Smokers ‘turned into lepers’ by health campaigns

Anti-smoking campaigns and laws have turned smokers into a despised underclass, a study by a Department of Health adviser warned yesterday.

It said smokers have come to be seen as disgusting and dirty and are increasingly becoming regarded as outcasts.

The vilification is also stoking up prejudice against the poor because those who are already on low incomes or at a disadvantage are most likely to be smokers, the report by Professor Hilary Graham found.

Smokers are like ‘migrant and indigenous groups’ in past centuries who were seen as contaminating the rest of society and threatening the way of life of normal, healthy peo- ple, Professor Graham, of York University, added. Her report calls for anti- smoking campaigns to be redrawn so they try to help the poor improve their lives.

The study, published by Cambridge University Press, suggests the tightening of laws controlling smoking, mean smokers are held in contempt by the non-smoking majority.

Health campaigns have helped to ‘signal the social unacceptability of smoking and, by extension, of smokers’, said Professor Graham, an adviser on inequality to the Health Department. ‘Non-smokers describe smoking as a disgusting habit and smokers as outcasts and lepers marked by smell and appearance,’ the study found.

Government anti- smoking policies, the report said, can generate hostility against those seen as a threat.

‘The history of public health is scarred by policies which, pursued in the name of health protection and promotion, have served to intensify public vilification and state-sanctioned discrimination against already disadvantaged groups.

‘Across the 19th and 20th centuries, poorer communities, including migrant and indigenous groups, were cast as the contaminating other whose habitual behaviours were seen to threaten ways of life that were in contrast presented as normal and desirable.’

Professor Graham said anti-smoking campaigns should be aimed at helping improve the lives of the poor and this was ‘essential if the dominant approach to tobacco control is not to be associated with the increasing stigmatisation of poor smokers’.

She praised the success of anti- smoking policies which mean around one in five Britons is now a smoker, against four out of five in the 1950s. But the report said: ‘Not to raise questions about the place of social class in the debate about smoking and stigma runs other and potentially greater risks.’