Banning drivers from the weed is just a smoking gun

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

As a fully signed up member of the anti-smoking brigade, I would be somewhere to the right of Benito Mussolini – although perhaps not, given that I don’t actually want to turn this into a police state.

But the New Year ban on smoking in cars is about the daftest idea since the UK’s Monster Raving Loony Party proposed an extra day in every year – as opposed to just Leap Years – by also having a Hop, Skip and Jump Year in rotation.

It’s mad because it’s unenforceable but it’s also crazy because the logical next step is to tackle it in one’s own private house.

Don’t get me wrong – there are few things that cause the blood to boil more than a parent with children in the car and smoke billowing out the cracked window from a dirty Benson.

And for all that, most smokers wouldn’t even think of lighting up in front of the kids in any environment, let alone the small confines of the family car.

Even if they wanted to, my own observations would suggest that you wouldn’t need the Gardaí to put a stop to it – the kids themselves would give you such a hard time that you wouldn’t get more grief if you were intravenously injecting heroin while simultaneously trying to go up and down through the gears.

In fairness to smokers, the manner in which they adapted to the smoking ban in pubs wasn’t only admirable – they also managed to turn a negative into a positive by making the smoking area the most desirable place in the pub.

They even gave rise to the new concept of smirting – smoking and flirting.

The non-smokers, on the other hand, are now the sad creatures left minding the pints and the coats and the handbags as everyone huddles together outside slowing killing their lungs but still having fun.

So already smokers are pariahs in public places – offices, pubs, restaurants, buses, trains, cinemas, shopping centres – and they’ve grown to not alone accept that but make the best of their bad lot.

But extending the ban to the family car moves inexorably into a person’s private space, leaving prohibition in the home as the next logical step.

Shouldn’t we also then look at monitoring drinking in the home – something that has far greater consequences for children than their parents smoking a cigarette?

Shouldn’t we crack down on parents tearing strips out of each other in front of the children?

What about bad language – isn’t that a bad example, albeit not something that can prove fatal through secondary inhalation?

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.