I opened up MN today to find a picture of an innocent little girl next to Cancer Research UK's spiel on plain packaging and child smoking. It says "Help us protect children from starting by supporting us..."
I am not and have never been a smoker, nor are most of the people close to me. The declining rates of smoking in the past few decades have certainly been good for individual and public health. So I'm not coming from the perspective of a disgruntled victim of the new persecution, or a Big Tobacco shill trying to contest whether it's that bad for you after all.
I signed up to the rival "Hands off our Packs" anti-plain packaging campaign when two people approache me in the street with their petition. I find the continuous anti-choice assaults on tobacco to be an injustice to the companies and people who choose to use it.
Nearly all the 11-15 year olds I knew who smoked when I was in that age group started by sneaking a cigarette or two off friends, their mum or someone else or by buying "loosies" which some inner city off licenses continue to sell to this day [though they have been banned for 20 years]. People only got near a pack when they'd moved from experimental to regular nicotine fixes. There was always a circle around the back of school where 4 or 5 of the older kids- probably 15, can't have been 16 as we had a different uniform for leavers' year in my school- pulled out cigs from packs that never got seen and distributed them to a whole posse of younger ones, who shared one between three or four of them. I was never tempted to join in and seeing a shiny gold pack- without gruesome warning pictures- was not going to make me.
They may well have figures suggesting that plain packaging will lower the number of smokers, which I am not questioning the validity of. It does not justify bringing in yet more legislative compulsion though. This government had said "no more nanny state." It promised to restore liberties. It attacked Labour's authoritarian record. The most insidious thing at all is that it is being pushed on a "safeguarding" platform. The signs outside primary school gates telling you to "protect" your children from secondhand smoke, the pack warnings using the same "protect" language and an image of smoke blowing toward a baby's face, it's all emotional blackmail against parents, especially offensive to those who are careful not to light up around their kids.
Child protection is too often used as a trump card to defeat principled objection to government policies that deny or circumscribe liberty of adults or youth. Besides which smokers have suffered enough already. Tax rises, publicans being ordered to stop them by central government, guilt trip tactics, advertising bans, now the display ban (after the legal challenge was tossed out)- I say LEAVE THOSE SMOKERS ALONE! AIBU to think the government and the medical establishment ought to back off quickly?