Daily Times

Sitting in Court Room No 1 at the Lahore Registry of the Supreme Court last week, I was deeply amused by a case that was taken up by the honourable three-member bench. It was an appeal against ejectment, which had been filed on behalf of a tenant. Apparently, the landlord had asked the tenant to vacate the premises, a shop, which he himself needed for his personal use. And his personal use was that he wanted to expand his shop, which he ran adjacent to the shop he had rented out.

The argument advanced on behalf of the tenant was that the honourable court should not allow the landlord to eject him because the personal need cited was expansion of shop where cigarettes and ‘paans’ were sold! It was argued that since smoking kills people, the landlord should not be allowed to expand his shop in order to protect the lives of thousands of susceptible citizens, which of course was the prime duty of the honourable court!

My earliest memories of smoking are of when I was five and my brother nearly seven. We used to roll up pages torn out of our notebooks, light them at the kitchen stove, and blow out, dancing and singing ‘dum maro dum’ imitating the hippies!

My friend and I planned to try smoking when we were 15-years-old. Living in London, our access to cigarettes was virtually impossible at the time as no shop would sell us any and nor did we have the required guts to attempt such a feat! One day immense good fortune shone on us; one of my father’s friends forgot his half-empty pack at our house and as mother luck would have it, my parents had to go out of the city for a couple of days. My friend, now a doctor, came over and we took out a cigarette each with mixed feelings of immense reverence and incomprehensible fear of being caught! The height of our naivety and stupidity can be gauged from the fact that we never inhaled the smoke and after the cigarette burnt out we did not know how to dispose of the evidence of the crime, the butt! Shaking with fear of being discovered in this huge crime, we climbed up on a neighbour’s wall and threw the evidence in the tall grass. For days thereafter I was unable to sleep; the fear of being discovered was enough to put an end to any fascination I might have harboured for a ‘fag’!

Mercifully, as awareness and education prevailed on my naive mind I became opposed to smoking and more especially to secondhand smoke. The initial childhood fascination I had was evidently due to the glamorous media portrayal of smokers and of course Zeenat Aman! I have no qualms about people trying to kill themselves by smoking three packs a day or taking ‘naswar’ or chewing tobacco, but I have a serious issue with it being extended to others who do not wish to die, mutilated, especially innocent children. When the anti-smoking law came into force in Pakistan, I was a nuisance at restaurants, complaining of violations and writing thesis-length fuming complaints addressed to deaf ears and blind eyes.

According to pulmonologist Dr Javaid Khan, “Tobacco is responsible for 100,000 deaths annually in Pakistan. The number of female smokers in their teens and 20s has increased rapidly. These women smokers are also going to face the same health issues due to tobacco usage as those being suffered by male smokers. Pakistanis in general consume Rs 450 billion worth of tobacco annually and this trend needs to be curbed.”

Last month we were approached by a cafe owner for legal advice. Apparently the police had raided his restaurant and arrested three of his employees allegedly for selling ‘sheesha’ (smoke pipe) to juveniles. He was under the impression that selling ‘sheesha’ was allowed by a High Court order as most restaurants and cafes were checking identity cards before providing it to their customers. Apart from this a frequent and adequate ‘settlement’ with the raiding party also keeps the smoke going who are then more than happy to look the other way! There is no order by the honourable High Court that allows public smoking for anyone, adult and child inclusive.

Reportedly smoking ‘sheesha’ for an hour is equivalent to smoking 100 cigarettes but the sad part is that according to a World Health Organisation (WHO) study, 70 percent parents accepted ‘sheesha’ smoking as compared to 15 percent who accepted cigarette smoking. The UN reports that nearly six million people have been killed this year from tobacco use out of which 600,000 died due to exposure to tobacco smoke (secondhand smoke, SHS or environmental tobacco smoke, ETS).

In 2002, the Prohibition of Smoking and Protection of Non-Smoker’s Health Ordinance was promulgated; the aim of this law is to ban smoking and other tobacco uses in public places and offices as well as on public vehicles to protect people against the dangers of passive smoke inhalation. While the intention in making this law might be commendable, the procedure for handling violators is absurd at best. According to this law a police officer, not below the rank of a Sub-Inspector or anybody ‘authorised’ by the government, has the power to ‘eject’ a violator from a public place. So, all of us non-smokers who will probably die due to passive smoking now have the option to call the Police Emergency 15 to report a person ‘smoking’! The fines start from Rs 1,000 for a first violation and go up to Rs 100,000 for second or third; violations for advertisements and sale carry an initial fine of Rs 5,000 and can go up to Rs 100,000 and can include imprisonment up to three months. A court cannot take cognizance of a violation unless the authorised officer or a police officer files a complaint!

While there is no denying that using tobacco in any form, including smoking it through cigarettes, hookahs, pipes, sheeshas, cigars and so on is seriously injurious to health and leads to various forms of cancer and causes death, it is also a fact that its use whilst regulated under the law has not been made illegal. Article 4 of the constitution guarantees that “no person shall be prevented from or be hindered in doing that which is not prohibited by law; and no person shall be compelled to do that which the law does not require him to do”. Article 18 confers the fundamental right of freedom of trade, business or profession upon a citizen whereby he has every “right to enter upon any lawful profession or occupation and to conduct any lawful trade or business”.

The anti-smoking laws are violated with impunity in restaurants, clubs, shops, banks and other public places. There is a serious lack of understanding what secondhand smoke does as well as the fact that most smokers do not care two hoots for the health of others, including their own children. Maybe the government should establish an emergency helpline for passive smokers, which connects to the local fire brigade. Let there be an amendment in the law that empowers our brave firemen to be the ones to put the fire out instead of the local police and a proviso should be added, akin to the right of self-defence, which empowers our brave civilians to take ‘appropriate’ measures, including a bucket of water to save numerous lives including their own, lest our emergency services get delayed or cannot be contacted in time!

The case of the disgruntled tenant who had litigated against his landlord to save himself from being ejected from the rented premises for four years finally met his end as his petition was dismissed. The disillusioned guy probably viewed himself as a messiah of the people of smoking Pakistan; too bad that like all self-proclaimed messiahs available in the local market, this too was for self-preservation!

The writer is an advocate of the high court