Win / win way to solve the smoking problem

It goes without saying that smokers shouldn’t indulge when they have the kids in the back, and as far as I can see the vast majority of them wouldn’t even think of it, whether or not there was legislation banning them in the first place.

Anyway if such a law were monitored in the way that, say, the ban of people using mobile phones while driving, they could smoke away, secure in the knowledge that they’d probably have to set themselves on fire before coming to the attention of the authorities.

But in any event this would give us the opportunity to add a second piece of legislation to the Bill – one that forces all smoking drivers to do their puffing behind fully closed air-tight windows.

This might seem utterly contradictory to the original proposal, but this way they maximise the benefit of their secondary inhalation and anyone who happens to be driving behind them in the next car isn’t given a free plume of carcinogenic fog as it storms into the atmosphere.

This seems only fair to both sides – after all, shouldn’t smokers get full value for their money, given the cost of cigarettes these days. And if they could spend an hour with their own smoke swirling around them in their locked-down car, surely that would give them twice the benefit of their fagging.

There are obvious dangers of course on longer journeys because, for committed smokers, this could soon turn into a dense interior fog, thereby creating visibility problems if they can no longer see out through the window.

The solution here would be regular motorway stops – some secluded area where they could pull over and open all the doors for a few minutes to, literally, clear the air.

And if recycling technology continues along its current inventive path, it cannot be beyond the bounds of some wizard to find a way of harnessing all of this hot air and turning it into something more useful for everyone’s benefit.

Presuming such an operation was viable, we could then legislate for smaller air-tight containers in populated areas where smokers could go to maximise their hit while doing their bit for recycling at the same time.

This again would also mean an end to those accidental intakes that non-smokers sometimes get when they inadvertently yawn or breathe in deeply on the street at the same time that a nicotine addict exhales a giant plume right in their direction.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.