01 July 2007

Smoking Ban Begins Today

A survey by the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) found that:

- 6.2 million people (17% of all adults in England and Wales) who visit pubs regularly are likely to visit pubs more often ... of that group, 97% were non-smokers.
- 840,000 people who currently never go to a pub said they will after the smoking ban
- Only 3% said they would not visit pubs at all as a result of the ban.

The "people will drink in their back gardens and not come out to the pub" argument might hold true for a few warm weeks of summer, but I think that we'll find a year from now that more people will be going out to pubs, and it'll be a healthier environment.

One other thing from that CAMRA survey, smokers tend to drink lager. So, we might also see a boost to small real ale breweries around the country.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

On no account should a total smoking ban be allowed ! That is pure fascism, those who are trying to enforce it are pure fascists, and as such are dangerous and should be fought tooth and nail as any dangerous fascist should.

The solution to the smoking/non-smoking problem is to have separate areas. That works perfectly well and there is no valid reason to change it. There is a lot of medical propaganda about smoking that is unproven or false, notably on the subject of passive smoking.

It is pure humbug. The rights of smokers are just as important as those of non-smokers and let no-one say otherwise. Hitler singled out the Jews in the 1930’s just like people are singling out smokers now. It is very very dangerous and these people must not be allowed to get away with this, if only because it is an open door to other things ………alcohol, fatty foods, car exhaust fumes etc etc. Rail Travel is dangerous, air travel, cars on the road.

You could argue that anything is dangerous and that it should be banned. The argument just doesn’t make sense. I have not one iota of doubt in my mind that these would-be banners are wrong and they must be stopped.

The other thing, the most hypocritical thing of all, is that if cigarettes were really as dangerous as they would have us believe, then their sale would be banned, wouldn’t it ? Ah yes, but there is too much money involved. Cannabis, which is not dangerous at all, is banned ? Why? No-one knows, but it does containes less dangerous products than tobacco.

All this goes to prove that the government are a load of hyprocrites and should in no case be listened to. It’s time the public stood up to these people who really take them for a bunch of idiots.

scott redding said...

This is lifted word for word from elsewhere on the Internet. So, it's spam.

It's just plain wrong about the effect of the smoking ban in New York.

It's morally sick to compare a ban on smoking in public places, for the purposes of public health, with the identification of people by religion, by sexual orientation, by race, that led to the killing of 6 million people in WWII by the Nazis.

Finally, the idea that there is medical propaganda about smoking is false. There are more than 4000 chemicals in cigarette smoke, of which over 40 cause cancer. Nicotine is linked with dementia and depression. Nitrogen oxide is thought to cause emphysema. Hydrogen cyanide destroys hairs that protect your lungs. Benzene is linked to leukemia. Cadmium causes kidney, brian and liver damage. Lead damages kidneys and red blood cells.

Smoking causes more than 100 000 deaths per year in the UK, and smoking costs the NHS about £1.7 billion annually.

scott redding said...

Oh, and the "freedom to choose" site, which my anonymous poster's text was lifted from, their contact person is Rod Bullough, whose mailing address in Shipley, but is managing director of Blackpool-based tobacco vending machine supplier Duckworth. Unless there is another Rod Bullough who's pro-smoking ... long odds. There's some irony in Shipley being one of the strongest Green wards in the entire country, but there you go.