The Prime Minister has shown us his limited originality by adopting Jacinda Ardern’s policy of phasing out smoking. The arguments for this policy are poor. The argument is, in short, that smoking causes health problems, and that it costs the NHS and hence the Government and hence the taxpayer a lot of money. There is some truth to the first part: but the second part is nonsense. The taxes on tobacco are colossal: and it is quite possible that the expectant lives of the Methuselahs untroubled by sudden death in their 50s, 60s and 70s, and who survive into their 90s and 100s, will cost the NHS much more.
But the subject of tobacco cannot be understood unless we relate it to coffee, to alcohol, to technology and to politics. And my particular point is about coffee, since I would like to predict that at some point in the future our rulers will announce that we should no longer drink coffee. It will be banned, or phased out. Everyone will pretend they did not drink it. Netflix will show nostalgic and accusatory programmes in which almost everyone in the past is depicted as chain-drinking coffee. In some countries coffee cups in old films will be blurred out by the censor. Sterling Hayden told Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar that a man only needs “a cup of coffee and a smoke”. Modern film critics will wonder how such a line was passed by the censor.
To make sense of this we should start the story with the oldest of all drinks. Alcohol causes problems. But almost everyone in the Middle Ages was almost permanently drunk. The concept of an ‘alcoholic’ did not exist until the 19th century: until then, everyone was at most a ‘drunkard’ and more likely just normal – gently sedated. Peasants in the fields swayed gently to the rhythms of nature as they drank endless pints of dilute cider and beer. Water was dangerous to drink, and there was nothing else.
With empire came the other drinks – tea, coffee, chocolate and tobacco (in England we ‘drank’ tobacco before we ‘smoked’ it: Turks still ‘drink’ it) – and of course the sugar which sweetened whichever of these drinks were made with boiled water. These drinks were not sedative but stimulating. Or, specifically, the stimulation was of a novel sort. Alcohol, as the Porter told Macbeth, provokes nose-painting, sleep and urine; and lechery “it provokes and unprovokes”, since “it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance”. No one has ever really objected to alcohol, except on the strictest religious or puritanical grounds. An Ottoman Sultan who wanted to close all the coffee shops couldn’t have cared less about the wine shops. Wine went with women and song. But coffee went with sedition. James I was hostile to tobacco, famously writing a book about it; and after him his grandson Charles II attempted in 1675 to close the coffee shops on the grounds that they were places where men gathered – to discuss politics.
There was almost no politics in the Middle Ages. Newspapers were mere sheets in the 17th century. They proliferated in the 18th, despite being controversial, and by the 19th were the bedrock of the entirety of industrial and imperial society. Coffee shops were distrusted at first because newspapers were found in them: this was in the days before gentlemen read their own copy of a newspaper at breakfast. So many miniature Addisons and Boswells clustered round in wig and stocking to listen to someone read out what was in the newspaper, and then began to discuss politics in a highly caffeinated and nicotinic version of a Platonic symposium. Coffee – this wakeful, stimulating drink – encouraged political talk like no other drink. Tobacco added a certain convivial or conspiratorial element. I remember Orlando Figes in lectures on the Russian Revolution explaining that every meeting of the Bolsheviks was conducted in an impenetrable fog of smoke. Tobacco, coffee and politics went together.
Incidentally, they also went together with technology. Coffee played a part in the story of technology because, along with tea, it overcome lethargy. It did not provoke sleep, as the demon drink did, but provoked wakefulness, and also accuracy. We could work for longer, with less waste and at less risk. Adam Smith spoke about pins when he explained the division of labour. Chaplin could not have tightened his bolts in Modern Times without coffee. The 19th Century was a century of steam engines and looms and shuttles: and all these new technical devices, ‘machines’, with whizzing pistons and rotating parts, great of flame and emphatic of sound, required steadiness, accuracy and wakefulness. The industrial revolution was fuelled on coffee, also on tea and tobacco, certainly not alcohol. A medieval peasant would not have lasted 10 minutes in Middlesbrough or Manchester in the 1850s before losing a limb to a machine. In a factory the peasant would have thought he had entered the hell of Bosch.
But we live in a changed world. For some time we have lived in a second industrial age, in which our machines are made by other machines. We humans no longer need to be exact. Our characteristic gesture is the swipe, for God’s sake. And so we see the beginning of a tidal wave of revolt – aided and abetted by the swiping puritans – against the stimulants of the industrial and imperial era. Tobacco, first smoked aggressively, then passively, is now being outlawed aggressively. Admittedly, no one is likely to ban tea. (James Bond disliked tea, called it mud, and blamed it for the decline of the empire. This is one reason, perhaps, why modern decolonisers might continue to drink it. Another reason is that any leaf can be placed in boiling water and called tea.) But coffee will soon be cancelled.
Out of nostalgia and a late blossoming of café culture, we still, for the moment, drink it in large quantities. But it is strictly unnecessary for accurate industrial or engineering work. It is no longer even necessary for all those students writing essays over a Starbucks latte since AI has uncomplainingly taken over the work. And it is becoming bothersome to the elites who rule us. They cannot quite convict espressos of causing the sorts of health problems associated with cigarettes. There is no such thing as passive coffee drinking. And no one yet dislikes the smell of coffee in a train. But the old tradition of drinking coffee and reading the newspaper – even on a computer, tablet, or phone – is worrying to the elites. Coffee is still encouraging us to be wakeful, thoughtful, critical, sceptical, about the activities of our rulers. And they do not like it. They would rather have us pacified with marijuana, or psychedelics, or even good old Pharaonic beer. They don’t mind us swaying to the rhythms of nature, or the beats of Spotify, or the algorithms of Google: but they don’t want us thinking critically about anything. God forbid. Stay home, save lives, by Toutatis. Turn on, tune in, drop out: but don’t think.
One day soon thinking will be outlawed. They already have started to call it ‘conspiracy theorising’. At some point in the future Descartes’ cogito ergo sum will be retranslated “I think about conspiracies, therefore I exist” (Cogito de coniurationibus, ergo sum?), and will be refuted in essays written by AI bots who will employ the Guardian/BBC/Google knock-down argument that anyone who swipes far Right in such an atavistically lucid way is to be condemned and then cancelled as off-message, out-of-date and over-the-hill.
The hostility to tobacco is reprehensible, for it is a hostility to conviviality and also wakeful meditation. (Chesterton said that smoking made every man a philosopher for a moment, since it took him out of the cares of time.) Montezuma liked a pipe after dinner. Las Casas noted that other Aztecs liked smoking cigars. It is hard to think of Cobbett without a long clay pipe, or Churchill without a cigar: almost everyone chuffed away between Walter Raleigh and John Lennon. But the hostility to coffee – which I predict will come – may be even worse when it arrives. For it will be hostility to the extremely stimulating sort of wakefulness on which the civilisation of the last four centuries has been entirely built. They are breaking our conviviality; they are breaking our wakeful meditation: and next they’ll break our concentration.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
Stop Press: Christopher Snowdon thinks Britain is now on a glide path to an alcohol ban.
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“First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.”
Martin Niemoeller.
And “they” are socialists. The Labour Party knew exactly what it was doing when it created the NHS. From that socialists are slowly controlling every aspect of our life. Socialism is the best way to power as the Conservatives discovered. But all parties have now reached to point of socialism’s failure – the money has run out.
Maybe there is an element of tongue in cheek in this article. Maybe. Sadly, I am more inclined to the view that Dr Alexander is spot on with his assessment.
We can’t have the plebs thinking, or even reminiscing about the good old days over a cup of coffee now can we?
When the smoking ban was announced by Fishy I did ask the question here on DS, what next? And let’s not forget banning coffee can always be linked to the slave trade, plantations and all that colonial stuff. Yes, it fits the bill nicely.
Coffee harms the Planet – it has to be transported long distance. It is racist – mostly enjoyed by White privileged, supremacists.
So I would say we are well down the road a ban, along with tea… something to do with slavery.
In some way tax payers or lottery funding monies via charities (ASH), and public health departments etc perpetuate this unnecessary assault on our liberties and freedoms.
Denied monies this and other unwarranted intrusions into our lives may to some extent evaporate.
Nicotine, the wonder drug. https://www.wired.com/2007/06/nicotine/
In the beginning: it was just banning cigarette ads on TV and newspapers, but not in magazines or cinema, and bans did not apply to cigars and pipe tobacco. See, not so bad really, sensible, because – health, the ubiquitous NHS burden, because we are all serfs in service to that State Leviathan.
On a slippery slope some said. Nonsense! Just an exception because of ‘proven’ health problems caused by smoking. People must be saved from themselves whether they like it or not.
Well it turns out the slope was well greased. One ban led to another right up to plain packaging except for obscene graphics of rotting tongues, etc and tobacco products hidden under the counter like porn – and once the pogrom against smokers was well advanced, new horrors and evils needed to be rooted out and dealt with to keep the parasite classes busy.
Now they are after our entire diet; how much we eat, what we eat, and ultimately the food we are ‘allowed’ to grow.
And our cars, cookers, heating, holidays, and the F word…. Freedom.
And we let it happen.
Terrific.
And next the ginger growler wants to make misogyny illegal. But no mention of misandry!
Sexual harassment was mentioned, that could make flirting or just asking for a phone number harassment. As much as the dumb public is not outraged by all this top down control, these baser instincts will not be followed.
As some recently said how can they make misogyny a crime if they can’t define what a woman is?
I remember an issue of 2000AD back in the 1980s where Judge Dredd and some fellow Judges took down a coffee bean smuggling ring and ended up burniing the coffee, remarking that the illegal substance could put thousands of citizens on a caffeine binge. Citizens are only allowed ersatz coffee in the city and caffeine is illegal.
The world of Mega City One – ‘800 million inhabitants, each one a potential criminal’ – is another chilling warning of the direction in which we’re heading.
This is known as the slippery slope fallacy. The exact same argument could be used to support the legalisation of any drug, no matter how harmful:
Today They Came For the Cocaine Users; Tomorrow it Will be the Coffee Drinkers
Today They Came For the Heroin Users; Tomorrow it Will be the Coffee Drinkers
Today They Came For the Crystal Meth Users; Tomorrow it Will be the Coffee Drinkers
Why do you think they’re gradually criminalising tobacco?
The last nearly 4 years have shown not just that they don’t care about the health – physical, mental and moral – of the population but that they want to seriously damage it.
So if criminalising tobacco isn’t about improving health, what is it about?
It is about improving health, and saving the NHS money. You seem to think that politicians are evil inhuman monsters who spend their days dreaming up different ways to inflict more evil on us, rather than flawed human beings whose intentions are generally good, people who have families, who care about their children, just as you and I care, and we are flawed too. They don’t get everything right, we don’t get everything right either.
I don’t see much evidence of good intentions. Covid, anyone? Or was that a cock-up according to you.
Politicians want to stay in power – that’s normal. We must always be suspicious of what they do, their declared motives, and always ask “cui bono?”. That’s the whole point of DS.
The slippery slope fallacy, like 3 weeks to flatten the curve? If you justify things by “saving the NHS money” then the sky’s the limit.
Anyway, cigarettes are not a “drug” in the same sense as the ones you mention, and not even in the same sense as alcohol.
So do you support taking away the decision about whether to smoke or not from people are legally adults? What meaning does adulthood have if the state decides for you? If there was evidence that dangerous sports, sugar, you name it were dangerous to health and banning them would save the NHS money, would you support those bans too?
By the way, I didn’t ask to be part of the NHS – I am forced to by the state. That’s called communism.
Do you think the people in Cancer Research UK don’t have good intentions?
“Smoking causes at least 15 different types of cancer: lung, larynx, oesophagus, oral cavity, nasopharynx, pharynx, bladder, pancreas, kidney, liver, stomach, bowel, cervix, leukaemia, and ovarian cancers.
Incidence of some smoking-related cancers is decreasing thanks largely to decreases in smoking prevalence; these include lung cancer (decreasing in males), oesophageal cancer (decreasing in females), and bladder cancer. However, unless there is further progress in reducing smoking prevalence, these decreases are expected to slow and eventually stop.
Tobacco is the largest preventable cause of cancer and death in the UK and one of the largest preventable causes of illness and death in the world. Tobacco caused an estimated 125,000 deaths in the UK in 2019 – around a fifth (20%) of all deaths from all causes, that’s around one person every five minutes . It caused an estimated 55,000 cancer deaths in the UK in 2019 – more than a quarter (28%) of all cancer deaths. Smoking (both active smoking and environmental tobacco smoke) causes 3 in 20 (15%) cancer cases in the UK.”
https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/risk/tobacco#heading-Zero
If these stats were about the Covid vaccine, do you think there would be a good case for banning the Covid vaccine?
I know nothing about CRC and their motives but I don’t need to as I’m not forced to give them money and they do not make laws or have powers of arrest, yet.
Unlike Covid vaccines, cigarettes are not paid for by my tax money, are not mandated or approved by the state or sold as a medical treatment, and they come with a health warning.
A cure for cancer would not be in the interests of cancer charities.
Indeed – same conflict of interest as the “public health” industry
Cancer Research UK – income last year £770 million.
Still no cure?
“So do you support taking away the decision about whether to smoke or not from people are legally adults? What meaning does adulthood have if the state decides for you? If there was evidence that dangerous sports, sugar, you name it were dangerous to health and banning them would save the NHS money, would you support those bans too?”
Yes. I support taking away the decision about whether to smoke or not from people who are legally adults, in the same way that I support taking away the decision about whether or not to take heroine or crystal meth from people who are legally adults.
Do you believe that no drugs should be made illegal, no matter how harmful, to our children, to our friends, to our community?
My default position is that the state should have a compelling reason to prohibit anything. The drugs you mention may have effects on society that justify prohibition; cigarettes do not as they harm only the user.
Allow me to go to hell my own way, and mind your own bloody business – and I will reciprocate.
The drugs you mention may have effects on society that justify prohibition;
This is very much disputable. All of these drugs where perfectly legal for millennia and even widely consumed. Eg, cocaine was absolutely common-place in the eary 20th century. The attempt to eliminate them via prohibition only started after the second world war and it certainly hasn’t worked. Cocaine is still common-place. As is speed. And weed, obviously. And the greatest addiction crisis in the West was caused by legal prescription opoids and not illegal Heroin. I know people who have to go through withdrawal therapy just because they trusted the doctors who prescribed these kinds of pills to them.
I agree with all of your points. I am not completely decided one way or another on legalisation of the drugs you mention, but I think it’s far from cut and dried. As I said, my default position is that the state should have a compelling reason to prohibit anything.
Your handle – ‘godknowsimgood’ – says all we need to know. You sound like, and are not ashamed to describe yourself as, the ultimate virtue-signaller, bleating weakly about children and community. There is no logic in your ‘argument’; everything contains an element of danger. Drink enough water and you’ll die. Once done with tobacco, you’ll turn to the dangers of using ladders. Or how about skiing? Getting a car? Walking in the woods on a windy day? Do you get it yet? YOU ARE NOT THE BOSS OF ANYONE!
One wouldn’t mind if the virtue-signalling were confined to “do this, don’t do that, be a good person like me”. But it often turns into “do this, don’t do that, be a good person like me otherwise the state must punish you”.
Well said. The moral man does something, and when no one responds, he rolls up his sleeves and uses force. When morality is lost there is ritual, Ritual is the husk of true faith, the beginning of chaos. Lao-tzu.
Bullying and intimidation are the tools of those whom deem themselves morally superior.
I believe that you have no business messing with my private life, no matter how hard you want to.
If they really wanted to do that, they’d tell the wilfully obese to ‘eff off and stop eating huge volumes of shite.
Some years ago, my wife in hospital. Visiting, a massively obese lady in a nearby bed attended by two consultants. working out how to deal with the fact that the heart drugs for her weight damaged heart conflicted badly with her lung drugs, for her weight damaged lungs.
Not ONCE did they say to her – LADY IT’S YOUR WEIGHT.
I gather now that 60%+ of us are obese. Maybe tobacco is the wrong target WRT health?
That is why more people are looking into the ATKINS or carnivore diet, meat, fish, eggs, milk, cheese, nuts. lose weight, eat fat!
“Obese” is a category so wide it is essentially meaningless. It covers the healthy and fully mobile as well as bed-bound land whales.
We know that those in the official category “overweight” have the longest life expectancy, those in the official category “underweight” the shortest, so it seems likely that the lightest in the official category “obese” are as healthy as those in the official category “normal weight”.
Indeed. Most likely being fat is worse than being not-fat, on average. But it’s nobody’s bloody business except for the person in question and their loved ones. If you want universal healthcare free at point of use because “be kind” that’s great, knock yourself out, waste your money and mine, but once you start telling me how to live my life “because NHS blah blah blah” you’re just a health fascist, f off and leave me alone, I don’t want to live in the same country as you.
“It is about improving health, and saving the NHS money. “
Well then can all the diversity officers. Easy way to save money. The continuing employment of such at inflated salaries indicates clearly that the NHS is NOT “underfunded”, rather clearly over funded. How any of these DEI non-jobs helps our health beats me.
I judge politicians by what they do.
Their actions tell me that they’re very far from being well-meaning.
I suspect most are primarily motivated by the opportunities for corruption available to those who achieve a ministerial post, but some are clearly adherents of a foul, anti-human ideology.
Smokers pay truckloads of taxes and – on average – die earlier than non-smokers. Which means they’re a net win for the NHS. Even if this was otherwise, I’m paying taxes to finance this National EDI Consultant Hiring Service whose core mission is – not public health, beware! – but to fight systemic racism and put trans-updated rainbow paintings onto anything which doesn’t run away quickly enough. Pretty much any human activity has an associated health risk. And this means your pseudo-argument can be used against all human activities someone dislikes for some unrelated reason.
The Horses run quickly enough from those rainbow crossings!
I wonder if the tobacco leaf, unadulterated with goodness know what chemicals used in cigarette manufacture, are actually less harmful than is made out. And whether nicotine has beneficial properties they don’t want us to have access to.
The last 4 years have shown that many things we took for granted may not be what they seem
But some slippery slope arguments are valid and come true. You have to look at each individual slippery slope in context before you can just call it a fallacy.
As a matter of fact: This slope has been proven to be slippery. As someone pointed out: Some decades ago, this started with putting health warnings on fag packets. Then came outlawing of tobacco advertising. Then, indoor smoking bans. Then, totally context-free mutilation porn on tobacco and cigarette packages. And now, the attempt to declare tobacco an illegal drug in all but the name for people who are now 17 or younger. And this won’t be the end of it. For as long as a single smoker still exists, these people will seek to persecute him. All just because they’re paranoid and afraid of tobacco smoke themselves. Or rather more general, anything that burns. That’s unhealthy and bad for the climate!
On the other hand
https://youtu.be/h82D5ZvcALM?si=DEMe4ABN2U8jlBaT
“The taxes on tobacco are colossal: and it is quite possible that the expectant lives of the Methuselahs untroubled by sudden death in their fifties, sixties and seventies, and who survive into their nineties and hundreds, will cost the NHS much more.”
Let’s phase out old people then!
Logans run anyone?
On the subject of phasing-out old people:
https://catholicherald.co.uk/belgian-catholic-bishop-advocates-euthanasia-for-the-elderly/
We already have the NHS Pathways!
I smoked for 21 years up till 2006 when I gave it up, It’s the banning of yet another freedom of choice that p£÷ses me off!
All started with the Seatbelt.
I have an interesting perspective on the two points above. I started smoking at the age of 11 and gave up aged 35. When seat belts were mandated I was very negative but wearing one saved my life twice in car crashes!
What is to say that good guidance on seatbelts, highlighting the dangers would’ve seen most people put one on. Especially adults putting them on kids.
I predict they will come for tea before coffee. The Guardian has already proved that tea (and HP sauce) are racist, after all.
On the positive side, the government has a hammer (legislation/regulation) so everything looks like a nail – they rarely give a thought to real-world niceties such as enforcement. Many currently-illegal substances are freely available and openly used on our streets. I suspect that, come prohibition, the main changes that smokers will observe will be a change in the language on their packets, which will also be significantly cheaper.
I will have to start hoarding tea! There are some places where you can still get masses of tea very cheap, only, the bags tend to be made cheaper and break in the cup.
An excellent read, thank you. Your observations may not be quite so daft as some might feel. We already have the De caff’ options, and cases no of sugar or alcohol either, as a promotion for good health as they see it. Not to mention vegan, veggie, low fat, etc.
The recent single use plastic ban will incur costs to the drive through and takeaway businesses that sell coffee, An action to reduce plastic waste will also indirectly reduce coffee consumption as well. The recent certification requirements issued by the EU on farms to certify there produce does not come from land gained by deforestation will have an impact on cost and availability And not just coffee.
“They” came for them years ago because of the inequality it seems (extract from a Scottish Ministers response to a question on smoking):
The Scottish Government is aligned with UN 2030 so their decisions from smoking to gas boilers and sex education should be viewed in that context.
https://nationalperformance.gov.scot/sustainable-development-goals
Coffee….anti-murdery juicey juice…..I remember an old meme involving Yoda.
Coffee drinkers deprived of their 10 am hot beverage of choice might be rather a difficult crew to subdue and may manifest extreme rage and violence.
The puritanical health fascists and their political allies will ban alcohol next, long before coffee.
That’s not to say that coffee isn’t on the list…
“I recently told my doctor I smoke twenty a day, then about ten in the evenings — and I try and keep it down to five during the night. I also told him that I have had three doctors in the last fifty years. Each of them recommended I give up. But each of them has now died; the last one only a year older than me.”
unherd.com/2021/06/britain-needs-a-cigarette/
David Hockney
June 4, 2021
They banned Carlsberg Special Brew many years ago now.
Yep it was 9% abv, and it was great stuff.
So if it hadn’t been for those health fascists I’d probably be a goner by now. Sure I’m so grateful.
The more I read about the crazy uk laws the more I become determined not to live there permanently.
Yes I drink coffee, but I also smoke and drink alcohol. To me there is nothing more relaxing/satisfyine than sitting around with frineds in the evening having a ciggie and a drink in a warm climate.
I ignore this inept government. Everyone else does too. They’ll ban oxygen intake next.
First they came for the vax sceptics
Then they came for the smokers
Then they came for the cash users
Then they came for the sugar eaters
Then they came for the drinkers
Then they came for ….. you
Welcome to the future
Great article! How dare we think!
I gave up smoking (having smoked from the age of 12!) 35 years ago this August (you see I remember the date!). But I consider this an infringement on human rights totally unconservative (not that this is a Conservative government) and all part of the daily control we’re being subjected to. I always said I’d start smoking again on my 80th birthday but I’m tempted in an act of defiance to start again now.
RESIST DEFY DO NOT COMPLY!!!!
‘They are breaking our conviviality; they are breaking our wakeful meditation: and next they’ll break our concentration.’
Who is this ‘they’? How do they keep their drive up, are there no moderate or dissentient voices among them, are they all rotten at the core, how did they extinguish every flicker of human goodness and compassion in themselves, what are they hoping to get out of subjugating and controlling everyone?
And who are they?