Looking back to before the smoking ban
Fifteen years ago today, the nation packed away their cigarettes and lighters in public places as Scotland’s smoking ban came in.
The new laws, brought in on March 26 2006 when around a quarter of Scottish adults smoked, was brought in to protect people from second-hand smoke in enclosed places.
It came at a time when an estimated 865 people who had never smoked in their life died each year in Scotland from diseases linked to the habits of others.
As the law arrived, many feared that a night in the pub would never be the same again with the natural marriage of drink and a cigarette annulled.
Norry Wilson, 55, a writer and researcher of Glasgow, who has smoked regularly since the age of 12, remembered the run up to the ban.
He said: “The smokers amongst us thought it would never work, that it was ridiculous. And then there were the smoking anarchists who thought they would just keep smoking as ‘they couldn’t arrest us all’.
"I remember in the weeks that followed the ban, you’d be in the pub and you would go to light up, because it was just such an automatic thing to do.
"And one of the first things you noticed after the ban came in was how stinking pubs and clubs actually were. You could smell the toilets, the sticky carpets, people’s body odour. The smell of the stale smoke just covered so much.”
In the year following the ban, the number of those going into hospital with conditions heightened by smoking dropped. There was a 17 per cent reduction in heart attacks and an 18 per cent fall in childhood asthma cases.
Saliva tests of the population today show that 80% of nonsmoking
adults in Scotland now show no sign of breathing second-hand smoke compared to about 16% before the smoke-free laws.
Scotland followed Ireland on a smoking ban and brought in the legislation around a year before England.
Pubs were at the forefront of the campaign to keep people’s choice to smoke. A pub in Glasgow, the Maltman on Renfield Street, had long trialled a smokers bar alongside two smoke-free spaces.
Paul Waterson, of the Scottish
Licensed Trade Association, said: "We were told that, after the ban, there would be an influx of new customers. We said at the time that was nonsense, and it was true.
"At that time, 80 per cent of people who frequented a pub three to five times a week smoked. There was a massive impact on trade.”
Ruth Mackenzie, co-owner of the Edinburgh Pipe Shop on Leith Walk with her husband Stephen, took over the family business from her father Allan Myerthall in 2017.
She recalls her father being “frantic” with worry as the ban loomed with Mr Myerthall part of a lobby to the Scottish Government to secure concessions for the specialist tobacconist, where customers could light up a cigar or try a new tobacco while in the shop.
Ms Mackenzie said: “Cigar customers would come in, spark up and talk about the experience with other customers. It was really, really sad to lose that.”