Regent's Park &
Kensington North
| |
|
Karen Buck MP Regent's Park & Kensington North |
|
For the Nation's HealthFebruary 2006 My own experience of smoking began and ended at age 18, when I went through a phase of hoping that a cigarette would act as a sort of fast track to sophistication. It went together with drinking Compare (goodbye, halves of cider) and the novels of Francoise Sagan I quickly decided that a) the sophistication strategy was doomed before it began and b) cigarettes were relatively expensive and therefore crowded out the Compare, budget wise. The relief at not having an addiction to break remains with me to this day. I have been around too many people addicted to various substances to feel anything other than a sympathetic awareness of just how hard it can be to shake free, and how devastating the consequences can be of not doing so. So I approached the (otherwise very welcome, and rare) free vote in Parliament on the banning of smoking in public places with slightly mixed feelings. I have a healthy libertarian streak which believes adults should be treated like adults and allowed to make their own choices. I am also inclined to pragmatism, believing that fundamental changes in society need to be secured by consent, negotiation and compromise where necessary. However, running alongside these is an even stronger sense that the health consequences of smoking are now so well understood and so shocking- around 100,000 people a year die from it- and the individual so small when set against the scale of an industry which sells in excess of 70 billion cigarettes a year, that we should not leave the odds so stacked. After all, whilst there has been a significant downwards trend in the number of British adults smoking, compared with a few decades ago, almost one in every three 15 and 16 year old girls are still smoking. They, and generations before and after them, are destined to wreak terrible damage to their health in adulthood, as a result of decisions they took whilst still schoolchildren, whilst the world's major tobacco companies record profits of close to £3 billion a year. So it seemed to me that even though a case could be made for a partial ban on smoking in public places, with some exemptions, possibly as a staging point on the way to a complete ban a little later, this would not be enough. This is especially the case given that evidence suggests that a total ban could contribute to as many as 600,000 people giving up smoking altogether, and that is a prize worth having. Certainty finally replaced equivocation on the issue when I saw evidence presented by the British Medical Journal which indicated that a partial ban would add to the already yawning health gap between rich and poor. I am prepared to see the lighter side of most things, but I suffer from a total sense of humour failure faced with the reality that children born into lower income families will get sick more often and die younger than their better off neighbours. So if we can make further progress, faster, in response to that, so much the better, and on Tuesday I voted to achieve just that. |
|
| Disclaimer | Copyright | Designed and run by Bassam Mahfouz on behalf of Karen Buck MP. Paid for by RPKN CLP. |
