Would a total smoking ban violate human rights?

Tobacco under fire

In 2004, Bhutan became the first nation to make the sale of tobacco illegal. The industry is too lucrative for the ban to have caught on elsewhere, apart from a few exceptions, like the Vatican where the sale of tobacco was completely banned by Pope Francis I. In August 2012, Tasmania's Upper House unanimously passed a motion that banned the sale of tobacco and tobacco products to anyone born after the year 2000. That would have meant that the post-millennium generation would have been entirely smoke free, apart form the remaining twentieth century smokers. However, he Bill was not approved by the lower house and as long as you are over 18, you can still buy cigarettes in Tasmania.

Smoking and human rights

Would it be a violation of our human rights for the introduction of a law like that proposed by Tasmania? No more than banning strolling on railway tracks or unhygienic restaurants. The issue has nothing to do with human rights: it is all about the Mafia of tobacco companies, their influential friends and their economies. But the cost is too high. If a few brave countries or states make the first move, they will soon show the other up and the trend may snowball. Bring it on!

Here's what the World Health Organisation has to say about smoking:

• Tobacco kills up to half of its users.

• Tobacco kills more than 7 million people each year. More than 6 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 890 000 are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke.

• Around 80% of the world's 1.1 billion smokers live in low- and middle-income countries.

The rights of others

Many things are unhealthy and people should have the right to choose for themselves whether to care or not. Heavy taxes could be imposed to meet the additional costs to the economy of reckless behaviour. Smoking, however, does not only kill the smokers. A model like the one that Tasmania had proposed, therefore, seems fare and just.