One of the most common complaints you’ll hear from cigar smokers in Australia is the increasing heavy-handedness of State legislation. It’s one things to ban smoking of any kind from places likely to be frequented by non-smokers, such as restaurants, sporting facilities, and offices. It’s entirely another thing to ban smoking cigars in a dedicated cigar club. If I may be permitted a loose analogy, it is like banning street prostitution and then also lumping into the legislation banning sex between consulting adults in a brothel. Brothels are legal in most Australian states but smoking cigars in a cigar club is not? That doesn’t make much sense to me.
Like many cigar smokers I know, I have never been a cigarette smoker. Therefore, I am quite conscious that many people (myself included) do not like secondhand smoke. I don’t like to smoke cigars in public places where it might offend. Only an asshole would want to stick their cigar smoke in other people’s faces. As much as I don’t understand why people don’t appreciate the aroma of a premium cigar, I would never wish to force it upon them, any more than I would try to force a tee-totaller to drink a finger of Talisker.
Which is all the more reason to have dedicated venues for cigar smokers.
As I understand it, the main reasons for the introduction of heavier smoking restrictions are as follows:
1. Protecting non-smokers from secondhand smoke.
2. Protecting smokers from themselves.
The first point is obvious and I doubt many of us would disagree.
The second point is more troubling.
In a free society, it seems that people should have the right to eat, drink and smoke whatever they choose, as long as they aren’t hurting others in the process. The excuse used by governments to curb smoking is the burden on the public health system, which is reasonable, but does this apply to cigars?
The science conclusively says NO. The most comprehensive report on the subject (which I’ve blogged about before), a 1998 report called “Cigar Smoking: Overview and Current State of the Science” by David M. Burns that is published on the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s site, is very clear on the subject:
The pattern of excess disease risk among cigar smokers is not identical to that observed in cigarette smokers. Mortality ratios among cigarette smokers are much higher than those among cigar smokers for coronary heart disease, COPD (Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and lung cancer.
An explanation for the difference in mortality pattern between cigarette smokers and cigar smokers lies in differences in the depth and likelihood of inhalation of tobacco smoke between these two groups of smokers. Most cigarette smokers report inhaling the smoke into their lungs, while over three-quarters of the males who have only smoked cigars report that they never inhale.
The fraction of adult cigar smokers who smoke cigars every day is much smaller than the fraction of cigarette or smokeless tobacco users who use every day. This suggests that cigar smoking among adults, while probably able to cause addiction to nicotine, is less likely to do so than cigarette smoking or smokeless tobacco use. Data from California, which show that the recent change in cigar use among adults is largely an increase in occasional use, also suggests that the addictive potential of cigars is lower than that for cigarettes.
When cigar smokers don’t inhale or smoke few cigars per day, the risks are only slightly above those of never smokers.
So it seems clear that suggesting the risks associated with smoking cigars is the same as smoking cigarettes is not based on science. It’s like saying that the risk of riding a motor bike is the same as flying in a commercial plane. It just doesn’t work that way.
