The first days of the smoking ban in UK [edit: in fact, England] have gone and life goes on… It’s not surprising; people adapt as they always do, almost in any conditions, they rationalise and go on. People working in a nearby building told me that according to the new rules, they need to go 25 meters away from the building’s entrance in order to smoke. ”But isn’t there another building?” I asked…

Smoking is associated with living 10 years less and is considered a major contributing factor to health problems. And yes, at last we can fully provide for non-smokers now, but the question remains, why are there not any, just few, places to serve smokers? First we suffocated the non-smokers, now let’s suffocate the smokers?

Unfortunately, following the recent UK political trend: one more liberty is to go. And none seems to pay attention. Difficult also here to ignore the highly patronising and selective mentality of the new measure and its followers, disguising the attack on personal choices to simple -even if unhealthy- things in life! (What about all other things that are killing us? Does the list end anywhere? Or we should forbid everything in the name of health and safety!?).

The question in personal level becomes even more painful; under an increasing barrage of normative rules, does self-determination lead to self-destruction?

A growing tendency. Cig break in the streets (© 2007 Christos Stavrou)

Interestingly, it was not long ago that the socially stigmatised smoking of the present was a socially promoted habbit and behaviour, from cinema heros to prime ministers. And now smoking is transforming again, to a vague and grotesque act of individual liberty…

Left: No smoking (© 2007 Christos Stavrou)

And it seems that a society creates problems , such as of the existing smokers, only when there’s a decided action ready to be imposed, within the crucial problematic of regulating populations. In other words, is the public service of few smokers such a social problem -that has to be totally denied? Or, smoking just became a problem, when governments realised that the huge income generated from cigarette taxes could be replaced and actually increased (plus higher productivity rates) by a new health prevention policy? In order to enforce the latter new social problems needed to be defined. Other similar ‘new’ problems will follow (for example, watch out for the growing discourse about obesity)…

Ok, let’s forget all this and enjoy an arresting photograph of the writer Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues by Henri Cartier-Bresson (Italy 1933)