Smoking: it's goodbye to all that

THE TOBACCONIST. Alan D Myerthall may be a tobacconist but, oddly enough, he doesn’t view the smoking ban as a wholesale disaster. ''If I never sold another packet of cigarettes in my life it wouldn’t bother me one iota,'' he says. Myerthall has run the aficionados-only Pipe shop on Edinburgh’s Leith Walk for 34 years, a spell in which he has developed his own brand of smokers’ apartheid: pipes and cigars good; cigarettes bad. He says profit on a packet of cigarettes is non-existent, though it’s the conflation of categories that bothers him most – cigarette smokers inhale, he points out, while pipe and cigar users puff.

The smoking ban will mean Myerthall will be unable to let customers test various kinds of pipe tobacco in the shop; instead they will be obliged to stand beneath the awning outside. But he doesn’t anticipate that the ban will hurt his business particularly. Cigars and pipes are principally domestic preferences, added to which he has a thriving mail-order business, delivering products worldwide.

Myerthall has also installed an ashtray outside his shop after one customer dropped a cigarette butt on the pavement before entering and was fined £50 for littering.

THE PIPE LOVER Ever the man of affairs, Donald Findlay – famously a pipe man but also a cigar smoker – will be responding to the ban with typically legalistic logical rigour. ''When it comes to restaurants,'' says the colourful QC, ''I just won’t bloody go, or I’ll go to a restaurant in England. I am not going to stand outside a restaurant smoking; it’s unthinkable. As for drinking, if a pub does not make an effort to accommodate me in this respect, with heated sheltered areas, I will not give it my custom. Simple as that.''

''If I were to smoke in a pub, be fined and refused to pay the fine, I would be jailed. But I could smoke in the police car that took me to prison and then in the prison itself. It’s soft-headed trendiness at its worst.

THE CIGARETTE SMOKER Formerly a two-lighters-a-day girl, Professor Sheila McLean, the director of the Institute of Law and Ethics in Medicine at Glasgow University, found cutting down was easy during recent trips to New Zealand and Dublin, where smoking indoors was outlawed some time ago.

''I found that when you don’t see it around you, you think about it less,'' she says. ''The same principle might well apply here. We’ve all learnt to adapt to circumstances in the last decade or so. Smoking is already banned on public transport, in cinemas and so on. If the ban had happened without those already being place it could have been very problematic. But we’ve accommodated restrictions as they’ve come along.''

The requirement to protect citizens from passive smoking can be achieved by segregating smokers into their own areas – so why is a legislative solution being imposed? ''There’s no legitimate basis for such a ban, beyond smokers setting a bad example to children. But children see their parents smoking at home. We have to conclude the state is taking it upon itself to make life choices on our behalf, which isn’t a happy thought.''

THE CAMPAIGNER. The tobacco industry’s most mortal enemy for the past 50 years has been Sir John Crofton, who will celebrate his 94th birthday at his Edinburgh home this week. For him, the Scottish smoking ban is the culmination of a lifetime’s work. ''It’s been a battle over the years,'' he says. ''But this law, especially the ban in pubs, which is the really striking thing, is extremely important. I’m an Irishman in origin, and if you can succeed with pubs in Ireland you should be able to succeed in Scotland.''

The Sunday Times, March 19, 2006

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*aficionados-only Pipeshop – магазин курительных принадлежностей, ориентированный только на страстных курильщиков.

* awning – тент, навес.

* soft-headed trendiness – "бестолковая тенденция".