I'm not sure we're even asking the right questions. So many of the decisions and actions cannot bear logical defence, let alone risk-return scrutiny. So many consequences, foreseen or otherwise, cannot be justified. Evidence seems impotent, both as a decision driver, or even as a basis to reconsider, given the facts.
Increasingly, we seem to be on our own path. Are we really that different, in every measurable way, from every other country on the planet? Or are there other agendas? There simply have to be.
When last I checked we were the only country in the world to have banned smoking because of Covid-19. The only country in the whole darn world. We sure as hell aren't the only country in the world with smoking-related illnesses, but the correlations simply aren't high enough to prove that the ban is worth the trouble. Once again, that hardly seems to be the point.
I don't have the statistics, but the solution was to build more facilities, more beds, to cater for the extra smoker comorbidity. We haven't done that, it seems, and we're peaking anyway.
Of course, we'll never be able to tell whether the ban on smoking had the desired effect on the number of deaths due to Covid-19. Because nobody stops smoking, especially or because you tell them to, pandemic or not. If they did, everyone would've given up at 14.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that smoking is bad for you - that empirical evidence is beyond question. Wake up, that's not the point.
Unlike so many other oppressive regimes, we chose to live in a constitutional democracy where, paraphrasing, we are entitled to freedom of choice. Freedom of choice includes being able to do things that you know are bad for you, as long as they aren't bad for others (again, paraphrasing). By that rule it is clear that smokers can smoke, but outside. Fair deal.
We'll also never know whether this ban reduced the number of smokers, or the number of cigarettes smoked. I'll bet those numbers haven't changed much.
What we do know, however, is that revenues within the tobacco trade (throughout that whole ecosystem) haven't reduced, but have been diverted away from the formal market players (which pay billions in taxes, which benefit even us non-smokers) to the illicit dealers who are pocketing the Covid-19 premium on the streets of the underground market (revenues which are multiples of pre-Covid-19 prices).
Who knows where these untaxed monies are being spent, or whether they might even be better spent than the taxes are.
There are conspiracy theorists among us who argue that those making the rules must surely be sharing in the ill-gotten gains. However unlikely or unproven this may turn out to be, it is at least a logical explanation, in the absence of any other. This analysis can be extended to various other prohibitions and restrictions.
Not only is there no enduring logic, but there isn't a visible, provable, virtuous outcome either.
What is known, and provable and painful, is that the impact of unreasonable lockdowns on the economic wellbeing of the population is killing us. In a country where unemployment lies somewhere between 30% and 50%, it would be fair to consider it a comorbidity instead. If you can't eat, you won't live.
Poverty is a pandemic which will prove fatal where the comorbidities of inequality and unemployment are already present. Forget smoking, or drinking for that matter - let's ban unemployment! And while we're about it, let's ban increasingly centralised power structures before they become a habit even harder to give up than smoking.
Better still, let's ban old age, diabetes, previous heart conditions and respiratory complications - the real causes that team up with Covid-19 to kill us.
Let's ban old age, diabetes, previous heart conditions and respiratory complications - the real causes that team up with Covid-19 to kill us
Don't be ridiculous! You can't ban existing medical conditions!
I agree, but you can't stop people smoking either. And you can't selectively ban social interaction between human beings in a private place, and, and, and ...
Why can't we see each other in non-public places, by choice, when we practically have to see each other in public places, whether we like it or not. Not everyone can get everything bought online and delivered at home.
The list of nonsense is long. You can store and smoke dagga without a receipt, but not cigarettes? You can't manufacture gin for export. You can fly in a pressurised, air-circulating aircraft cabin, or squeeze into a taxi, but you can't go and visit a friend in the confines of a home.
Why not? There are other agendas, that's why not.
The government has the right, the obligation, to protect the innocent public from the intrusion of the virus carriers, but not to tell us what to do in our private lives and places, mostly because it doesn't work.
Instead, we'll all become criminals because of the imposition of the rules and regulations of the few, against the will of the many. Where have I heard that before?
There will either be an explosion, or a total disregard for the law. Ask any rocket scientist.
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