A GENTLEMAN of my acquaintance has been a habitual smoker for more than half a century. When he started experimenting with tobacco in his salad days, it was time when the practice was romanticised and glamorised.

From the cheroots that became popular amongst army officers and gentlemen of leisure in the days of the West’s dalliance with Empire, to the Marlboro Man in the 1950s onwards, the smoking habit was considered one of the hallmarks of elegance and worldliness, initially amongst men but later amongst women too. (Though as always, different rules applied to the working classes, with reference to whom it has always been considered a ‘filthy habit’.)

Today, across the developed world, smokers are viewed — and rightly so — as pariahs, derelicts of an earlier, illiterate age when the habit was thought to have neither health nor social consequences. As late as the 1980s, smoking was a regular feature on film and television. Today, when those pieces of culture are aired, they carry large health warnings as corollaries. Works designed to stay true to a certain period, such as the highly popular television show Mad Men, today appear as anachronisms.

What starts with a cigarette here or there develops into a lifelong habit.

To go back to the gentleman who smokes, he recently found himself in an Islamabad hardware market, without his packet and overcome with the urge to light up. The shopkeeper sent a boy round to the khokha, to acquire just one or two cigarettes since the customer’s preferred brand would not be available here. The boy came back empty-handed: the problem was not that the child was underage, but that the kiosk wouldn’t sell loose cigarettes for fear of attracting the wrath of the law.

In March, the then federal cabinet banned the sale of loose cigarettes across the country, following a December 2016 suggestion by the Senate Standing Committee of Health Services. The logic is clear, and its success has amply been demonstrated across the world and in the region, such as in Iran and Nepal. The availability of loose cigarettes, or small 10-packs that were banned much earlier, encourage the habit, particularly in minors who usually do not have the funds to go for a whole packet. What starts with one cigarette here or there, hidden in the bathroom or under the generous shade of a bridge, almost inevitably develops into a lifelong habit. A ban on the sale of loose cigarettes is one of the moves recommended by the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

As ever, though, the success of legislation goes only so far as implementation is possible. The sale of this commodity to minors has been banned for a long time, but it is only enforced — and even then, patchily — in the more affluent areas of well-policed urban areas. If the gentleman in Islamabad was unable to buy a cigarette or two, go into the peri-urban areas of the Islamabad Capital Territory, or even markets such as Aabpara within it, and the poison is well within reach.

The sale of cigarettes to minors has been banned, as has smoking in all public places. Even so, a couple of years ago the Network for Consumer Protection released a report detailing how cigarette manufacturing companies target children even younger than 10 by strategically placing products and advertisements in shops and kiosks around educational institutions.

After conducting a survey around schools in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Lahore, Karachi and Quetta, the organisation released data showing that over 80 per cent of the shops around educational institutions surveyed had cigarettes displayed behind cash counters, and a large number had the products placed alongside snacks and candies. Some were even offering incentives such as limited time offers or free gifts. The overwhelming majority of shops surveyed did not display the ‘No sale to minors’ signs that the law requires. Similarly, the fate of the ban on smoking in public places is a joke.

Government estimates say that over 100,000 people die of smoking-related complications in Pakistan every year. Yet, on the eve of World No Tobacco Day on May 31, the government diluted a proposal to mark 85pc of a cigarette pack’s area with health warnings and pictures of the ravages it unleashes on the human body. The problem is that given that tobacco products are quite heavily taxed, the peddlers of poison become a pressure group with a fair amount of leverage over government policy — according to FBR sources, tobacco companies contribute some $500m to the national exchequer in excise duties.

Laws and their enforcement and higher duties are a must if Pakistan is to bring this menace under anything resembling control. But also needed is a society-wide vilification campaign and a barrage of public service messages that focus not just on the health consequences of smoking, but also present it as what it is: a relic from an era when responsibility for the self and society was not valued as highly as it is now.

The writer is a member of staff.
hajrahmumtaz@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, June 4th, 2018