By the time you read this, the Tobacco Control Bill will be an Act, awaiting only the proclamation of the President before it is a punishable offence to smoke just about anywhere. The Act, I expect, will join those preventing littering and mandating the use of seatbelts (among many other bits of legislation relating to motoring behaviour) that, on paper, make the country appear awfully progressive but which in reality are seldom enforced.

The Tobacco Control Act will stand proudly as another law that will be utilised by law enforcement for nuisance benefit. We all have stories of, for example, driving with a broken tail light for three weeks, passing police officers here and there, and receiving no attention for it until the moment when we encounter a particularly bad-tempered or officious officer who issues a ticket for it. It’s like officers daily driving past a block where they smell marijuana being smoked but do nothing until the day they are assigned to harass the limers on the block or when they discern a look or attitude they do not like, then everyone gets spread and rubbed down and one or two are thrown in a police vehicle and taken for processing.

I cannot see how enforcement of the new tobacco legislation will be anything more than for nuisance value. What’s to prevent a smoker from discarding the cigarette when an officer is within sight? Who is going to stand 15 metres from each school to bully someone who smokes? Who is going to measure the no-smoking zone?

I could also demonstrate the hypocrisy of this Government’s veneer of care for citizens’ well being while contradictorily pushing the smelter agenda; the amount of revenue Government receives from tobacco companies; Government’s support for construction across the country that has contributed to unhealthy and costly flooding everywhere; the burden on the health sector’s resources from treating stabbings, shooting, choppings, vehicular accident victims to the extent that care cannot be provided to other patients; the case of the disappearing Children’s Authority Bill and the mystery of the revised gender policy.

But that seems too easy, there being such numerous examples of double standards, unenforced legislation and poor prioritising in the short history of this small place.

One of the more troubling aspects of the Tobacco Control Act is how it legitimises discrimination against smokers, how it renders tobacco smoking a taboo and how it achieves this in relation to- let us not forget-a legal product.

From the 1960s, when the US Surgeon General warned that smoking was dangerous to health to now, there has been growing hostility against smokers that severely infringes on people’s human right to consume a legal product. The smoke screen of the dangers of second hand smoke is the primary strategy used to divide smokers and non-smokers and to gather support internationally for oppressive restrictions on smoking. That the dangers of second hand smoke are scientifically contested, that as far as I am aware there is yet to be a death certificate stating cause of death as second hand smoking or smoking even are issues far too heavy for us here to consider. It is considerably easier to parrot internationally fashionable legislation and issue snide remarks about the powerful tobacco lobby without reference to the powerful anti-smoking lobby that has over simplified the issue of smoking in public in order to generate widespread support for its well-financed agenda.

What began as a fair and reasonable campaign to encourage smokers to respect the wishes of non-smokers has evolved into outright hostility by anti-smoking activists and the demonisation of anyone who chooses to smoke. This has worked so well that smokers themselves have become voiceless victims, huddling to tief a smoke, targets of unprovoked verbal sanctions, pariahs who have also internalised these messages and consider themselves engaging in ’a nasty habit’.

This authoritarian piece of legislation undermines the civil liberties of citizens to an unacceptable extent and legitimises discrimination against smokers to an extent that infringes on their human rights. This is not the same as saying that there ought to be no control at all on smoking or that all the data relating to the risks of smoking is inaccurate.

But to impose such hefty fines, to consider outlawing the sale of single cigarettes, to enter people’s homes and legislate on the consumption of, I repeat, a legal product, is surely going too far. But then again, if there is one country in the world these days where going too far is commonplace, Trinidad and Tobago appears to be it. Note that only a couple Senators reacted to the draconian impositions in the original Bill and the Prime Minister’s studied response to concerns about the sweeping controls on the population was that the legislation would not bother him since he stopped smoking in 1996.

The context of the Act is not to educate but to punish, a point eloquently made in a recent Express editorial. Education would encourage self-censorship; punishment imposes restrictions and to hell with those who don’t like it. We could have done it differently. We could have critically reviewed other anti-smoking legislation and crafted a Bill that is unique and progressive, that demonstrates temperance, and that is compatible to our outdoor, tropical culture. The Government chose not to. The population acquiesced.