Smokers are pariahs...

Surprise surprise! A Cambridge University Press study has found that smokers are the new unclean lepers of our society. No kidding! I don't know how much this study has cost the taxpayer...a good few thousand I should think...but all they had to do was to simply ask a few smokers what they thought society was doing to them...so much easier and cheaper don't you think?
An adviser to the DOH (department of health), Professor Hilary Graham is someone that overwhelmingly believes that society has now made lepers of the very people that nannies like herself were ostensibly trying to help. It sure took them some time to come around to that obvious conclusion...perhaps they've spent some time in the blogosphere reading and understanding what those that are most affected by the ban think. I think the Americans call it thinking outside the box.
I have to say though, she has called for the relentless anti-smoking campaign to be withdrawn to allow some sort of hiatus to develop whereby society doesn't continue this vilification for a while. Well that's nice...a bit late though...once this persecutory behaviour has established itself in the human Psyche, then it will stay permanently. Trying to roll this backwards will be virtually impossible to do...at least for the next few decades.
The report raises issues about social class, I'm sure that you've read many times that poor people do most of the smoking and therefore they in some way should be pitied...after all they can't help it can they? How deeply patronising! Don't people from other classes smoke regularly, it has never been simply confined to one socio-economic class, smoking straddles and always will - the complete social divide.

Still any acknowledgment that this smoking ban legislation has created a group that can be legally hated is better than no acknowledgment...and that as far as were're concerned is called progress.