The starting point is John Stewart Mill who wrote a long time ago that governments can only interfere with the affairs of a citizen when that citizen is interfering with the affairs of others - with it being understood that those others are complaining. That the citizen might be doing himself harm in some sense or other is no business of the government.
So stretching the point, the government can ban smoking in public places on the grounds that passive smoking is dangerous and smokers have no right to deny health conscious non-smokers access to public spaces. Motor cyclists have no right to inflict the additional costs of fixing their broken heads arising from their not wearing their helmets on the rest of us. Maybe champion rock climbers ought to be made illegal on account of the high proportion who wind up damaged or dead.
One might also argue that the poor health of smokers is draining health resources away from the health of non-smokers. But this argument falls because premature death of smokers saves a lot of money which might otherwise have had to be spent on care for the elderly. At least I would guess is that how the figures would pan out, even allowing for the considerable cost of cancer treatment. Arguments of this sort are even weaker in the case of other recreational drugs, where most of the harm is a consequence of the illegality of the drugs, rather than of the drugs themselves.
But Conly is said to make a different argument, that government is allowed to make us do things which we don't want to do now but which most of us will recognise to have been a good thing in due course. Part of her thinking being that most of us are wrong about the proper balance between short term gain and long term gain and that most of our governments are right. Not very happy about this at all.
Rather happier about her preference for nudging rather than coercing, holding coercion in reserve for when nudging does not work. It seems that our very own Prime Minister has set up an Office for Nudging (to be privatised in due course) so that civil servants can dream up things about which we ought to be nudged, for example, about eating less sugar. Which brings us back to Mayor Bloomberg, who tried to go straight for the jugular.
On the other hand, thinking of lead paint (see March 19th), I am quite happy for lead paint in homes to be made illegal. It may be OK for someone to chose to poison him or herself in this way, but it is very hard to contain the damage. Other people are apt to be harmed during the lifetime of the paint and so a ban on selling if not manufacturing the paint seems to be justified.
So where I think I get to is this. The apparently private areas in which government can interfere and the sort of grounds on which they might so interfere should be laid down in some kind of law which is debated, and perhaps passed, in the usual sort of way. If such a law is written and passed so as to include making cigarettes illegal, so be it. As things stand, at least in this country, provided the government is not deemed to have interfered with our human rights, they can legislate about more or less anything. Fizzy drinks today, oranges (horrible amount of sugar in this so-called health food) tomorrow. Recreational drugs no chance at all. All modern governments seem to be programmed to interfere by default and we need something to control them.
And let those who want to get rid of cigarettes remember that they might have some minority taste - like hunting foxes with toothed dogs - which some other gang might think ought to be done away with. Let's have a bit of live and let live.
In any event, a topic on which a bit of public debate might be a good idea. So full marks to Ms. Conly for her efforts to stimulate same.
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