Coupling the butt ban with a way

Peering through the cloud of controversy enveloping China's smoking bans, it becomes clear that restrictions can benefit smokers even more than nonsmokers.

Nonsmokers' rights are an integral component of the issue, because people who opt not to light up are often forced to breathe the fumes of those who do. But the risk of passive smoking is slighter. So the essence of such bans should be refocused to mostly impact active smokers.

A smoking restriction has been in place in Beijing since before the 2008 Olympic Games. While critics are right in citing enforcement problems in the capital, they should not neglect its progress. The Beijing health bureau inspectors found that fewer than 2,000 of the 78,598 indoor public venues failed to respect nonsmoking rules from January to July.

Many smokers already believe the restrictions are in their interest.

A poll released last month by RTI International Research Publications, which covered 3,525 smoking employees in 14 countries, including China, found that 74 percent of them supported full bans in the workplace.

There are more than 300 million smokers in China, making it the world's biggest consumer and producer of tobacco. Lung cancer caused about 600,000 deaths nationwide last year, while other smoking-related diseases claimed another 1 million lives, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said. The center also said tobacco will be linked to an additional 100 million deaths before 2050 unless consumption is curbed.

Smoking bans in public places are particularly helpful to this end. Few nonsmokers truly understand that for the vast majority of smokers, puffing tobacco isn't a habit. Instead, it's a powerful addiction, the intensity of which many studies have ranked above that of heroin.

Many smokers, like me, actually dislike, even hate, always having to light up. But deprived of nicotine, people subservient to this substance suffer from severe physiological withdrawal symptoms - headaches, cold sweats, irritability and difficulty in concentrating.

This explains some strange behavior by otherwise normal and rational people. Many smokers have at some desperate point stooped to picking up butts from public ashtrays to finish whatever is left when they didn't have their own packs. And this unrelenting craving is why airlines make much ado about smoke detectors in passenger planes' restrooms.

But despite the dominion this addiction wields over them, when smokers can't light up, they won't - and that's the only time they won't. While most tobacco users are aware of the health risks, the dangers often seem to be a future concern. So smokers are likely to put off quitting.

But immediate inconvenience makes it a present concern. And the more ubiquitous this concern becomes, the likelier they are to smoke less and to even quit.

Many who have kicked the butt in countries with sweeping smoking bans say that, in addition to health concerns, they were forced to quit because there was hardly anywhere they could light up anymore.

They would find themselves in chronic agony when they weren't in their homes or places where they could easily slip outside for a puff. And they would even find themselves making excuses to avoid or exit social situations to smoke - until they decided they had finally had enough.

By that point, cigarettes weren't just going to end their lives someday; they were ruling their lives every day.

To be truly effective in reducing tobacco consumption, such bans should operate in concert with other campaigns. This would ensure the will to quit is coupled with a way.

Beijing's health bureau recently launched a "smoke-free families" program, sending 1,000 trained supervisors to communities to guide people on how to give up tobacco.

Without enforced bans, comple-mented by effective campaigns to help people kick the butt, the hope that many smokers in China will give up smoking on their own will be nothing but smoke in mirrors.

E-mail: erik_nilsson@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 12/02/2009 page9)