Ban on smoking may add to appeal

DEEP in the bowels of what New Yorkers call The Village, there is, unusually for the city, a little narrow, winding street sandwiched between two wide boulevards.

Halfway along, hidden from view, you will, if you look hard enough, discover a narrow opening barely three feet off the ground. It is flanked by a pair of bollards and covered by a faded, chipped wooden covering that looks like a door. It is indeed a door, but it has no handle or knob, no knocker and no bell, no obvious way of going through it.

Unbeknownst to most New Yorkers, it hides a secret garden, accessed only by an elite few.

It is a Speakeasy, Yankee-speak for shebeen, an unlicensed bar. Inside, wayward poets and artists mingle with professional alcoholics and even a few of New York’s finest. It is a remnant of the Prohibition days of the 1930s. There are dozens of them still in the city, operating with the compliance of the police so long as they don’t make a song and dance about their existence.

They are also testament to a peculiar human condition, well known to us in Ireland. Its called beating the system.

During the era when alcoholic drink was proscribed in the US many areas actually witnessed an increase in the consumption of booze. This confounded not only the authorities but also psychologists, sociologists and experts in human behaviour.

After much study, it emerged that, as soon as ordinary, law abiding people were told they could not have so much as a glass of beer, they were determined to imbibe, even finding the clandestine nature of the activity strangely thrilling. Prohibition was finally lifted, but not before the Mafia had built a criminal empire on smuggling alcohol.

So, will something like that happen to smokers? Will tobacco become cool by virtue of it being banned in so many places? Will organised crime get on the bandwagon and target youngsters too naive to realise the danger? Will pubs see clandestine gatherings of weed worshippers?

It won’t happen, according to Dr Fenton Howell, chairman of ASH, the anti-smoking lobby group. “Minister Micheál Martin’s latest measure is a public health one,” he said yesterday. “People finally realise passive smoking is deadly, like asbestos, and there is a huge degree of public support for it. I don’t see how it could in any way lead to an increase in smoking, the opposite in fact.”

A former smoker himself, Dr Howell was ecstatic at yesterday’s announcement. “This is not only a big day for public health, it is also a big day for politics. We finally have a minister with the bottle to act on scientific advice given him.

However, past experience tends to contradict the notion that prohibiting a distasteful activity will eliminate it. In fact, an existing ban on selling cigarettes to underage youngsters is flouted wholesale in Ireland.

Two years ago, a survey by the mid-western Health Board found the majority of shopkeepers in the west of Ireland were disregarding laws which prohibit the sale of cigarettes to minors.

The focus of Minister Martin’s drive is young people but, according to the World Health Organisation, that battle is already being lost, with tobacco companies using covert methods, like funding youth programmes, to get kids hooked.

A WHO study found there were 215 million smokers in Europe. This is higher than it was five years ago, despite the fact tobacco companies themselves know only too well the dangers.

Late last year, Philip Morris, the biggest cigarette company in the world, declared its Australian headquarters a smoke-free zone.