THE TOBACCONIST Alan D Myerthall may be a tobacconist but, oddly enough, he doesn’t view the smoking ban as a wholesale disaster. “If I never sold another packet of cigarettes in my life it wouldn’t bother me one iota,” he says. Myerthall has run the aficionados-only Pipeshop on Edinburgh’s Leith Walk for 34 years, a spell in which he has developed his own brand of smokers’ apartheid: pipes and cigars good; cigarettes bad. He says profit on a packet of cigarettes is non-existent, though it’s the conflation of categories that bothers him most — cigarette smokers inhale, he points out, while pipe and cigar users puff.
“I hate it when smokers are talked about as if they’re all the same thing,” he says. “They’re completely different. It’s unfair for us to be lumped in with cigarette smokers.”
The smoking ban will mean Myerthall will be unable to let customers test various kinds of pipe tobacco in the shop; instead they will be obliged to stand beneath the awning outside. But he doesn’t anticipate that the ban will hurt his business particularly. Cigars and pipes are principally domestic preferences, added to which he has a thriving mail-order business, delivering products worldwide.
He complains, though, that his taxes are spent on advertising campaigns promoting the “unproven” claim that passive smoking kills. “I mean, nobody claims smoking is good for your health but have these people never heard of opening a window?” he says. “There is such a thing as freedom of choice.”
Myerthall has also installed an ashtray outside his shop after one customer dropped a cigarette butt on the pavement before entering and was fined £50 for littering.
For his own part, the ban will barely touch Myerthall; he limits himself to one cigar a day, smoked at night when he returns to the privacy of his own home. “Cuban or Nicaraguan,” he says. “No Hamlets or any of that rubbish, nothing cheap. Spend around £10 on a cigar and you should be fine.”
THE PIPE LOVER Ever the man of affairs, Donald Findlay — famously a pipe man but also a cigar smoker — will be responding to the ban with typically legalistic logical rigour. “When it comes to restaurants,” says the colourful QC, “I just won’t bloody go, or I’ll go to a restaurant in England. I am not going to stand outside a restaurant smoking; it’s unthinkable. As for drinking, if a pub does not make an effort to accommodate me in this respect, with heated sheltered areas, I will not give it my custom. Simple as that.”
Findlay is sufficiently aggrieved by the ban to consider launching a campaign against passive drinking. No working days have ever been lost to passive smoking, he says, nor is it implicated in domestic violence or car accidents, three areas in which alcohol is traditionally a significant factor. “If this smoking ban truly is health-driven, as Mr McConnell says, it follows that there can be no case against restricting sales of alcohol.”
But of course, he adds, the smoking ban has nothing to do with health. The executive, Findlay believes, is currying favour with the majority by restricting the rights of an unpopular minority. “It was clear from the start,” he says. “The consultative process was a farce. From the outset it was obvious that smoking in enclosed spaces was going to be banned, without compromise. It is appallingly restrictive and prejudicial. It is turning people like me into second-class citizens.
“If I were to smoke in a pub, be fined and refused to pay the fine, I would be jailed. But I could smoke in the police car that took me to prison and then in the prison itself. It’s soft-headed trendiness at its worst. And if the executive wants to treat me like a second-class citizen that’s how I’ll react. Whenever I travel I always encourage people to visit Scotland, as Mr McConnell would like us all to do. After next Sunday, I’m sad to say, I just won’t bother my backside.”
THE CIGARETTE SMOKER Formerly a two-lighters-a-day girl, Professor Sheila McLean, the director of the Institute of Law and Ethics in Medicine at Glasgow University, found cutting down was easy during recent trips to New Zealand and Dublin, where smoking indoors was outlawed some time ago.
“I found that when you don’t see it around you, you think about it less,” she says. “The same principle might well apply here. We’ve all learnt to adapt to circumstances in the last decade or so. Smoking is already banned on public transport, in cinemas and so on. If the ban had happened without those already being place it could have been very problematic. But we’ve accommodated restrictions as they’ve come along.”
What concerns her, ethically and personally, are the grounds on which the ban has been erected. The requirement to protect citizens from passive smoking can be achieved by segregating smokers into their own areas — so why is a legislative solution being imposed? “Look at the ban on smoking in parks,” she says. “There’s no legitimate basis for such a ban, beyond smokers setting a bad example to children. But children see their parents smoking at home. We have to conclude the state is taking it upon itself to make life choices on our behalf, which isn’t a happy thought.”
Not being a heavy socialiser, McLean expects the ban will affect her only when smoking is prohibited in the British Midland departure lounge at Glasgow airport. “And British Midland were the last carrier to ban smoking on their planes so I always fly with them on principle.”
THE CAMPAIGNER The tobacco industry’s most mortal enemy for the past 50 years has been Sir John Crofton, who will celebrate his 94th birthday at his Edinburgh home this week. For him, the Scottish smoking ban is the culmination of a lifetime’s work. “It’s been a battle over the years,” he says. “But this law, especially the ban in pubs, which is the really striking thing, is extremely important. I’m an Irishman in origin, and if you can succeed with pubs in Ireland you should be able to succeed in Scotland.”
Mentally sharp and with a forensically accurate memory, he recalls discussions with colleagues in the 1940s when many doctors were convinced the massive rise in lung cancer was caused by petrol fumes. When the first scientific evidence of a link with smoking was published in 1950, Crofton was sure it was a huge breakthrough.
As an eminent doctor and former president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, Crofton is best known for developing an effective cure for tuberculosis in the 1950s and 1960s, saving countless lives worldwide. “We knew we couldn’t do this with lung cancer,” he says, “so I came to believe the only answer was to prevent it — and that meant stopping people smoking.”
He knows from personal experience that persuading people to give up the weed is a tough business. “I know some very ethical people who have found it almost impossible to give up, including a thoracic surgeon who was operating on lung cancers all the time.”
Crofton realised early on that occasional learned journals pointing out the dangers was not going to have the desired effect on the public at large. “We realised it was very important to keep this before the public the whole time — that’s what led us to set up Ash (Action on Smoking and Health) in 1972 and Ash Scotland in 1973. There was a dramatic effect after that.”
Over the years he has watched thousands of people suffer from cancers and respiratory illnesses directly linked to their smoking. Knowing that pain was preventable, he says, was “the most frustrating experience”.
