The smokefree law

Notícia publicada em:

  • 16 de Dezembro de 2014

It’s amazing the power of intimidation of the tobacco industry. Not enough commercializing a product that causes chemical dependency and robs on average 12 years of a man’s life and 11 years of a woman’s life, the makers insist the continuing crime to press the authorities to prevent the application of any measure of protection to health which would be contrary to the financial interests.

After facing a lobby that would make the mafia envy, the law that prohibits smoking indoors throughout the national territory was adopted in 2011. The regulation, however, which should be immediate, took three  bureaucratic and unexplained years to finally enter into force on the day 3 of this month.

Prohibit smoking in public environments is measured that benefits everyone, indiscriminately. Those who do not smoke no longer breathe cigarette smoke of others, that when contacting the airway cause the same diseases that kill a smoker’s life. The scientific evidence are unquestionable, who considers this risk irrelevant is ignorant or malicious, there is no third option.

Prohibit smoking indoors, however, helps especially the smoker, who finds himself/herself forced to overcome nicotine withdrawal crises, drug addiction-related enslaver more that medicine knows. Be required to leave the site where one is, to light a cigarette, puts the smoker come face to face with the addiction that dominates him/her. At this time the ridiculous myth that smoking is a habit falls apart.

In addition to this psychological impact, the ban constrains the smoker. How many times an employee can leave the office to smoke on the sidewalk? Or abandon his friends on the table in the restaurant?

Public restrictions to cigarettes help deal with crises of anxiety that abstinence raises whenever blood levels of the drug fall, fundamental learning to be rid of her.

This is the detail that afflicts the industry: when the dependent can spend hours without a smoke, one can conclude that one has the strength to get rid of the dependence, opposite attitude to the intentions of the supplier.

State laws have already adopted the ban in São Paulo, Rio, Amazonas, Rondônia, Roraima, Paraná, Mato Grosso, Minas and Paraíba, without the movement of bars and restaurants in those States suffering any concussion. Still, Abrasel (Brazilian Association of Bars and Restaurants) will try in court the repeal of the federal law. The reason?

To the newspaper “O Estado de S. Paulo”, the entity explained that the law “creates an unimaginable necessity, preventing the individual rights of the citizen to consume a product that is lawful”.

Regardless of the disregard for the health of workers from bars and restaurants of members chaired by it, the argument of Abrasel is no different from that expressed by some intellectuals always appalled by “this attack on the freedom of the smoker”.

It is unbelievable that supposedly educated people don’t take into consideration the fact that the cigarette smoke spreads in the air that is breathed by unwary nearby, imbuing them the clothes with repulsive smell and lungs with toxic, carcinogenic agents.

There would be more logic to defend the right of the cocaine user by removing it from restaurants, churches, offices or airplanes: who smells powder do not harm bystanders.

Let’s not be naive, the aim of companies like Philip Morris and Souza Cruz is to vitiate the largest possible number of children and adolescents, with the clear goal of making them fall into the hand of the supplier to the rhythm of a pack a day for life.

Any measure or law that has as its goal to reduce smoking prevalence in the population and thus decrease human suffering and the number of deaths caused by him, travels against business interests.

Contradicted, the industry mobilizes marketing departments, hires the gold weight lobbyists, law firms and finance unscrupulous political campaigns, to preserve and, if possible, enlarge the captive market of the nicotine-dependent.