Interesting thing over at Tim Worstall's place on the statistical evidence for the smoking ban.

i wonder if it is also statistically significant that Sir Richard Peto, probably the foremost epidemiological statistician and long time collaborator with the late Sir Richard Doll on the tobacco issue, says rather non-commitally that "if this ban helps people who want to stop to manage to do so then it could save a lot of lives and prevent a lot of premature deaths."

If, of course, they survive the pneumonia.

Let's face it, this is a grubby piece of nanny-state legislation used to demonise what is a grubby habit - and I write as a smoker who is at the same time not proud of my addiction but not in the "right place" to have the willpower to give up at the moment. And at the same time presents an interesting precedent about property rights and the state.

All sorts of figures were trotted out before the debate on the ban, such as that 80% of people would prefer going out or start going out to pubs and restaurants if they were smoke free. Why then, could the leisure industry not react to this fantastic market potential without legislation forcing them to do so? Well, any pub or especially pub chain would be taking a risk with their existing customers by unilaterally banning smoking. So, in a classic piece of rent-seeking and market manipulation they wanted government to tell them they had to so they would all be "disadvantaged" at the same time.

Yes, smokers had become too bolshy over the past couple of decades, exercising a "right" to smoke anywhere that they hadn't enjoyed previously - old fashioned pubs had "smoke rooms" long before any desire of the middle class to segregate smokers; I remember in upmarket restaurants and hotels and at formal dinners nobody would dare smoke at the table - that one smoked in the lounge with one's coffee and digestifs in a similar fashion to ladies being dismissed to the drawing room so the gentlemen could smoke after genteel dinner parties.

Of course, the sort of places the hoi-polloi want to go these days are too focussed on money making to have redundant spaces like lounges for after dinner mints and cigars or rooms specifically established for the working man to stop for a pint and a fag on the way home. Many a pub has had its internal walls ripped out to make more space for crammed in binge drinkers.

I daresay that the most effective way of making smokers face up to the grubbiness of their addiction would have been to allow a two tier system to develop in response to market demands, and have some pubs full of pristine, crystal clear air and others where you couldn't see the bar as you entered the establishment for the clouds of smoke. Eventually, even smokers, and especially their non-smoking friends, going out for the evening would abandon the filthier establishments and persuade their addicted friends that a better night would be had without the smell and choking fumes.

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