It would appear that one out of every two smokers will die from a smoking related disease. Yet considerably fewer than one in every two drivers in excess of the legal alcohol limit will die or cause a death in a traffic accident.
Now, I've every reason to support road safety and believe that one road death is one too many. But I am also enough of a realist to know that we will never, as long as people drive, achieve a zero death target. Many road accident statistics are actually drunken pedestrians Garda road checks won't stop them, nor will they stop people who get into a car with the express intention of committing suicide.
Drivers will continue to drive tired, stressed, depressed, drugged, distracted by children fighting in the back seat, confused by poor road design and trapped by substandard road maintenance. Some day, technology will take control of personal transport to eliminate human frailties. Then the hacker will take over, or a Y2K Bug will come along and kill us in our hundreds.
Now, I'm not saying free the driver, what I am actually trying to get around to is - how many lives would be saved if the RSA Budget, or its equivalent were directed to getting people to stop smoking. By that I mean, serious checks on smoking in cars carrying or capable of carrying passengers. Smoking in enclosed spaces where other people may also be present.
As a smoker and I still consider myself one, because I am still at risk of going back to them, I never realised just how pervasive they can be. I can smell a smoker at 20 yards and I'm just four weeks off the weed. I watched a video by a friend of mine, Gerry Collins, on Quit.ie last night. For the first time ever the impact of smoking on my children got through to me. As a smoker, I was never aware of this. Not even in the slightest.
Smokers smoke in blissful ignorance of their impact on others. Just as drinkers drive in blissful ignorance of their potential impact on others. There is something alluring about smoking that draws you into it's web. It is like the impact of the third drink, or the second drink for some, the one where you begin to lose your ability to stop. You may not be drunk on your second drink, and you will probably drive as safely as everyone else.
The tragedy of the drunk driver who kills or is killed, is not even their third drink, but it is the third drink that leads to the fourth, fifth and sixth drink that leads to the truly drunk driver. The tragedy is their loss of self control. They can't stop themselves driving with the sixth drink taken, but with the third drink taken, they can't stop themselves sliding into the oblivion of that 6th drink.
It took me years of confused thinking to realise the significance of such a low alcohol limit for drivers of 50mg. You are most likely to be quite capable of driving safely at this limit. There are many politically incorrect reasons why some may be better able to do so than others, or why some with zero mg alcohol may be more dangerous than some with 100mg, but we can't all have personalised laws and have by default, set them to the lowest common denominator. An example of the power behind the drink driving campaign.
At 80mg many lose the ability to say no to another drink, while at 50 you can be fairly sure that sense will prevail. For the smoker, once you are hooked, you are like the drinker who has passed the point of no return. But unlike the drinker, you will not be sober in the morning. Unlike the drinker, you have a far higher probability of becoming a statistic.
We need stronger anti smoking legislation. We need smokers to feel the same heat as drunk drivers. Last year we lost 161 people on our roads, approximately 53 of them in alcohol related accidents (one third). The HSE estimates that we lost 100 times that 5,500, lives to smoking related diseases. We have about 1,000,000 smokers in Ireland, 500,000 of them will die prematurely. Surely this life saving target deserves a more serious commitment from government.
Four out of every five smokers want to quit this serious, deadly addiction, do we have to do it all on our own? Quit.ie is one aid, and it is a good one, but imagine if the government's drink driving campaign consisted of one website and a bit of advertising around New Year and Ash Wednesday. It is time to start taking cigarette addiction seriously.
No comments:
Post a Comment