We are used to accepting sheepishly the most implausible medical statistics, but when the RCP report into the impact of passive smoking states that more than 300,000 GP consultations and 9,500 hospital admissions result from children breathing second-hand smoke, one's credulity is strained to breaking point. How could anybody know this? And how could anybody be sure that passive smoking is responsible, among other things, for 100 per cent increases in the risks of meningitis and cot deaths and for a 35 per cent increase in middle-ear infections? Nobody could be sure of this, just as nobody could plausibly claim to know how much passive smoking by children costs the NHS in treatment (£23.3 million, according to the RCP).
And to pre-empt accusations that either ban would infringe the basic freedom of the individual, the medical establishment invokes the welfare of children as its justification. Although most car drivers don't have children as passengers, the RCP wants a ban on smoking in all vehicles because it would be easier to enforce. Even Martin Dockrell, the director of policy at the anti-smoking group ASH and one of the authors of the report, admitted yesterday that this would be an "injustice" to the drivers of cars without children in them, but added: "That injustice is completely outweighed by the current injustice of the harm that's done to kids."
There is still controversy about the effects of second-hand smoke on the health of non-smokers. Smokers who have inhaled first-hand smoke for decades without suffering any apparent damage to their own health (and such people do, believe it or not, exist) find it hard to accept that they are endangering others with their habit. One such is the artist David Hockney, who was yesterday quoted as saying: "I don't believe a word they say about passive smoking. I have smoked for 52 years and I'm still here working away very ambitiously." But even accepting that, in all probability, smoking in an enclosed space doesn't do anybody any good, it is hard to disagree with Forest, the group that lobbies on behalf of smokers' rights, when it says: "Smoking in outdoor areas poses little nor no threat to anyone's health." Professor John Britton, chairman of the RCP's Tobacco Advisory Group, implicitly accepts this when he says that the report "isn't just about protecting children from passive smoking, it's about taking smoke completely out of children's lives".
The justification for banning smoking in parks is not, therefore, that it has a deleterious effect on children's health, but that they are going to be corrupted by seeing adults puffing away. It is claimed, perhaps rightly, that children whose parents smoke are more likely to do so themselves later on – and the aim of the RCP is to arrange things so that no child ever again sees anyone with a cigarette in his mouth. Fortunately, even the RCP recognises the impossibility of enforcing a smoking ban on people in their own homes and therefore does not, for the moment, propose it. But when smoking has stopped everywhere else, the attention of the medical authorities will doubtless turn to the scandal of parents smoking at home and it will be redefined and made criminal as another form of child abuse.
Everybody now agrees that smoking is bad for you, the number of smokers has fallen dramatically in recent years, and a survey last year found that 78 per cent of people now do not allow smoking in their homes (and 47 per cent even forbid it in their gardens). The propaganda war against smoking has been immensely successful. The Government and the medical authorities are entitled to be feeling quite pleased with themselves. But they are not entitled to stamp on the liberty of the individual to indulge in a harmful habit if he so desires, and especially not to use children's health as an excuse for such persecution.
David Hockney has a point when he says that doctors have a "ghastly view of life; it's all quantative, not qualitative". "A little bit of what you fancy does you good," he goes on. "That's an old observation lost on petty, mean-spirited, dreary people who look only at figures, not at life."
