The Royal Society for Public Health has released a reportdemanding that smoking be banned from anywhere near schools, restaurants and bars – and yes, that means pub gardens, too.
It doesn’t stop there. The RSPH has also suggested that anyone selling tobacco should be licensed to do so (no more cigarettes under the counter at the kebab shop) and that anywhere selling tobacco or cigarettes should also sell e-cigarettes (or ‘non-tobacco nicotine containing products’ as they so snappily put it). They’ve even published a call to action that e-cigarettes stop being called e-cigarettes.
August in Britain may seem like a strange time to try and dissuade people from smoking in a sun-drenched garden, while playing beer pong and drinking Pimms. But, the data behind the report is fairly hard to ignore. Smoking kills an estimated 100,000 people each year, with over 64,500 smoking-related deaths this year alone. That means smoking kills more people per year than the next five largest causes of preventable death combined.
The report, which is titled Stopping smoking by using other sources of nicotine encourages the use of non-tobacco nicotine containing products (mainly e-cigarettes) to help smokers ween themselves off fags. As the report puts it, ‘Given that the evidence to date so far suggests that non-tobacco nicotine containing products are safer than cigarettes, we should ensure that we utilise these products to their full potential for smokers.’
The fact is that many smokers – including those who have whittled their summer away sucking down fags in beer gardens, between courses or while waiting for the school bus – want to give up. Smoking is expensive, addictive and, ultimately, lethal. The harder you make it to smoke, so the logic goes, the more likely people are to stop.
Smoking inside public buildings has been banned in the UK since 2007. That same year, the pro-smoking campaigner David Hockney wrote in the Guardian that ‘The ban won't affect me much. I live very privately. I’m not very social – I’m too deaf, and in the world I have created I will smoke.’
Whether the same coud be said if the RSPH successfully introduces a ‘smoking exclusion zone’ around schools pubs and restaurants remains to be seen.
Like this? Then you may be interested in:
Social Smoking Is On The Rise In Young Women And We’re All In Denial About It
Here’s What A Twentysomething’s Drinking Habit Really Looks Like
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.