Sporadically speaking

Cigarette display ban considered BBC News

This strikes me as a phenomenally stupid idea on just about any level. Not just because it’s going to make buying your particular brand of choice difficult because you can’t bloody see them but also because it strikes me as painfully pointless gestures politics. How is hiding the bloody things going to discourage anybody who already smokes? Just because I can’t find the Calvados in the drinks isle of the supermarket won’t deter me from eventually finding it after all. Likewise, just because a certain wonderful wholesaler has an entire shelf of absinthe varieties doesn’t meant that I have to purchase any when I’ve just gone to pick up more Stoli, even if the La Fée logo is highly entertaining. Just because something is there doesn’t necessarily make anybody more likely to purchase it. Take the little impulse buy section as you approach the tills in certain supermarkets for instance, after all, I can safely say that I haven’t had the urge to pick up something from the rack of chocolate by the Marks & Spencer food tills for at least as long as I can remember. Though possibly this might have more to do with the fact that I’m not terribly keen on chocolate and that it tends to be Marks & Spencer brand chocolate up there which isn’t bad but also isn’t spectacular. That and the fact that I don’t regularly do my food shopping there probably negates that example somewhat. But nonetheless the point does stand that just because something is there it doesn’t mean that you have to have it: this is something quite basic that most people tend to learn when they’re very small.

I honestly don’t think that hiding cigarette sales will do anything other than inconvenience stores and smokers since I highly doubt that this mythical demographic of schoolchildren who have no control over the impulse to pick up something brightly coloured will be at all effected, seeing as they don’t exist. People who start smoking because their peers do and they’d like to try it, I can understand. But I really don’t even see how having tried something will necessarily mean that said individual will necessarily take it up as a long-term activity. I once took part in a canoe capsize drill which was interesting enough but I’ve never once set foot anywhere near a canoe since and don’t particularly have the urge to. Equally, my one experience of rock climbing taught me not to give my gloves away chivalrously to the pretty girl whose hands were cold and I’ve never done so since, because I’ve never been rock climbing again. Which also ties in to the point that the government seem to be making that suggests that just because something is billed as dangerous and contrary to the expected norm then people will automatically take it up simply to be different. This too doesn’t work in the slightest. My father went abseiling once, this was quite contrary to his being a middle-aged managerial type at the time but since he didn’t like it he’s never gone again. And he didn’t really want to go in the first place: it was some asinine corporate ‘team building’ scheme. All of which would lend credence to my argument that just because something is allegedly ‘different’ or ‘exciting’ or ‘edgy’ or whatever branding someone wants to stick on it it doesn’t mean that anybody else will necessarily care.

So having argued that restraint is something learnt in early childhood which would sink the argument that people are going to start smoking simply due to seeing a packet on a shelf and that just because the government chooses to mark something out as deviant it won’t necessarily mean that people will go out of their way to enjoy it, what other arguments are left? Because unless the authorities come up with something other than an argument founded upon the presumption that the consumer is stupid and never makes any active decision over what to purchase, I can’t really see how they’re going to help anything. If anything, all these anti-smoking measures seem to be suggested by disgustingly puritan organisations that seem to feel that theirs are the only decisions that matter and that as a result everybody who chooses to live a differing lifestyle is deluded. And really, didn’t we have this back in 1885 with Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act?
But flippancy aside, if the government really do want to discourage smoking as a general thing they might well do better by not treating smokers and presumed vulnerable non-smokers as idiots in the first place.


Of course having typed this up and going for a second cigarillo something seems to have eaten my lighter which may or may not be indicative of anything. Goodness knows it’s blasphemy to be using a lighter for this but I’m really quite convinced that there’s something living on or around my desk that’s eating things I occasionally need. It ate a biro the other day too.