LETTER: Scrap the smoking ban

Karyn Maughan is spot on. The essence of pragmatism is to do only what works (“Tobacco ban poses biggest threat to public’s faith in state’s reasonableness”, May 27).

The government’s whole response to the pandemic is essentially pragmatic and a key criterion must be that restrictive actions achieve their objective: if any measure fails that acid test there is no point in pursuing it, however worthy its purported intentions — particularly if the ban is necessarily accompanied by many undeniably deleterious side effects, which this one is.

This is why persistence with the ban on cigarettes is such an irrational irritant, unworthy of our government. Much of the article deals with motivation for this ban, but that is all irrelevant because it could be reliably forecast that it would fail to meet its objective, and this is now proven.

Smoking is addictive and known to be hazardous, so most smokers who could give it up have already done so. The short-term ban on sales could not be expected to make addicted smokers stop, and it hasn’t: 90% of our 8-million smokers continue to smoke, and most resent being forced outside the law to do so.

The ban is not working. It can’t be made to work. Scrap it!

Roger Briggs
Edenvale