Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 2:"Page 2, line 2, leave out ““any other substance”” and insert ““such other substances as may be prescribed in regulations””" The noble Earl said: In moving this amendment, I shall also speak to Amendments Nos. 3 and 4. Clause 1(2)(a) defines ““smoking”” as"““smoking tobacco or anything which contains tobacco, or smoking any other substance””." I am troubled by the phrase ““any other substance””, and it is important that we take a brief look at it. The focus of the SCOTH report, as we all know, is on tobacco and the effects on people’s health of inhaling second-hand smoke. I am not aware that SCOTH has made any particular pronouncements about the smoke from substances other than tobacco. In fact members of that committee confirmed to me that they have not. So the question arises: on what scientific basis have the Government included within the scope of the ban the smoking of absolutely every substance in addition to tobacco? This may seem like a pedantic point, but I do not believe it is. Policy needs to be evidence-based. There is a whole range of products that have nothing whatever to do with tobacco, but which are on sale for people to smoke. I have details here of a number of herbal cigarettes. Some of these cigarettes are advertised as being therapeutic for particular conditions such as blood pressure, asthma, digestive problems and bronchitis. Others are promoted as helping tobacco smokers quit the habit of smoking ordinary cigarettes. Others again are billed as having a value in Ayurvedic medicine. I even have details of dried fruit blends for smoking in hookahs. I hold no brief for any of these products, nor have I ever tried them, but I confess that I cannot see a rationale for banning them in either the workplace or premises open to the public in the absence of evidence that they do harm to others. It may be that such evidence will emerge in the future. On the possibility that it may, there is a case for leaving the terms of Clause 1(2) flexible, to allow further regulations to be made if the need arises. Until then, if someone wants to have a drink in a pub and smoke a marshmallow and red clover cigarette, or one with ginseng and rose petals, or honey, vanilla and apples, I for one do not see why they should be criminalized for doing that. It is clear from reading Clause 1(2)(b) that to count as engaging in the act of smoking, a person does not actually have to put a lighted cigarette, pipe or cigar to his lips. The Bill defines him as smoking if he is merely in possession of a lit substance in a form in which it could be smoked. That could lead to anomalies, because I am not sure what ““being in possession”” could actually amount to. If I pass by a table in a restaurant and happen to see a lighted cigarette sitting in an ashtray; and I then stub it out, technically I would appear to have been guilty of smoking, because I was in possession of that lit cigarette when I picked it up. If on a factory floor I were to come across a burning fag end—which I might think was a fire hazard—I must not pick it up in order to dispose of it, because if I did, I would technically be smoking it. If in a pub or club or restaurant I hold a lit cigarette on behalf of someone else who is smoking it, I am apparently as guilty as he is under the terms of the clause. Is that really what we mean the Bill to say? One could take the argument a little further—I am hesitant to do so, but I will. If it is not necessary to put something to one’s lips in order to be deemed as smoking it, then one wonders whether a shopkeeper who lights a joss stick in his shop is guilty of an offence. A joss stick may not be something that one smokes in the same way that one smokes a cigarette, but the whole point of a joss stick is to inhale the smoke. The same applies to incense in a church; the point of incense is for people to smell the smoke from it. A priest who lights incense and takes it through the church for the congregation to smell, may technically be guilty of smoking. That sounds far-fetched, and I sincerely hope that it is, but one gets to these examples by taking the wording of the clause absolutely literally. Will the Minister reassure me convincingly that the wording is not open to extreme interpretations of the kind to which I have referred? I beg to move.