Hard on the heels of Dr. Hilary Graham’s apparent regret over the ‘downside’ of her denormalisation programme, comes a second professional tobacco controller crying foul over policies that ‘go too far’.
Dr. Michael Seigel is proud to be called an anti-smoker. He is a firm believer in people not having to suffer second-hand smoke, for reasons that he claims are scientifically valid. But for outdoor bans, he says, the science is missing, no matter what the Surgeon General thinks.
His point seems to be that, by going ‘beyond the science’, the anti-smoking community risks moving into the lunatic fringe, taking with it the credibility of the public. He uses the word ‘fanatical’ once or twice.
What Seigel and Graham have in common is a fear that current anti-smoking fervour might damage the future of the entire anti-smoking movement. Where they part company is in their tolerance of ‘denormalisation’ as a tool to achieve anti-smoking goals.
Denormalisation is an ugly word for an ugly concept. It first pops up in Britain in the Royal College of Physicians report, ‘Ending tobacco smoking in Britain’, published in 2008.
Denormalising smoking, and hence reducing exposure to smoking products and role models, appears to be the most effective way to prevent the uptake of smoking by young people.
The obvious consequence of denormalising smoking – the denormalisation of smokers themselves – gets nary a mention in the RCP report.
Seigel appears to be genuinely repelled by the notion, but one wonders if this is only because the science isn’t there. The good doctor’s concern has always been the ‘protection’ of non-smokers from second hand smoke; if the science to underpin outdoor bans could somehow be conjured up, how keen would he be, then, to finger-wag the ‘fanatics’?
Dr. Hilary Graham is a different animal. She is, first and foremost, a class warrior who happens to have a side interest in making people stop smoking. Her criticism of denormalisation is that it only works on the middle classes. If the lower orders could only be raised to middle class status, she argues, they will all give up smoking in order to fit in. She criticises the anti-smoking movement for getting things back to front, and for pursuing a policy that has run out of steam. Far from denouncing ‘denormalisation, Dr. Graham would quite like to try it out on a less rigidly class-conscious country than Britain so she can see how it works out there.
Seigel is happy to engage with his critics. He is fully alive to the horrors of stigmatisation, even though he helped to kick start the process with his support for indoor smoking bans. For Dr. Hilary Graham, tucked away in Area 2 at York University, the world is her laboratory and we, the little people, no more than the lab rats in it.