Some of us enjoy the risk of tobacco, so put that in your pipe and smoke it
‘No one could possibly fit in a job, family, friends and 30 cigarettes a day without exceptional levels of discipline’
Nearly everyone gets smokers wrong. Proper smokers, that is: those of us who persisted with the habit long after the Treasury sought our ruin through extortionate taxes, we were turfed out of pubs by government fiat, and left in no doubt by our loved ones that we are among the most dismal of God’s creatures.
The near-universal perception is that we’re weak of mind, left helpless by a pathetic addiction, desperate for some paternalistic intervention. Not so. Heavy smokers are among the most ruthless and Machiavellian people out there. No one could possibly fit in a job, family, friends and 30 cigarettes a day without exceptional levels of discipline, and wouldn’t bother unless they had calculated rationally that the ends (pleasure, rugged individualism) justify the means (ill health, cost).
This is the crucial context of the debate about vaping. If you don’t know what this is yet, you soon will. The Government has just reminded offices, bars and restaurants that it is perfectly legal to allow the use of e-cigarettes indoors. Taking a drag on a machine that vaporises a flavoured liquid infused with nicotine does not pose the same risks to others as passive smoking. It poses very few health risks at all, with Public Health England finding that it is roughly 5 per cent as harmful as tobacco.
Four traditional smokers a minute have switched to vaping since 2013, but attributing this solely to relative health risks is barmy. If e-cigarettes had been invented by some miserable NHS department and introduced as a grey medical device, their impact would’ve been marginal. It took an army of entrepreneurial capitalists to design, build and market a panoply of products sufficiently attractive to prise smokers away from their beloved fags.
Go to any vaping store and it’ll look like an old-fashioned sweet shop, with serried ranks of multicoloured bottles of liquid of every flavour you can imagine. The usual suspects, with their pitiful grasp of human nature, consider that this glamorises vice.
In truth, it shows that to change behaviour, behaving well has to be as fun as behaving badly, a fact which only the private sector, driven by the profit motive, appears to understand.
This has wider relevance. It has become fashionable to argue that humans are fundamentally irrational, and that we need philosopher kings with degrees in sociology to make us perfect, which mostly entails minimising the risks we are allowed to take. This is obviously unacceptable in a free society. It is also inconsistently applied: according to health researcher Christopher Conover, climbing Everest is 11 times riskier than smoking, when measured by minutes of lost life expectancy per minute of activity, yet mountaineers are treated like grown-ups.
Most importantly, however, it is destined to fail. Yes, heavy government treatment can put off those only half-committed to bad behaviour: drinkers, drug-users, over-eaters, and sex addicts among them. But a hard core will continue to take risks, calculated or otherwise, unless they’re offered a sufficiently appealing alternative.