‘We need to take a legislative stand on behalf of the voiceless’

Make it illegal says John Crown

THE reasons for banning smoking in cars when children are present can be neatly summarised as follows. nSecondhand and side-stream smoke is dangerous, and particularly dangerous for children; nSmoking in cars produces uniquely high environmental concentrations of dangerous chemicals; nSome people who know these facts continue to smoke in cars with children.

For these reasons, when Seanad Éireann comes back into session next week, I, together with the support of my colleagues, senators Mark Daly and Jillian van Turnhout, will introduce a bill to the House which would make it an offence to smoke in a car where children are present.

The legislation will take the effect of a simple amendment to the current ban on smoking in all workplaces. Gardaí will be responsible for enforcement.

The existing law, introduced a decade ago by then health minister Micheál Martin, has been a huge success and has moreover, provided a model and precedent for similar bans worldwide. Our smoke-free pubs, restaurants, shopping centres, and hospitals are a testament to this visionary piece of public policy, which at the time of its proposal, prompted very considerable scepticism and opposition

The same sceptics and opponents have been stirred into action by our current proposal. Although the feedback I have received has been overwhelmingly positive and supportive, there have been objectors, mainly on the grounds of civil liberties. The charge of “nanny-statism” is being levelled.

Forest Éireann, a smokers’ rights lobby which receives funding from Forest UK, itself a beneficiary of support from the tobacco industry, have been particularly vocal.

Let me address the charge of nanny-statism. I have a very strong libertarian streak, and would defend the rights of smokers to sate their addiction (and addiction it is) as long as no other individuals were harmed. The problem is when others are harmed. The evidence that indirect smoking is harmful to bystanders is overwhelming.

Michael Cabana and colleagues in Pediatric Asthma Allergy and Immunology described links between environmental tobacco exposure and chronic asthma symptoms.

The World Health Organisation concluded in 1999 that exposure to cigarette smoke causes respiratory disease in children. In 2000, the UK inquiry into stillbirths and death in infancy linked exposure to tobacco smoke with cot death. There are multiple other reports.

Passive smoking can also cause cancer. Tobacco smoke produces a higher level of benzene, one of the most carcinogenic (ie, cancer causing) chemicals known to medical science. The level is higher than the upper safety level accepted by the US steel industry. While environmental smoke is bad for everyone, it is disproportionately dangerous for children, given their small body size and the rapid rate at which they breathe.

These are known harms that smokers inflict on their children by smoking around them. By the time that only two cigarettes have been smoked in a car, those who are not smoking experience more than the daily maximum limit of small particle environmental pollution. The US surgeon general has argued that there is no safe level of exposure to such small particles, and that each cigarette is a source of a huge number of such particles.

The perils of secondhand smoke motivated the Micheál Martin ban. Smoking in the workplace was a risk to others. Far from being an instinctive nanny-statist, I am a strong advocate of individual liberties. I combine belief in these liberties with a belief that each of us also has a duty to our community, and that total liberty free from the recognition of our obligations to others leads us into a Hobbesian war of competing claims for liberty by all, against all.

Rights and duties are inseparable, I cannot invoke one without the accepting the veracity of the other. I am also a former smoker, and I understand what the people of the recovery movement call the “stinking thinking” of addiction. It is possible to rationalise almost anything, when the drive behind it is to protect your access to the drug you crave. The disordered thinking of the addict will lead to them rationalising that they are at liberty to place children in environments which are known to promote disease.

We all have a duty to aid those who are powerless, those who need our assistance to protect their liberties. I have seen too many lives devastated and wasted by this disease not to take a legislative stand on behalf of voiceless children.

Consider this paradox. At present it is illegal to smoke when you are alone in your company car. It is, however, perfectly legal to smoke in your private car with three children strapped into their seats.

* Let me know your thoughts on this issue. Contact me on Twitter @ProfJohnCrown or email [e-mail]