http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-29623851

Most of that's patently bollocks, but I'm all for banning smoking in council-owned public spaces like parks - it's the bloody smell of it!

I'm a non-smoker, but even I think this is a step too far. It's open space for Christ's sake, if someone doesn't like the smell they can always, you know, move 10 paces the other way!! Bloody nanny state nonsense.

I don't know if my nose is sensitive to it or what, but that really wouldn't make any difference in my case! It's especially annoying round the park when all you want to do is sit and read and/or have a snack in the fresh air.

I'd welcome a blanket ban on tobacco sales entirely, tbh.

Given the amount of taxation that would have to be found from somewhere else, I'm not entirely sure you would do so unreservedly. Internet estimates suggest taxation revenue from tobacco sales is about £10bn a year. Directly attributable NHS costs from smoking related illness is about £2bn a year.

This is the bare fact of the issue. We really should just ban smoking. It has no benefit and a provable cost to all of us as a society. But we don't and we won't, because every government knows they'd lose billions of pounds a year in net income. Plus the large tobacco companies have so many lovely non-exec director posts just waiting to be filled in a few year's time but that's a separate issue. Plus prohibition of a widely available addictive substance was such a success in the 1920's. If you think ciggy smuggling is a big thing now...

No, it's not going to happen in the real world. And in the real world, any ban on smoking in public spaces would be utterly unenforceable anyway and bringing in laws that are obviously unenforceable has only one consequence, it makes the people who campaigned for them look like fools.

While I broadly agree with your point, and the NHS figures are completely valid, it's a fairly single minded metric to be looking at smoking with though.
There are other costs to consider - smoking is the most common cause of fatal house fires. Half of accidental fire deaths were attributable to smoking materials.
Perhaps in the longer term, the shortfall might be made up in reductions in other areas.
80,000 people a year die from smoking related illnesses.
And if someone's dead, you can't tax them, after all.
So perhaps we should consider the wider affects too.
Do the NHS figures only apply to people who smoke, or people who don't smoke but have been affected by tobacco smoke for instance?

To give another point of view, I have asthma and a couple of years ago I went through a bad patch. If I was standing down wind, somebody smoking 200M away would trigger an asthma attack.

That meant I basically couldn't even go shopping in town!

It is better now, I need my inhaler once or twice a year. But around smokers I notice that it is harder to breathe.

I agree

We are trying to regulate people lives far to much

Most people who die (even smokers) are old when they do. They probably won't have paid tax for quite some time. You could see their lack of requiring care/pension payments as a financial benefit to the state. But there's a big question about exactly how far down the rabbit hole you go.


Well, I think we should limit ourselves to those where we can make some causal link to smoking. Detailed analysis could be done over a wide range of theoretical consequences and with enough time and effort, we could quantify each one to produce a 'total cost of ownership' to society of a smoker vs a non-smoker. Such a study would be both very time consuming and costly. And possibly subject to all sorts of political interference.

There are a set of medical conditions and life risks where we have scientifically validated data that shows smoking is worse than not. ANything else is speculation until proven, surely?

How about they close the smoking room in the House of Commons first?