As If You Didn’t Know That!
Just read that having a fag when you get behind the wheel isn’t good for you, because scientists have declared that smoking inside your car, produces levels of pollution that exceeds official safe limits. Wow, they will be telling us Santa Claus isn’t real next.
Now, I can speak with some authority here, having until 6 months or so ago, being a life long smoker and frankly, all these kind of warnings and threats that its dangerous, means nothing and no smoker worth his salt would be in the slightest bit effected by what ever the boffins tell them, as its what they choose to do.
Never the less, this is what the men in white coats say. They looked at the air quality over a number of car journeys and found out that the harmful levels were almost 3 times over what the World Health Organisation say is the safe limit. Even if you have your windows open and you smoke just one cigarette, it’s claimed that particulate matter levels will still rise above the safe limits. Meanwhile, the level of second hand smoke zipping around in your car would equate to between a third and a half of what you might experience in a typical bar before the smoking ban.
Clearly the anti-smoking lobby hasn’t gone away and is dead set on interfering with what you might do in a vehicle you own or perhaps even in your own home, whilst as you might expect the smokers lobby group ‘Forest’ strongly oppose any calls to ban smoking in cars.
One final point and I write as an “ex smoker”. Smoking is legal and whilst for sure, no one should have the right to do something that effects those around them adversely. There is however one adverse effect that’s going to happen, and that’s going to be the loss of income by way of tax and vat when everyone stops smoking. Yes, we know that smoking costs the NHS lots of money, but the last reported figure as to the cost of smoking treatments and the deaths of smokers reported by the NHS is £5.2 billion plus around another £150 million in stopping smoking therapy and medication, but you have to balance that against the £12.1 billion of income directly from smokers. So smoking produces a net profit to the country of almost £7 billion ‘”each year” which the rest of the population are going to have to make up by paying other kinds of taxes. Add to that a likelihood that smokers will die younger, which will mean they are not around to claim the state pension and winter heating allowance for so long and whilst yes, we know its not PC and we know its not pleasant, but smokers are good for the economy!
