Paul Thomas: Smokers splutter while the middle-class huffs and puffs

If the anti-booze brigade is looking for a jolting cautionary tale to illustrate the dangers of excessive drinking, it should look no further than the recent case of a Chinese man whose drunken friends inserted a swamp eel in his rectum when he passed out in an alcoholic stupor.

He died an agonising death as a result of the eel trying to chew its way out of the hole it found itself in.

It could be argued that the real moral of the story is don't get on the turps with people whose idea of a prank is shoving live creatures up their friends' backsides, but never mind - when it comes to scaring us into doing what's good for us, anything goes.

Like the Polish farmer who cut off his own head with a chainsaw. He first appeared in a New Scientist magazine story about the disorienting effects of alcohol and became a cyberspace legend.

But when researchers tried to verify the story, all they could find was a snippet from the Polish News Agency about drunken roistering which culminated in a man challenging a friend to behead him with an axe.

The two-paragraph report, which didn't appear anywhere else in the Polish media, contained three fairly obvious clues that it was a hoax.

In 1981 the Liberal peer Lord Avebury told a conference on alcoholism that Winston Churchill had been tired and emotional during much of World War II.

As Spectator columnist Auberon Waugh pointed out, the media cast doubt on Avebury's revelation, which merely confirmed what was well known in political circles, while swallowing an unsubstantiated claim by another speaker that drinking more than five pints of beer a day could cause one's genitals to shrink.

The current assault on things we like but which are bad for us hasn't quite reached the stage of not letting the facts stand in the way of a good story.

Nevertheless, Nanny-knows-best self-righteousness is in greater evidence than logic or common decency.

The price of cigarettes is going up by a third over the next two years. Associate Health Minister Tariana Turia says this will make people cut down, give them an incentive to quit and dissuade young people from taking up smoking.

No one takes much notice of anything Sir Roger Douglas says these days but surely he had cold logic on his side when he argued that, if that's the priority, why not increase the price by 600 per cent? And where's the consistency in ignoring the Law Commission's recommendation of a 50 per cent increase in the excise tax on alcohol as a means of reducing the damage done - often to others - by our most popular recreational drug?

What of those whose habit has suddenly become much more expensive? Maori are twice as likely to smoke as the overall population. In Australia, which has also just rammed up the price of cigarettes, 50 per cent of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders smoke compared to 18 per cent overall.

According to Glenda Humes of the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, the price hike will have little effect on smokers in the indigenous communities. "It would be a shame if people were choosing cigarettes over food or medication." One might add: or their children.

While smoking is now officially vile, it wasn't ever thus. What of lifelong smokers who took up the habit when it was widely seen as a sophisticated thing to do, and leading brands were endorsed by all manner of celebrities?

It all smacks of virtuous middle-class professionals enacting policy which will have a negligible effect on people like them, but could have a considerable effect on those less fortunate than them.

Despite all the talk about smoking being an addiction, there's little apparent recognition of what that involves: many people in a position to make the comparison swear that kicking heroin is easier than giving up smoking.

That's a good reason for putting resources into discouraging people from ever taking it up, but begs the question: is it fair to pressure lifelong smokers in their twilight years to give up, or to penalise them financially if they can't or won't?

There's a strand of progressivism which refuses to accept we are an imperfect species living in an imperfect world. It holds that human beings can be nudged or coerced into becoming better people and citizens.

But not all of us are fortunate enough to have good upbringings, decent educations, fulfilling jobs, emotionally nourishing personal circumstances, and healthy or uplifting hobbies. Should those who do begrudge those who don't the scant consolation of their petty vices?