I think John Reid was basically very irresponsible to use the words pleasure and smoking in the same sentence, it's addiction to nicotine that makes ppl keep on smoking, not pleasure, and in my opinion calling such a nasty deadly drug addiction a pleasure is so trivialising the whole issue, it makes it out to be a relatively harmless choice when most smokers want to quit but have to struggle to do so. Would he say the same about heroin? I doubt he would dare trivialise that but it's the same really, in fact cigarettes are actually worse as they affect others around the smoker, we are all made to take in the poisons into our bodies involuntarily. No way can inhaling smoke be a pleasure, it's just vile! I think he should be sacked for trivialising a serious drug addiction, regardless of whether it is mostly the working classes who smoke or not.
As for me I have a severe chemically sensitivity to cigarette smoke and because it is allowed outside everywhere even in the local kiddies playground in the park where some parents do smoke (they have no shame some people). I can barely cope outside, especially in the shopping street when so many ppl are smoking there, I always come home coughing and wheezing and suffering a headache and sore throat, this is just from the level of second-hand smoke outdoors. This has come about most likely because I had to endure a childhood of being around smoke from my mother and she is still in denial about the level of damage she has done to me. Smoking around kids is quite simply child abuse, I am just one example of living proof of this. There are others, here is someone I heard of recently, even worse affected than I have been: www.notperfume.com
My sensitivity to smoke got markedly worse in my third pregnancy so I think my youngest child might be at risk of suffering from the same condition even though my mother is of course not allowed to smoke around her grandchildren, and we don't see much of her.
When we went on holiday to Blackpool, a very smoky town, I was ill with a sore throat and breathing problems all week and my youngest was very sniffly, more so than she has ever been with an ordinary cold so I am convinced the smoky air affected her too. We did not have colds, I can tell the difference between a cold and a smoke sensitivity reaction, the effect of second-hand smoke is far more acute but shorter lived (just a couple of hours sometimes)!