UK News 05-12-2003 Smokers "Should Be Criminals" who: The Lancet what: Says smoking should be made a criminal act where: LONDON when: Yesterday snippet: Estimating that passive smoking kills 1,000 non-smokers per year, medical journal The Lancet yesterday "ignored the failed experience of Prohibition in the US", says The Times, and called for tobacco "to be made an illegal substance, and its possession a crime." The Lancet editorial, coming only a week after the 13 royal medical colleges called for a ban on smoking in public places, points out that 80 per cent of people in the UK were non-smokers, continues The Telegraph. That 80 per cent had "the right to freedom from exposure to proven carcinogens," said the journal. Criminalising smoking is "the most radical anti-smoking demand yet", says a sceptical Independent, and one which was greeted with scepticism by campaigners yesterday "and ridiculed by the tobacco lobby which said it revealed the `true voice of the rabid anti-smoking zealot.`" Indeed, Simon Clark, director of Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco (Forest), appeared delighted with The Lancet`s "laughable" editorial, insisting that the journal had scored "a stunning own goal." "Like it or not people choose to smoke just as they choose to drink alcohol and eat certain foods or take part in extreme sports," said Mr Clark. "Do we ban everything that is potentially dangerous and turn the practitioners into social outcasts?" Amanda Sandford of Action on Smoking and Health warns that banning smoking outright would call massive social unrest. "If tobacco were banned we would have 13 million people desperately craving a drug that they would not be able to get," she tells The Independent. "It is ludicrous." The Royal College of Physicians agreed that banning tobacco "would be a nightmare", but chairman Professor John Britton applauded The Lancet`s recognition "that a health problem as big as that caused by tobacco needs a radical solution and we need a government that is prepared to face up to that." [... more]

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