It's enough to drive you to drink

This article was published in The Sydney Morning Herald 3 May 2010

Cracking down on tobacco is like cracking down on devil worship. It's easy to put the boot into something that antisocial without apology. Smoking stinks and it's bad for you.

By government estimates, it costs the nation more than $31 billion a year in healthcare and lost productivity. It kills 15,000 people a year and deludes vulnerable teenagers into thinking they look cool when in fact they just look like teenagers trying to look cool.

Which means it takes about as much true grit for a government to whack smoking as it does to whack satanism. Four decades of mounting evidence and steady campaigning against smoking mean the wheeziest of intellects can stub out the smoker rights argument in 25 words or fewer.