"Excuse me, I’m just going to pop inside for a breath of fresh air.”

That’s Sam’s new motto, as Mickey Martin’s latest dose of health fascism kicks in. Many times over the past ten days or so, Sam has found himself in the company of companionable and invariably attractive strangers, standing outside bars and restaurants puffing away and basking in our new outlaw glamour. For the first couple of hours, indeed, we were all interviews waiting to happen, liable to be ambushed at any moment by reporters from civilised nations like France, Japan and Russia where an adult’s personal vices are cherished not penalised.
Ah, but what about the poor passive smoker, you cry. Make the cheap parasitical bastards buy their own, is Sam’s instinctive response. Look, here’s the deal: I simply don’t believe that the passive smoking threat has been proved, any more than I believe that reefer madness is an inevitable by-product of toking jazz Woodbines. What the anti-dope and anti-smoke lobbies have in common is a delight in bashing opponents over the head with the moral weight of rolled-up and highly dubious “studies”.
Fuck studies. Common sense tells you that your passive smoker has about as much in common with your serious 40-a-day merchant as Bill Clinton has with Bob Marley. Put simply, like Bubba – or should that be unlike Bubba? – they don’t inhale.
But while I’ve yet to read a study which “proves” that the ex-President of the United States has contracted Rastafarianism, the world is only coming down with dodgy dossiers “showing” that bar-staff are 90 times more likely to contract lung cancer than, say, people living at the North Pole. Yeah, right, and too much butter will make my balls turn to soap.

Feel Happy
Anyhow, if smoking bothers these fragile folk even one little bit, what the fuck are they doing working in a bar? Like, that’s what it is, dude – a bar, not a health club. It’s not supposed to be good for you, other than in the sense of making you feel happy, however briefly, in this world full of woe. People with vertigo generally don’t help build skyscrapers, but if the victims’ logic of the bar unions applied, the upshot would be that we’d all live in bungalows.
Children are a different matter of course. Like any parent, Sam would be concerned about the little ones picking up bad habits, even by accident, which is why I’ve made the mature and informed decision to start my three-year-old – Sam Junior – on a pipe. More attractive looking than a soother, it also exudes a pleasant aroma which means I don’t have to waste money on scented candles and thus run the risk of being mistaken for one of those tree-huggers.
Speaking of smells, I really do hope that all citizens abide by the new ban and refrain from smoking tobacco in bars, preferably by turning to herbal cigarettes. An oxymoron on the scale of non-alcoholic beers, herbal cigarettes are being touted as a great alternative to the real weed and maybe even a half-way house to kicking the habit completely.
Actually no, herbal cigarettes are designed to do only one thing and that is to drive the committed smoker half-way ’round the bend, in precisely the same way that a committed toper presented with a bottle of Becks non-alcoholic will have no alternative but to smash the offending item on a table and gouge out his own eyes.
Yet, the self-same herbal cigarette could prove to be the salvation of the real smoker. I mean, have you ever smelt this shit? Have you? Torch one of those demon babies and you can only imagine that the stuff being burnt spent at least 20 years in a rolled-up dirty sock stashed in the back of Lemmy’s linen cupboard. I mean, it’s really, really fucking foul.
So, fellow smokers, by all means smoke as many of these things as you can without physically throwing up and, I guarantee that, before you know it, non-smokers will be down on their knees begging you to get rid of the evil odour by firing up one of those nice cool Marlboro Lights, like we used to do in the good old days.

Health Vigilantes
Meanwhile, a whole new generation of health vigilantes and tobacco informers is set to spring up and make this country an even more intolerable place in which to try and live any kind of vaguely free and easy life. Here again, the herbal could come in handy: should you happen to be confronted by one of these smug little busy-bodies as you attempt a bit of a discreet smoke at 3am in a nightclub, simply thank them for bringing your ghastly mistake to your attention, immediately replace the good weed with the bad, and proceed to blow clouds of toxic herbal gas into their face, until they are forced to run screaming and weeping from the building.
Informers can only work on the basis of being shifty and sly and basically sticking their noses into other people’s business, but if we all make a real effort we’ll literally smoke these fuckers out.
Your ever smokin’ Samuel J. Snort Esq