Every year in the world some eight million people die from tobacco-related illness, with 75,000 coming from Britain
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The “right” to smoke is a fake freedom, a cynical fiction punted by the most murderous industry of modern times. No one who surveys the damage inflicted on humanity by smoking since it was first linked with lung cancer by British scientists in the early 1950s can come to any other conclusion.
Addiction to nicotine does not admit choice, except in the act of freeing oneself from it, a testing and often unsuccessful process. Those who mobilise liberty of the individual as an argument for allowing fellow citizens to poison themselves to death by inhalation of tobacco — while poisoning others around them — may as well deploy that argument in favour of heroin. Governments ban all kinds of lethal things. In Britain guns are
