Smoking ban is a sign of our increasingly authoritarian state

Your Letters July 03 2006 - http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/65152.html

I am happy to be another voice besides that of licensed-trade chap Roy Beers (Letters, July 1) in speaking up against the smoking ban that Dr David Carvel is so enamoured of.
And that is to wonder aloud what it really accomplished. To prove that you can force people to do things by the use of the law? And that is considered some sort of progress?
I am against the compulsory ban, Dr Carvel, because it is of a piece with the growing authoritarian state; our masters deciding what is best for us. That is not of the essence of a free society. That is of the essence of the captive society, where the people are held in perpetual adolescence by the state, because they can't be trusted to do the right thing. It is the thinking of tyrants down through the ages: the principle that the end justifies the means. Thank you, no thanks, Dr Carvel. I will take the free society over your regimented way of doing things any day. And that is why the smoking ban can "be a bad thing".
Stan Stanfield, Cluny Hill College, Forres.

ROY Beers, as a self-appointed and apparently unremunerated (aye, right) apologist for the licensed trade, did not declare until now his credentials as a food critic. After removing from my letter the "compliments", the cogent argument and the mention that many of my patients since the smoking ban are keen to give up, he suggests I write "purest mince" (100% Scottish organic no doubt).
Roy Beers has long been spoiling for a spar. Latex gloves off it is, then. He writes for a trade magazine and floods The Herald as part of his single issue, ill-health campaign, dressed up in a "freedom of choice" (smoking?) jacket. If his writings have such dominance in these magazines, too, I would suggest his figures of Irish pub closures and unemployment are, at best, unqualified and perpetuated by him, taking no account of other economic and social factors and with no mention of newly-opened premises or created jobs.
Being as long-winded as Mr Beers is, I suspect he is not a smoker himself. But being, by definition, a former passive smoker, his tetchiness and loss of humour is telling. Venturing a diagnosis from afar, he probably would benefit from nicotine replacement meantime. While I suspect we will never "patch" up our differences, he should pop down to his pharmacist who will happily furnish him with nicotine ones.
The promise of more "monotonous" letters from him, though, fills this particular reader with something less than excitement.
Dr David Carvel, Gillepsie Old Manse, Biggar.

David Carvel at least recognises that the smoking ban is a piece of surreptitious prohibition, despite its ostensible aim of protecting workers from passive smoking. Perhaps Dr Carvel joins with his eminent late colleague, Sir Richard Doll, and those who ran the very large Californian investigation that the evidence for passive smoking is so nugatory that it should not be the basis of public policy. But prohibition does not have much of a success rate, either.
I'd have thought that a mere four months into the ban was a bit early for Dr Carvel to be at all confident that his patients were going to stay off tobacco in the long term. The evidence from Ireland suggests that a lot of people will stay at home where it is likely they will drink more (it's cheaper and you pour your own measures) and even smoke more. Some public health measure.
But as well as being dumb, the campaign has had a nasty side. Since the anti-smoker lobby hijacked the campaign from the health professionals, there has been a sustained effort to demonise smokers. One recent TV advert showed a young man sitting with older colleagues, all smoking, at a tea-break. The smoke from the cigarettes coiled around the young man - subliminal message: "Your workmates are trying to poison you." Reminiscent of the medieval rumour that Jews poisoned the water supply and with the same intention of demonising (or making "socially unacceptable") a minority in the hope of blackmailing them into joining the majority.
Still, there is a silver lining. Labour's vote is collapsing and this has begun within the currency of the ban.
Gordon McNeill, 68 South Scotstoun, Queensferry.