There is no case to be made for outdoor smoking areas

The recent news that Kier Starmer plans to ban certain outdoor smoking areas in the UK received mixed responses. This should be a welcome move for someone such as myself who neither smokes nor wants to die of second-hand smoke. Every way you look at it, as long as one person’s smoking habit has the potential to affect others, the scales remain imbalanced. This does not mean smoking itself has to be outlawed, simply that the government must ensure that smoking does not cause collateral damage to any degree.

The UK banned indoor smoking in 2007—as Daisy Jones pointed out in her article for The Guardian today—because the NHS pointed out back then that, firstly, there is no such thing as ‘safe exposure’ to second-hand smoke, and secondly, that smoking can have ‘nonconsensual and seriously damaging effects … on the body’. Despite this awareness, she then goes on to nevertheless defend outdoor smoking areas.

Ms Jones starts with a nostalgic description of smoking in London in 2018. It is not a narrative I particularly connect with, but she goes on to use that description as an example of how ‘Brits go to flirt, gossip, or even have a few existential moments to themselves’ in smoking areas. All of these are, no doubt, activities that can be undertaken without gripping a cigarette.

It is perplexing that she then proceeds to claim that the younger generation, who ‘already have a hard time socialising’ need outdoor smoking areas to ease them into the act. Few more outrageous things have been said about smoking than that it is the sole enabler of socialising among youngsters. If anything, youngsters are best positioned to not take to smoking—they are far enough away from such an obsession that it can be prevented from ever becoming a habit. Instead, Ms Jones sees a task universally accepted as severely injurious to health as a worthwhile price to pay for socialising. Surely, bowling or D&D or even blind dates are far better options.

Ms Jones accepts that the indoor smoking ban made sense but fails to see how outdoor smoking areas can have comparable ill effects. The smoking area, she says, is ‘where smokers go to get away from everyone else’. This is hardly the case for every outdoor smoking area I have to walk past to enter a cafe because most cafes have no room for such an area dedicated to smokers besides street-side seating outside their main entrance. Likewise, puffs of cigarette smoke, in my experience, fail to obey air space restrictions when they get blown with the wind towards the serene, smoke-free zone of a yard I happen to share with smokers at an outdoor restaurant. It is no doubt such areas that pose potential for collateral damage that Mr Starmer is planning to ban and not simply all outdoor smoking areas.

In her article, in all fairness, Ms Jones agrees that smoking is not a good habit. She agrees, for instance, that it is ‘the UK’s single biggest preventable cause of illness and death’, and that it kills two-thirds of long-term users, and that even second-hand smoke can cause fatal diseases. Knowing all this, how does one still make a case for smoking? Ms Jones’s solution is simply to say that those who want to stay safe should simply not go to smoking areas. She compares it to how health conscious people can simply avoid ultra-processed foods. This is hardly a fair comparison because unlike consuming second-hand smoke, people cannot possible accidentally consume ultra-processed foods non-consensually, repeatedly. If there is in fact an outdoor smoking area that is substantially far removed in such a way that nobody need venture near it for any reason whatsoever, and that anybody venturing near it is guaranteed not to inhale second-hand smoke, then by all means those areas should remain and creating more of them should remain legal.

Alas for Ms Jones, science tells us such outdoor spaces are incredibly hard to design. For example, in the neighbourhood of outdoor smoking areas “most studies detected outdoor concentrations of PM2.5 [particulate matter] exceeding 10 μg/m^3, the annual outdoor average that the World Health Organization sets as the lowest cutoff at which lung cancer and cardiopulmonary deaths are likely to increase”. The science is clearly not in Ms Jones’s favour. Another more recent study pointed out that not only does the distance from a smoking area matter when considering second-hand smoke but also no standard distance can be declared because the distance would change depending on the number of smokers in an area:

…every 3 m increase in distance was associated with a decrease of ambient PM2.5 by 24.6 μg/m^3 … Every one extra smoker at the smoking point was associated with an average increase of PM2.5 … by 2.0 μg/m^3…

The study concluded that “outdoor smoking points could significantly increase the PM2.5 concentrations in the surrounding air and the risks of secondhand smoke exposure, despite of the noticeable decreasing trend with increasing distance” (emphasis added).

So there is no ‘other side’ in this debate ‘that has to be considered’ as Ms Jones puts it. It is as meaningless to speak of “the cultural significance of the smoking area in this country” as she unironically describes it, without sounding remarkably like the NRA across the pond. And further, no, Mr Starmer would not be ‘banning flirting among the perennially shy’ because they would surely find other ways to flirt. Banning potentially harmful outdoor smoking areas would not ban adults from making friends either. To justify smoking as a means of flirting or making friends is irresponsible at best and reckless and worst.

Ms Jones curiously points out, towards that end of her article, that she herself does not smoke. Perhaps she does not wish to appear as a smoker making a case for smoking areas, but not being a smoker hardly legitimises her arguments any more. And just because she confesses to having made some of her life’s important decisions in smoking areas or bonded with people there, does not justify continuing to expose the rest of the population to nonconsensual, second-hand, cancer-inducing cigarette fumes.

This country has had many a vice and will no doubt find new ones. But with every turn of history, and with every new inconvenient law, this country has coped just fine, even thrived. A positive, health-conscious legislation such as a ban on potentially harmful outdoor smoking areas will do this country more good than harm in the long run. Whether you are reading this in a smoking area or outside it, this new law could well be the light society needs right now.