedom” is morally obtuse.
This post, along with the comment below, shows the usual pattern for paternalists. Yours is a utilitarian and not a liberal argument. There was here a freedom. But it was a freedom you didn’t approve of so you rejoice in its passing. But you can’t quite bring yourself to admit this so you put ‘freedom’ in inverted comments instead to indicate that the freedoms you disapprove of are somehow less authentic than the ones you do. This is also the reason why you conspicuously failed to answer Norm’s question, which was:
Shall we impose compulsory legal norms about diet, about exercise, about whatever else, on the grounds of wanting to protect the worse-off from the effects of inequality?
What say you? Thus far in your thinking I can see no principle by which this sort of thing might be excluded.
It’s neither. I made clear right from the start of my post that restrictions upon individuals’ fundamental freedoms are grave matters, that we have to restrict our view of public policy problems before we broaden it (exactly not utilitarian), that we have to weigh one predicted outcome against another in accordance with our confidence in such predictions, and that freedom of any kind is a fat lot of use to you if you are dead.
I subscribe to no ideology, because any all-embracing system of political thought, whether it’s Marxism or utilitarianism, is broken from the outset—though some, the ones that promise a utopia, claim to discern an inevitable pattern in human development, or call themselves “scientific” for example—are more broken than others.
What pretentious twaddle. Talking of restricting someone’s freedom to smoke in a pub as though it is a grave matter is ridiculous. It makes a joke of the justified reverence we have for genuine, precious, hard-won human rights. Describing its loss as a “deprivation” is like mourning the passing of the fundamental freedom to light one’s farts in company. It’s all the more absurd when it’s weighed against the undeniable gravity of the alternative.
Rubbish.
I disapprove of the abuse of alcohol more than I disapprove of smoking. (As I was reminded on Saturday evening in the centre of Brighton, it certainly impacts more negatively upon my everyday life.) The toll in human death and suffering from alcoholism might even be higher in aggregate, but, even if I personally thought prohibition was desirable, it doesn’t work and has been demonstrated not to work.
I disapprove of the abuse of several illegal drugs more than smoking, but if it can be demonstrated that licensing drugs like heroin lessens the drug’s toll on both rich and poor—and I worry that the poor would suffer more from legalization—then I might support it.
The reason I put “freedom” in quotation marks is because a freedom so narrowly defined isn’t really a freedom at all. I’d happily go to jail to protect my freedom of speech. I wouldn’t go to jail for my “freedom” to shout abuse in restaurants.
If I wanted to get personal—as you just did—then I might suggest that you are the one playing games with words. Smoking is a deadly addictive habit that pleases you, but displeases those around you. Because you like it it’s suddenly promoted to becoming a “freedom”. I don’t pontificate about my “freedom” to meet my friends and come home not smelling like an ashtray. I don’t pontificate about my sister’s “freedom” not to have an asthma attack in a bar.
What makes such pseudoliberal outrage even sillier is that you’re still “free” to smoke. No one is stopping you. Private citizens in Israel are free to bear arms, but they put security guards on the entrances of shopping centres and take your gun off you if you try to take it into McDonald’s. Illiberal bastards!
I answered it immediately: “Sometimes”. Then I listed some, but not all, the considerations we have to weigh when we make a decision in a given case.
Believing that one single principle will correctly guide such decisions is where you have conspicuously failed. Deciding public policy isn’t about banging some Platonic essences against one another to see which one endures; it’s about the boring, messy business of observing human behaviour, of empirical investigation, of statistics and trade-offs and compromises. Human rights are useful in this, not because they are self-evident or timeless or absolute, but because they are powerful higher-level heuristics that have proved their worth over time.
This morning on the Andrew Marr programme, Matthew Parris responded to a letter written to Gordon Brown by one of the most recent victims of knife crime some weeks before his death, a letter in which the boy listed several possible minor policy suggestions that might reduce teenage violence. Parris complained that the “real” problem was that no one was coming forward with a single “big idea”—he actually used the phrase twice in slightly different contexts—to tackle the problem. It was almost as though I’d scripted it when I wrote this post. The bovine stupidity of the political class in this country never ceases to amaze me, which is saying something because I’m a very cynical person indeed.
The real world is complicated and difficult. In the post above I give a couple of examples of hugely important and hard trade-offs between real freedoms and deadly diseases and I contrasted them with a somewhat easier trade-off between one pseudo-freedom and the condemning of thousands of human beings to suffering and death.
To apply the language of great emancipation struggles to your snorting burning tobacco in a pub isn’t just daft, it’s squalid.
No, Shuggy is right about this one,. The confusion arises because we keep talking about bars and pubs as if they were straightforwardly private places. But they are not, They are private places that are publicly licenced for certain activities. Smoking, though, does not require licence. It is a legal activity that should, therefore, be permitted on private premises without the law having anything to say on the matter. Your sister may want to sit ion a bar without fear of an asthma attack, but she has not right to do so, any more than I have a ‘right’ to sit in a bar that sells no alcohol, or a dance club that plays only Brahms, no matter how much I might prefer it if such places existed. It is plainly and flatly illiberal when the law restricts the freedom of private individuals on private property to engage in non-commercial legal activities just to protect those people from themselves. You would have thought Mills nailed this one 150 years ago. Apparently not.
Oh goody, here comes another bloggertarian, appealing to Legal Principle, History, and Grand Old Works of Political Philosophy while demonstrating ignorance of them all. Bring ’em on.
That’s news to everyone else. I can see someone is confused here, but it’s not me.
So what?
The law has something to about the matter now: it says you can’t smoke on licensed premises any more. That’s the way law in England and Wales works and has done for hundreds of years. Our elected representatives want to set a precedent? They set a precedent. You can invent any supposed fundamental principle you like if it makes you feel better; Parliament, and everyone else, will ignore you.
I never claimed she did. I made reference to her asthma precisely to contrast my not making such appeals to “rights” or “freedoms” with anti-banners’ repeated (and risible) resort to such rhetoric.
It might be plain to you. It isn’t to me. The only universal difference between a legal activity and an illegal activity is what the law says about it. The law has changed. You can still smoke legally everywhere else. Get over it.
You can’t buy electrical appliances without plugs attached any more, even though it would make them cheaper. You can’t drive a private car without wearing a seatbelt even though you might feel more comfortable doing so. You can’t even invite your sexual partner to nail your penis to a plank of wood in the privacy of your own bedroom any more. Every day, I contemplate the demise of these Great British Freedoms and weep softly to myself.
Would that be Charles Mills, the English historian, or maybe John Easton Mills, former mayor of Montreal, or perhaps Robert Mills, the American architect? Or could it be that “Mills” was a typo and you meant John Stuart Milne who wrote The Magna Carta at Pooh Corner?
As Clive James (I think) remarked “that’s the trouble with living in a free society; it means that people are free to say daft things about freedom” (I think I may have made some of that quote up, sorry – there should be a law).
PS pretty well every liberal democracy now prohibits smoking in bars or is about to. The New Zealanders have been doing it for four years and, I’m told, the mouth foamers have more or less shut up on this topic now. But there’s loads more alleged infringements of their liberty for them to waste their adrenalin on….
PooterGeek: “What makes such pseudoliberal outrage even sillier is that you’re still “free” to smoke. No one is stopping you.”
I am no longer free to drink a pint indoors whilst smoking a cigarette. Even if the landlord consents and all other customers consent. When I wish to smoke, I am compelled to go outdoors, even when the culture of the pub supports indoor smoking.
The smoking ban is an example of government bossyness, and government bossyness is not a good thing. Interestingly, you say: “The bovine stupidity of the political class in this country never ceases to amaze me”. And yes, the smoking ban fits that definition supremely.
Yes you are. You can do so in the comfort of your own home—or indeed the comfort of a friend’s home, if that friend can stand the smell. Can you see how the latter works?
You’re not free to stub your cigarette out on another pubgoer’s hand either. For every smoker like you who feels his evening out isn’t what it used to be there are three non-smokers whose evenings out are better. And you can still smoke elsewhere. You claim you’re inconvenienced; I claim some other people aren’t going to die.
That’s what a minority says about speed cameras that reduce the number of children killed on village roads and health and safety regulations that protect factory workers from losing limbs to machinery. You’ve got a compelling case there, charlieman: “It’s bad because, er, it’s bad.”
“That’s news to everyone else. I can see someone is confused here, but it’s not me.”
Actually, it was a mistake. I wrote ‘private’ for ‘public’. Mea culpa.
“They are private places that are publicly licenced for certain activities.” So what?”
So, if you want to sell ginger beer from your front room, you would need some form of permission, but that would not make your front room a public space. It would still be a private space. Do you see now? If you wanted to play dominoes there, or keep goldfish, or watch Big Brother the law would (or should) have nothing to say about it.
“The law has something to about the matter now: it says you can’t smoke on licensed premises any more.”
That’s right. I don’t dispute that it is the law, I am simply pointing out that it is an illiberal law. The law once forbade sex between consenting males in private bedrooms (and could do again). But it was illiberal and wrong, even if the law makers may well have felt they were protecting people from themselves, just like you.
“That’s the way law in England and Wales works and has done for hundreds of years. Our elected representatives want to set a precedent? They set a precedent.”
Of course, but that does not make the law right or the last word. Parliament has passed illiberal laws before and will again. We should try to prevent them if we value freedom.
“Every day, I contemplate the demise of these Great British Freedoms and weep softly to myself.”
This is very typical rhetoric of people with authoritarian or paternalistic leanings. If it is not a freedom you value for yourself personally, it must be absurd to value it. You don’t want to nail your penis to a plank? Then nobody should be allowed to! You don’t like to sleep with people of the same sex? It is patently absurd to want to? Then ban it, and snigger at the losers who think they are terribly hard done by just because they can’t enjoy the Great British Freedom of getting cuddles from people with the same genitals.
If people want to smoke cigarettes on in their own private property, it should be none of your, my or the law’s business. It is a major extension of government power to legislate which recreational, non-commercial, legal activities are permitted on private property so long as those activities do not unreasonably negatively affect those who are not electing to be on the private property (which is why is is reasonable to force people to turn their music down, but not off). I know you may find it absurd that people are allowed to do things that you don’t enjoy and which are bad for them, but it should be none of your business if they keep it to themselves. You should also know that pointing out that there are other illiberal laws in place is hardly an argument in favour of introducing more.
The Mills you want, by the way, is the one who pointed out that to restrict an adult’s freedom, simply to protect him from himself, was always illiberal. I recommend him to you.
[shielding eyes from the computer monitor] Oh, the stupid: it burns!
I’ll deal with the rest of the above later. This is just a placeholder.The law has plenty to say about what goes on in “private” spaces. If you wanted to play dominoes for high stakes, abuse the goldfish, or watch Big Brother without a TV licence you might find yourself being visited by people in uniform. Whether or not the law is wrong to take an interest in those activities is irrelevant to the fact that your generalization is already long broken.
No. You are claiming that the law is illiberal. I am pointing out (in passing—it isn’t my main argument) that there is just as strong a case—that is: a weak one—for saying that the default behaviour of the minority affected by that law interferes with the freedoms of a larger number of people.
No. In this case, you should try to prevent a law that, as I have pointed out, bears no resemblance to those opposed by great emancipation strugges, if you value your freedom more highly than others value theirs. Leave gay sex out of your campaign to smoke in pubs.
See above.
No it isn’t. See examples above.
I love it when people pompously recommend, as though it were any kind of argument, that someone they disagree with should read the work of a particular author—even when it’s clear that the person they are attempting to talk down to is more familiar with the work than they are.
If you greet every misspelling in a blog post as evidence of your opponents’ intellectual inferiority, your blogging life will be a complacent one. But you will excuse us if we don’t think it shows you in the light you think it does.
While you are pondering the post above and bestirring yourself to brush it effortlessly aside, here is a bit of Mill for your reading pleasure:
“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”
“to restrict an adult’s freedom, simply to protect him from himself, was always illiberal.”
To prevent someone from sharing their second hand smoke with bar staff is not simply to protect the smoker from himself, it’s to protect others from him too.
Before you start on the “if they don’t like it, they don’t have to work there”, that flies against decades of Health and Safety legislation, often brought in after it was found that negligent employers and ignorant employees can lead to dead people.
“To prevent someone from sharing their second hand smoke with bar staff is not simply to protect the smoker from himself, it’s to protect others from him too.”
“There are many ways to protect bar workers from second-hand smoke, short of banning smoking so that is a red herring.”
Well, it seems clear that a number of businesses have closed because of the smoking ban, so those workers don’t get to work there one way or the other, do they?. What is better, that they have the choice and the risk, or that they have the choice removed and the job with it? If you choose the second, you are opting for paternalism, saving people from themselves. Is it OK for orchestral musicians to risk hearing damage, I wonder? Shouldn’t orchestras be forced to play at a below-risk decibel levels or to wear protective gear to muffle sound? (A hot topic in orchestral circles, this.)
So, should we not impose a similar ban on the public consumption of alcohol?
There are bans on public consumption of alcohol in many places through Designated Public Place Orders, although in this case public means streets and parks rather than inside a business (then again, there’s probably some law stopping you drinking in your local Halfords, even when you’re not hurting anyone). I haven’t seen as many complaints about this. Perhaps the people it affects don’t have Internet access.
For every smoker like you who feels his evening out isn’t what it used to be there are three non-smokers whose evenings out are better.
There ought to be a law barring smug wedding photographers from weddings. For every unemployed genuinely good photographer, there are hundreds of non-photographers whose experiences of weddings are considerably improved, by not having to pose in a cliched fashion for hours on a day that ought to be spent celebrating and not gurning, or being leered at by the kind of bloke who spends most of his spare time perving on the internet.
Just saying, like. Although it might be hard to prove the health benefits of that one 🙂
Incidentally – how does having smokers hanging out in a house drinking and smoking together differ in terms of the greater public good compared to them doing the same in a pub covered with great big fuckoff signs saying “SMOKERS INSIDE: THIS PLACE WILL KILL YOU” run by smokers with someone on the door pointing out that smoking is bad and this place will make you smelly and ill? In terms of civil liberties, smokers are still free to do so if they choose, it’s just the person who used to make money pouring the beer and sorting out grub in such a place is now unemployed.
Why there couldn’t be a compromise such as there is with alcohol (i.e. a requirement for a smoking licence with councils only giving them to a restricted number of bars and clubs with sensible ventilation, no under 18’s, etc.) I don’t know. That way non-smoking is the default (as non-alcohol is the default for cafes), noone has to put up with smoking unless they decide to go to a smoking bar (if you in your fine-smelling linens or your asthma-suffering sister did so it would not be for want of an alternative) and as long as 35-40% of the adult population smoke, there will always be smokers happy to work the one or two licensed smoking joints per town and there will always be opportunities for non-smokers to work behind bars in environments less likely to kill them.
In addition, smokers don’t have to put up with the “it’s for your own good” busybodies who can happily smirk amongst themselves in their now soulless fart-smelling wannabe gastropubs that have resorted to churning out shite fake steak after shite fake steak in order to make ends meet.
Everyone’s a winner.
As I tried to explain to another bloggertarian earlier on in these comments, when I turn an anti’s feeble argument back on him—it’s always a “him”, isn’t it?—it’s to demonstrate that it’s only slightly less pathetic when deployed by the pro side; it’s not an invitation for you to shoot yourselves in the collective freedom-loving foot by trying to point out how feeble it is.
Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far, given that a lot of my business comes through word-of-mouth recommendations from clients who tell their friends that I’m much pleasanter to have around than some other wedding photographers they’ve encountered. I suppose the unpleasantly smug ones will go out of business eventually, so there’s probably no need for the state to intervene.
I certainly agree with you on that point. If my clients want some formal photos, I ask them to make up a short list of them in advance and get them to nominate a close family member or friend to gather the subjects together so that I don’t have to shout at strangers on what should be a day for celebration, rather than being bossed around. Once those are quickly out of the way, then I can get on with what I do best: discreetly snapping informal portraits.
Hey, perving on the Internet is the best I can hope for, what with my not having a girlfriend and everything. But at least I’m not on it at half-past two in the morning, swearing at strangers.
I’m not going to bother with your failed analogy or your failure to read my original post, but I did want to take advantage of the bit where you reduced me to tears with your devastating personal attack to get in another ad in for the wedding photography.
There was an anonymous fella over at that Harry’s Place who couldn’t engage with anything I wrote without going on about my shooting weddings. (It might have been the sex tourist who posts reviews of Developing World brothels. Are you the sex tourist?) Call me smug, but there’s something satisfying about witnessing the little hissy fits I inspire in the logically challenged.
So, should we not impose a similar ban on the public consumption of alcohol?
There are zones in many towns where drinking in the street is banned.
The one thing I’d say about the smoking ban is that I live next to a pub and now that the punters have to smoke outside the air conditioning doesn’t catch it any more, so it blows in through my windows. Unintended consequences and all that.
Private citizens in Israel are free to bear arms, but they put security guards on the entrances of shopping centres and take your gun off you if you try to take it into McDonald’s.
Presumably this is the policy and the business of McDonald’s, and not one of the government? I would prefer to see the same concept be applied in the UK as regards smoking.
I’m wondering what you plan to do next, to extirpate the scourge of tobacco from the land? Because obviously the ban on smoking in pubs has only been partially successful and there are still plenty of smokers out there who need to be corrected. So where do you go from here, PG?
I was thinking perhaps Government Health Agents could observe every household in the land using Google’s roving, net-curtain-penetrating cameras. When they detected a secret smoker, jackbooted stormtroopers would be dispatched to the address in question, snatch the smoke out of the perpetrator’s mouth, and beat him or her unconscious with enormous cigarette-shaped batons, then strip the smoker naked and slap nicotine patches on—everywhere.
You might think this would be unpopular, but I’m not the only one talking along these lines: since the ban on overt cigarette advertising in Formula One by cigarette companies, such policies have gained backing from a figure high up within the sport’s administration.
good – we’re in agreement.
Then we go after the fatties and soon the thought criminals
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