WHO demands general smoking ban in Germany

It is harder now for European authorities to claim that smoking bans are universally popular. Germany has failed to enforce its ban, Spain has protested vigorously, and Belgian café proprietors and customers have also protested about a ban due for implementation in food establishments on 1 July, three years earlier than planned. The Netherlands has also thrown off its ban for bars without employees.  


Demands not just for a full implementation of the ban in Germany but for the law to be enforced centrally instead of in its federal states have appeared, of all places, in the British Medical Journal.  I only have access to the abstract but already the Heidelberg branch of the World Health Organisation gets its say, claiming that the German people are exposed to dangerously high levels of smoke in their restaurants and pubs.


(Clearly he seems to be under a misapprehension that people are forced to allow smoking in pubs and that unwilling customers are forced to go into them.) 


People seem happy to tell priests to keep out of politics and stick to religion: not a view I would necessarily agree with – everybody should have a say in politics. I would only agree to limiting religious interference in politics if religion wanted to keep secular interests out of politics. Why don't people realise that health is the new religion? Why do people tolerate health officials who are so steeped in politics that they happily recommend interfering with German legislation in order to achieve their smoke-free agenda? 


The study is entitled 'Full smoking ban is needed in Germany as four out of five pubs flout regulations'. What size of budget is needed to report what is common knowledge: that people can smoke in German public houses? 


The Netherlands didn't get off scott-free either. Tobacco control has no respect for national boundaries.