The rights of smokers: I've seen the future and it makes me smoke

IT IS TRUE that peer-group pressure encourages smoking. After a lifetime of resistance, I finally gave in and started smoking at the age of 35. One drug, as they say, leads to another. Contrary to popular opinion, I believe that hard drugs lead inevitably to soft drugs. That's my experience anyway.

Even now, though, my habit is not properly formed. I can go for weeks without a cigarette then smoke millions in a night. My friend Deborah always complains: "You are the most crap smoker I know". But I maintain that though I am not a particularly committed smoker, I am committed to the idea of smoking.

Recent visits to California have greatly increased my commitment. I have seen the future and it is ghastly. I felt compelled to smoke twice as much there as usual. The question, "Do you mind if I smoke?" is equivalent to saying, "May I use your children in a Satanic ritual?" Nipping into the garden is also out of the question. The great outdoors apparently belongs to everybody. Except smokers.

I have had the bizarre experience of being seated outside at a restaurant in order to abuse myself. There were many empty tables around us. Yet, within minutes other people were seated beside us who proceeded to complain. This begs the question: who does public space actually belong to?

The arguments about passive smoking have not led, among smokers anyway, to anything resembling a resistance movement; but non-smokers have become increasingly aggressive towards anyone who they see as violating their right to clean, fresh air.

In America, of all places, where the car is king, one might presume there to be equal concern about pollution; but there isn't. In the land of individualism, the car continues to rule, because so much social and economic life is based around car ownership. Smoking, an individual activity, is regarded as profoundly anti-social.

Such attitudes are crossing the Atlantic. Tower Hamlets Council is to try to ban its workers from smoking outside its town hall buildings. The new rules, expected to be approved next year, would mean that employees cannot smoke, in working time, inside or outside any council building or vehicle.

No one can believe that this will stop those who smoke from smoking. I suppose it will just add an extra thrill to sneaking off for a quick fag, the very thrill that gets so many people hooked in the first place.

What is astonishing about California is not that it is run by health freaks but the passivity of smokers themselves. You can be in a bar full of Hells Angels who meekly leave the bar if they want a cigarette. On St Patrick's night, it was still hard to find an Irish bar that allowed smoking. We eventually reached a compromise, whereby we could smoke but leave no evidence. "You have to take your butts outside," said the barman menacingly.

It is easy enough, I suppose, to divide and rule. If the world is made up of smokers (dirty, filthy, selfish types who pour fumes out into the environment) and non-smokers (clean-living saints who are considerate both of their own and others health), then it's fine to wage a war on smokers. The majority of people, when polled, will vote to work in a smoke- free environment and I don't blame them. They want to be able to use public transport without having to encounter the stale smell of cigarette smoke. Far enough. But would the majority of people also vote to ban smoking altogether?

If smoking were to be presented as a civil liberties issue - the rights of smokers to self-destruct versus the rights of non-smokers to a smoke- free environment - surely you would get a more balanced view. This compromise is one we seemed to have achieved without too fuss much already. There is less and less smoking in confined public spaces. Outside, however, still means outside, and is therefore beyond jurisdiction. The Californian situation seems to redefine public space as only available to certain members of the public (ie, non-smokers).

Those who are really concerned about smoking - particularly the numbers of young women smoking - should pay attention. Young women smoke not just to keep their weight down but because they believe it to be "cool". Anti- smoking bodies are keen to re-educate these misguided young things so that they realise that smoking isn't actually cool. It kills you or, worse, makes you smell so bad so you cannot get a boyfriend.

Yet, the more you drive smoking underground, the cooler you make it. The coolest man I met in California was full of the joys of extra-wide Camels and regaling me with tales of how his friend David was being driven out of California because of the draconian anti smoking legislation. David, a libertarian, had originally gone to California for the freedom and light it offered. The David, he was talking about was David Hockney.

The country that produced the civil rights movement and gay liberation once defined civil disobedience as part of political activism. Nowadays civil disobedience has been reduced to simply lighting-up in public. The political has become entirely personalised

The deadly problems of American society make many citizens feel personally powerless. By insisting that others do not blow smoke in their faces, they desperately exercise control in the tiny space they feel they can. To be anti-smoking also allows the majority to be victims. You don't have to be black, poor, gay or female to feel in some way "violated" by the behaviour of others. Anti-smoking legislation allows people to assert their "rights" in a way that they rarely do in other areas of their lives.

Smoke itself - vague, cloudy, insidious - comes to represent all kinds of social evils that leak into our environment. But, unlike racism, poverty or crime, smoking can simply be banned.

In such an environment it is undoubtedly cool to smoke, to remind others of human frailty and human failings, to appear publicly fallible. The anti-smoking lobby has achieved what pathetic smokers themselves never could. They have given credence to the adolescent idea of smoking as intrinsically rebellious, as active rather than passive, as meaningful rather than meaningless.

At last we find ourselves truly rebels without any cause whatsoever. But my god do we have an effect.