note of the day

Grandstanding politicians and headline-grabbing legislation are no guarantee of successful outcomes. Years of slavishly following the ‘neo-prohibitionist’ model of public health—which ignores the reasons why people smoke in favour of an obsesive focus on petty bans and restrictions—have conspicuously failed to have an impact on the smoking rate. To continue down the path of extremism in the light of this fact suggests the same cognitive dissonance that was displayed last week by Welsh anti-smoking campaigners who complained that smoking prevalence had barely fallen despite the most aggressive wave of tobacco control legislation in the country’s history.

Snowdon