Words, Cavan Gallagher 

Summer has come upon us again and, with it, the strange ambivalence we smokers feel for all those winter months spent sitting outside our favourite pubs, clubs and cafes, braving rain, icy winds and generally going toe-to-toe with pneumonia for the privilege of indulging our evil, filthy, orphan-punting habit. For it’s this time of year that our hard-earned fagging space comes under threat not only from all the non-smokers, who suddenly decide that they want to come outside and take up all the seats, but from establishment owners who choose to open all the windows or string some dodgy piece of cloth outside, somehow instantaneously rendering it an ‘inside’ area.

Once upon a time, we naively thought that when smoking was banned from inside all public buildings, the battle was over; non-smokers were given the building, smokers their token strip of turf, and everyone could stay happy in their own area. Unfortunately, it seems, some people just aren’t done with the fight yet.

The latest flashpoint is the Star City Casino in Sydney, which recently launched a furious set-to after announcing plans to move 130 of its 1500 gaming machines into its ‘open air gambling lounge’ (i.e. smoking area). This move has incurred the wrath of the anti-smoking group Action on Smoking and Health (A.K.A. ASH: See what they did there?), which immediately ran to the press with a list of protests ranging from the embarrassingly ill-considered to the quite honestly insane.

Top of the list is the grandly paranoid assumption that since the Star City is following the recent trend of NSW pubs and clubs moving some of their pokies into the Cancer Zone, it’s all obviously part of some grand conspiracy to give every gambling machine in NSW to the smokers. Now just dwell for a minute on the frankly laughable image of several thousand non-smokers standing around in the main building of the Star City with nothing to pump their money into, staring through fortified windows watching the Cancer-Jocks enjoy their machines and heaving great, oppressed sobs from their (obviously clear and healthy) lungs. Imagine NSW reborn as a horrific, dystopian state where no soul who loves to breathe will be allowed to make themselves bankrupt. By now, your brain’s probably hurting with the onslaught of overpowering stupidity.

But wait, there’s more! ASH, in stunning defiance of logic and the principles of semantic consistency, then go on to accuse the Star City owners of granting smokers machines in their areas so they can’t take a break from their gambling, therefore boosting the casino’s revenue.

OK, time to take a deep breath... If we put aside the stupefyingly self-evident fact that they are a business, are there to make money however they can on their own property and, therefore, have the perfect right to stick pokies in the urinals if they thought it would help them, we can sit back and wonder exactly how the aforementioned conspiracy to steal all the non-smokers’ machines fits into this little get-rich-quick scheme. Aren’t these anti-smoking organizations always boasting about how much richer non-smokers are than those of us who fritter away our hard-earned on the cancer-weed? Doesn’t that make them exactly the type of people casino owners try to fill their establishments with? What business boosts its revenue by shutting out its wealthiest clients? It seems we’re being led to believe that the casino has based their business model on a guy who decides to stop washing so he can get laid more.

Unfortunately, there’s more to ASH’s comments than the business sense of a lower-high-school Economics student; behind their fantastical musings lies the kind of arrogant, self-serving sentiments to which the anti-smoking lobbies have become increasingly prone in recent years. They go on to criticise the Star City of underhandedly enriching themselves by exploiting the smokers’ tragic addiction, establishing the wonderfully kooky implication that if you let people smoke and gamble at the same time it, by some freaky and arcane voodoo, not only makes the smoking more reprehensible but actually makes the money bilked off them twice as dirty.

                Now some vices do combine to make an even worse whole – cocaine and heroin for example, or rough sex and needlework. But have you ever heard a gambler say, “Crikey, I would never have gone bankrupt and lost my family so quick if I’d left the Winnies out of it”? Do you think that when the bailiffs come round to clean out someone’s house to pay back their gambling debt, they say, “Well at least you don’t smoke; then we’d have to break your kneecaps”? If people gamble, they gamble; if they want to throw all their cash at Lady Luck they’ll do it, everyone ends up equally broke and whether or not they pop out for a cig break now and again...               

Makes.

No.

Difference.

As a matter of fact, it’s just as easy to argue that since the non-smokers don’t have to leave the machines to chuff the tumour-twig, they actually gamble more  – so by giving the smokers pokies of their own, aren’t we simply redressing the balance? Just when you thought these anti-smoking types couldn’t get any more egotistical, they go and claim that even their gambling’s more wholesome.

It makes one wonder how desperate these anti-smoking groups are getting for material. Perhaps having realized that in this day and age, repeating to us the damaging effects smoking has on one’s health is about as enlightening as ‘warning’ a fourteen-year-old boy that if you rub your willy something magical happens, they’re now opting for the emotive angle; at every turn striving to portray smoking and the people who do it as pitifully weak and even intrinsically immoral.

Once upon a time our cigarette packets told us that smoking while pregnant harmed babies, a well-established scientific fact; now they scream ‘DON’T LET CHILDREN BREATHE YOUR SMOKE!!!’, as if second-hand smoke magically becomes fifteen times as lethal as soon as a pre-teen enters the room. Now let’s consider what we actually KNOW about the qualities of cigarette smoke; if it’s really nasty enough to consign a kid to the Darth Vader-esque breathing apparatus portrayed on these packets just from passive exposure, wouldn’t the stuff kill every actual smoker within a month of their first fag? Kind of makes me proud to have survived the cigs for thirteen years, actually. Stitch that, underdeveloped lungs!

                It’s not just on the cigarette packets, either.  Stare into the haggard, jaundiced features of the smokers in any modern TV ad paid for by these people, and you could trick yourself into thinking you were looking at someone on Meth (the current media narcotic du jour, which can famously turn a person from healthy to Nick Nolte in sixty seconds) Do smokers actually look like that? No. But anti-smoking groups have stopped caring about the way things actually are, ironically eschewing hard science and demonstrable reasoning for the exact kind of overly emotive myth-making the tobacco companies are still vilified for pulling during the Fifties.

Even though we WA smokers have not felt the brunt of this debate (though if ASH get their way, expect it to wend its way over here at some point), we still live in the culture of skewed priorities these groups encourage.

I’ll give you an example: a couple of months ago I was sitting outside a popular Mt. Lawley cafe, following my usual routine of having a coffee and a cigarette while I worked. A middle-aged couple takes the table next to me, and I start noticing the filthy looks the husband keeps giving me every time I take a drag. He then proceeds to move them several tables down the row, still shooting intermittent glares as if to say, “See? Look what you made us do!”

                Now anything was possible in that situation; perhaps one of them might have health-related problems that makes cigarette smoke uncomfortable for them to deal with. If that were so, I would have liked to have thought he would have had the maturity and class to mention it and I can say, with my hand on my heart, I would’ve gladly moved. Even if they simply didn’t like cigarette smoke, all he needed to do was ask politely and I would probably have obliged (depending on how he reacted when I reminded him that they were, after all, sitting in a smoking area).

Unfortunately, politeness was not on this chap’s agenda. I was smoking, which meant he simply didn’t like me. Never mind the fact that we were all sitting on the pavement on Beaufort St during rush hour, with hundreds of cars passing right under our noses spewing enough toxic gases to make a rhino sterile; my cigarette was the only threat in his nostrils. Frankly, that’s like taking a bath in raw sewage and getting the heebie-jeebies because there’s a soap-scum ring round the tub.

That man is exactly the type anti-smoking groups such as ASH populate themselves with, and strive to mould society into from their own image. They are people who live in ignorance of the fact that smokers know that their habit is unhealthy, but choose to do it anyway; or at least, won’t quit until they decide themselves. People who remain in gleeful denial that smokers have also bent over backwards to accommodate the non-smoking populace, no matter how marginalized and demonized they have become...and continue to do so to this day. In short, self-appointed moral legislators who have lost sight of what the issue really is and seem to be enjoying the fight too much to notice the victories. For a nation that places so much emphasis on sport and the ethics it entails, could we be ironically be giving national exposure to nothing more than a bunch of sore winners? 

Here are the facts: smoking is an extremely unhealthy habit. It kills. Anyone who doesn’t accept this is an idiot. But by the same token, anyone who doesn’t accept that smokers accept this, and are perfectly willing to make concessions so they can continue to enjoy the habit to which they have every right, is an even bigger idiot. When the ‘addicts’ are the most sensible and open-minded people talking, you know the debate has shoved its head between its legs and gone for a peek up the back of beyond. Unfortunately, we are not the ones society is choosing to listen to.

At the very least, it’s nice to know that WA doesn’t have a monopoly on browbeating insanity; smoking, it seems, brings out everyone’s inner idiot.