HEALTH PLUS:A war - not between smokers and non-smokers - but between addiction and health
THERE ARE smokers and non-smokers. The gap between them is widening. Their tolerance for each other is reducing. The discourse that each group has about the other is increasing in negativity.
They are becoming polarised in their practices and their beliefs. They understand each other less and resist each others' viewpoints more. An inadvertent war has begun. It is interesting from a sociological viewpoint, because if divisions can arise around an issue such as smoking, then it shows how swift the human propensity is to take up a position and become more entrenched in it as time goes by.
Observing what happens when segregation is introduced, whatever the rationale or regardless of the ostensible cultural acceptance of it, is interesting. For the smoking ban has created two distinct categories of people and they are forming separate ideological and practice camps. What began as practical separation seems to have taken on dimensions not originally anticipated.
That tells us something about how easily we can find ourselves in opposition to each other when structures divide us and how separation can lead to prejudice.
Additionally, the more smokers smoke, the more non-smokers feel imposed upon by their habit.
Equally the more non-smokers protest about smokers and move them further away from potential pollution of non-smokers' fresh air space, the more smokers claim their right to smoke, to make decisions about their own lives and to exclude non- smokers from designated smoking areas.
To the traditional categories that bind or separate people from each other such as race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religiosity or geography, may be added another: smoker status. Each views the other negatively.
Non-smokers are often regarded as self-righteous, health obsessed, anally retentive, hypochondriacal, sanctimonious and smug.
Those who are ex-smokers are seen to be the worst offenders. Added to their self-satisfied liberation from the tyranny of the cigarette, is their belief that self-control, willpower and common sense should convince smokers to quit as they themselves have done so successfully.
Non-smokers also object to having to penetrate a toxic fog entering and exiting buildings, inhaling what has passed through another person's respiratory system, suffering from sinusitis and asthma because other people pollute the atmosphere around them.
Non-smokers are angry that eating al fresco means sitting with smokers, most of whom regard themselves as having a prior claim to outdoor space.
Non-smokers are furious that smokers then point their cigarette smoke away from themselves and towards non-smokers. They are angry that they cough and splutter with self-inflicted illness.
Non-smokers protest that while they may be legally protected indoors from smoke, they are now much more vulnerable outdoors in the after waft of smokers topping up their nicotine levels.
But there is a further issue that is angering non-smokers: that is the number of unofficial breaks in the working day taken by smokers.
Smokers may gain as much as a half day off work a week attending to their habit. Non-smokers are now not only treated inequitably in the work place in terms of breaks but have additional work imposed on them during their colleagues' absences outdoors.
Meanwhile, smokers have retaliated with their own brand of camaraderie in adversity. Like endangered species whose natural habitats have been eroded they congregate. They form friendships with people they might otherwise never get to know.
Banished to smoke outdoors, hierarchical structures disappear. Smokers are united by their smoking. There is collegiality in their status, reminiscent of the bonds formed in school days by those put outside the classroom door: an unspoken understanding that the system may evict you but it can't stop you.
Therein lies a problem. Added to the addiction of smoking is a new addiction: that of being part of a defiant minority group. The social stigma of being a smoker is being replaced by the social support smokers are giving to each other which may override the reality of the serious health consequences for them.
Because at the end of the day it's worth remembering that the war is not between smokers and non-smokers, but the struggle between addiction and health and those who profit from the needs of others.
• Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murray is director of the Student Counselling Services at UCD