If you support freedom then you should oppose what the Smokers' Rights Party stands for.

As I pointed out in the Smokers' Rights Party's Facebook page:

- allowing smoking in a venue (such as a pub) is discriminatory, as it means that people with particular medical conditions - such as asthma, pregnancy, emphysema, etc. - will not be able to go to the venue. Allowing business-owners to permit smoking in their businesses is akin to calling for the repeal of a law that mandates that all businesses have wheelchair access.

- to allow business-owners to permit smoking at their businesses is a violation of the rights of the business' employees to a safe and healthy working environment.

- the tobacco industry is riddled with human trafficking, environmental damage, and child labour. Whenever you buy tobacco you are supporting this.

- smoking pollutes the air.

- there are the further problems of people smoking around their children, smoking around their pets, smoking while pregnant, and littering their cigarette butts. I recognise that not all smokers are guilty of this, but each of them is enough of a problem on its own to warrant anti-smoking and anti-tobacco laws.

Rachel Connor is correct that littering one's cigarette butts is illegal. However, countless smokers break that law every day and couldn't care less.

Regarding the "nanny-state" argument, I would be interested if Rachel Connor opposes laws mandating cyclists and motorcyclists wear helmets, and that people riding in cars and trucks wear seatbelts.

Is the author's problem her libertarianism?

During the seventies I read two of Ayn Rand's books because Malcolm Fraser indicated that he had been influenced by her philosophy. That philosophy has been comprehensively discredited. Maybe MF had a Road to Damascus experience when on the "Eminent Persons" committee in South Africa during the apartheid era.

Human nature is more geared to co-operation than it is to tough competition except if stirred by "us and them" indoctrination.

We were co-operative hunters and gatherers for millions of years before agriculture became our way about 10,000 years ago. Each group tended to have its own hunting territory and "them" contacts were probably few.

Dear Foyle,

<<Human nature is more geared to co-operation than it is to tough competition except if stirred by "us and them" indoctrination.>>

Yes, with two caveats:

1. Human nature is geared for co-operation within reasonably-sized groups where everyone knows everyone else. Also, when someone was unhappy with his group, they could simply cross the hill to the next valley and join "them". This experiment of forcing together a 6-9-digit number of people, is unprecedented and from an ecological point of view is not likely to last long.

2. While humans necessarily follow their nature, we are not humans: we only wear a human body for some 70-100 years, so we do have the potential and hope to grow beyond human limitations rather than be enslaved to them.

While Rachel is correct on every count, pity she chose to head her campaign with the lowest of freedoms, choosing of all things (though treading carefully) to campaign on an issue that is bordering on harming others. The elephant in the room is the involuntary nature of the territory-based state, that we are forced into a society of millions without ever being asked whether we agree to have anything to do with them, regardless whether or not we have common goals with them.

Had we freely consented to be part of the group to begin with, then I wouldn't see a problem with the group imposing its shared values on us. Yet this is currently not the case.

On the TV this morning were images of well heeled suckers pulling nicotine laden vapor into their lungs, and out their flared nostrils, from an E smoke!
Apparently, this satisfies the need to imbibe nicotine and the oral gratification that is also part of the addiction that is smoking.
Now, this form of smoking, doesn't foul the air, with carcinogenic tar or make my hair and clothes smell like an ashtray!
And kissing one of these addicts, leaves a very unpleasant after taste, like a very dirty tar filled ashtray! It makes me a former smoker, spit for literal hours!
I enjoy a few beers now and then, the outcome of my pleasure is increased urination!
But, I just don't have a right to climb on a chair and hiss on your head, to in a word, share the outcome of my pleasure.
I would be charged with criminal assault offence, creating a public nuisance and halve a dozen statutes that are yet to come to mind!
No smoker has the right to forcibly share his or her particular addiction, with those that don't!
And there are now just too many alternatives or treatments, for this antisocial behavior to be allowed to continue, in any public venue!
Except say, E smokes for the heavily addicted.
E smokes seem to result in a 60% quitting rate, far and away much more successful than any other alternative or substitute; and the only reason for tolerating this far less harmful, non tar example, in a public place?
Albeit, one with sheltered corners reserved exclusively for the E smoking nicotine addict!
Rhrosty.

If you want to ban smoking on health grounds, you have to immediately ban at least 90% of the council busses in Brisbane, & 99% of all other busses including & particularly school busses. Their exhausts make cigarette smoke almost pure by comparison.

If you were a doctor 20 years ago, the ploy of attacking smokers to divert the attention of how many clients your profession was maiming & killing was a good, & most successful one.

If you just like bossing others around, yea, smokers are a good target.

If there were still the same percentage of smokers today as 20 years ago, the tax they would pay would just about pay off Labour's deficit.

I'm a hard hearted bugger, with not much sympathy for most who cause their own problems, but older smokers are one group I feel sorry for. I reckon they have had a raw deal.

We continually have bleeding hearts crying for drug addicts, of all the illegal drugs, & spend billions on them. Studies I have read tell us that nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs known, but we do nothing but denigrate the poor bloody smoker.

Smoking is a omplicated topic.
My father was a heavy smoker, as was his father. My father died at age 84, with emphysema. He never had a heart problem. His elder brother was a non smoker who died of a heart attack at age 68. My brother was a non smoker who died o a heart attack at age 68. My younger brother is a heavy smoker and at age 70 has never had a heart problem.

I am a non smoker, and at age 68 had open heart surgery. Another brother gave up smoking, and now has heart problems.

Ehese are merely observations. I have no conclusions, but deplore some of the attitudes to smokers