the legendary Nosmo King

Well, we're officially smoke-free in pubs, clubs, etc. now. Which is great. Or.....well, I dunno. I find myself with just a niggling sense of uncomfortableness about the whole thing, probably because I'm finding my own preferences and convenience in conflict with my instinctive social liberalism, and indeed libertarianism, on this particular issue.

Let's deal with the easy issues first. It is a positive pleasure to go to the pub for the evening, stay for several hours, come home, and not wake up the next morning to find your clothes reeking of stage cigarette smoke. Soaked in beer and flecked with blood and vomit, yes, but smoky - no. And as a non-smoker it's an obvious massive improvement to have the atmosphere, while you're in the pub, not choked with other people's fag smoke.

Then there's the health issue. This is simultaneously more and less complicated than some might imagine. It's more complicated because the evidence for the risks associated with passive smoking is less clear-cut than you might think. My view is that the balance of probability is that there is a sufficiently increased level of risk to justify concern, and that I have to treat the protestations of lobby groups like Forest with a certain amount of scepticism. To misquote Mandy Rice-Davies, well, they would, wouldn't they? We're not in an Intelligent Design situation here, in that there really is some debate in the scientific community, but not as much as the lobby groups and the scientific spokesmen for the tobacco industry would have you believe. The motivation of those people is clear enough; what the motivation (if we assume that it isn't just reporting the science) of those who insist it is harmful might be is harder to imagine - unless you're Richard Littlejohn or Garry Bushell you will, I trust, be aware that such concepts as the "nanny state" and the "self-hating liberal elite" don't actually exist. Less complicated because, actually, the health thing is a bit of a red herring, after all. It probably wouldn't do you any lasting physical harm to have the bloke sitting beside you in the pub urinate repeatedly on your trouser-leg, but that wouldn't make it any more pleasant, nor would it make your trousers smell any sweeter in the morning. Unless of course your incontinent neighbour was diabetic.

Smoking is a uniquely tricky one though, in that it is (even if you don't accept the science) almost unique in that it's a drug habit whose practice, in public, affects others by its very nature. Not true of drinking, eating hash flapjacks, nor even of mainlining heroin on the bus next to schoolchildren. The very act of smoking a cigarette impinges on those around you. I'm not going to end up cirrhotic, fat and impotent (or no more than I already am) from sitting next to someone drinking a skinful of lager, any more than I'm going to end up smelling of beer if they spill it over themselves. Sure, drunk drivers kill people, crack-crazed lunatics steal and kill to fund their habit, and these are serious issues, but they are secondary knock-on effects, caused in the case of crack, since I mention it, by its illegality as much as anything. I'll come back to this in a minute.

Now it might sound from all this that I'm right behind the smoking ban, and I mostly am, but....did we really need to legislate it out altogether? Couldn't we have provided an opt-out for establishments to say, right, we're going to remain smoky, and in order to do that we're going to purchase a licence (in the same way as you're required to do to serve alcohol) for a nominal but non-trivial fee (to encourage most places to remain smoke-free), and along with that licence we'll be issued with a few large signs to be displayed in prominent places so no punters can claim ignorance of the rules (the impenetrable smog should be a bit of a giveaway anyway).

That's probably enough about smoking. Just to cast a bit more chum into the water, how about legalising all drugs? A few brief discussion points:

• Who are the government to be telling me what I can or can't be putting in my body?
• I'm allowed to purchase and eat fatty food, pork scratchings, Bernard Matthews' Turkey Drummers etc., which are bad for me, so what's the difference?
• Come to that, I'm allowed to purchase things like Mr. Muscle Drain And Plughole Unblocker which would hollow me out like an apple-corer if I drank them, so what's the difference?
• People die in the sea all the time, but we don't ban going in the sea, do we? Because, well, it's fun, isn't it?
  
• Surely the vast majority of the "war on drugs" budget is spent preventing or following-up crime caused by the drugs in question being illegal in the first place?

Hey, it's never going to happen. But that doesn't mean that focussing for a minute on the rampant hypocrisy and inconsistency of the laws as they stand at the moment shouldn't give us pause for thought once in a while. It's good to question things. Especially when those things prevent me getting a regular supply of da 'erb.