I wrote a column recently which referred to the news that a team of inspectors would be monitoring the application of the proposed ban on smoking in Irish pubs, restaurants and other places of entertainment. I make no apologies for the fact that I abhor the kind of snooping mentality that drives a tactic like this and said as much: it smacks of the thought-police being called into action. Apart from which there is the issue of resources: spending money on having public servants, of whatever rank, traipsing around from bar to bar seems to me like a colossal waste, at a time when public services are generally in disarray.
But that doesn’t mean that the ban is a bad thing in itself. Nor does it mean that the right response is to oppose it. On the contrary: the best thing for smokers to do would be to embrace it, and use it as an opportunity to tackle the beast head-on. You can’t smoke in pubs anymore? Great, all the more reason to give cigarettes up entirely.
I smoked myself over a six or seven year period. I started at the age of 13, and I remember well what a thrill it was at that age, getting a hold of the first cigarette and lighting it. It was a kind of initiation into independence, that was about much more than the act of smoking itself: there was an almost sexual dimension to it, which involved breaking a taboo. But back then there was precious little information available about the damaging effects of smoking. The health warnings on packets and the unmasking of the deviousness and greed of the tobacco companies all came later.

What I’d have done, had I known what a pernicious substance tobacco was (and is), is impossible to say. But I ditched the habit a little bit later anyway, at the prodding of a girlfriend who didn’t like the foul smell of the weed, that hung on your breath and your hair and your clothes. We long since parted company, but when I think of what she did for me, by pushing me in that direction, I silently doff a cap to her. I owe her one.
I mention this only to make the point that I am not looking at this from the perspective of someone who hasn’t ever lived with the habit. I have. Which is why I feel qualified to say the following...

There are anti-social things – or what are considered anti-social things – that people do, which I fully understand. It may not be the smartest move a lot of the time, but I know why – at a certain stage of their lives at least – people feel the desire to get drunk. I know why they might want to get stoned. I see the attraction of mind-expanding drugs. But cigarettes, by comparison, make no sense whatsoever.
Do they open up avenues of experience that might otherwise remain closed to us? No, unless we’re talking about knowing what the inside of a hospital looks like, sooner rather than later. Do they provide us with a real rush of pleasure or of joy or of fulfillment? No. Do they loosen inhibitions, and make sex better, easier or more interesting? No.
Do they offer us a glimpse of heaven or a gateway to ecstacy? No, just the horribly prosaic reality of hardening our arteries and hastening our trajectory towards an early grave. Cigarettes are a fraudulent temptation, a sin without a payoff, a drug without a high – only inevitable and increasingly dreary and squalid lows.

They deliver nothing. Which is why people can smoke 10 or 20 or 30 a day: their apparent effect is minimal. But this is an illusion. In fact they are working away steadily, poisoning the system, taking cancerous hold, preparing to kill the mug who is ingesting the smoke, and maybe others who are within reach as well. We all know it at this stage: they cause heart attacks; they cause cancer; they cause bronchial illness and emphysema; they cause untold misery – and not just for the smokers themselves, but for their families and for people who are close to them.