A little public ridicule might help solve the vaping crisis

There are smarter ways to discourage vaping than by coercion, but a little imagination is required... Picture: AFP

Four weeks ago my wife and I were sitting outside one of the popular restaurants on Adrianou Street in central Athens, overlooking the city’s Ancient Agora. It was, as everyone knows after a series of sad news reports, very hot in Greece, so I had been carefully hiding in shady (in both senses of the word) bars, maintaining what I regard to be my essential fluids at a level somewhere between gaiety and dribbling sleep.

The terrace was fitted with awnings blessed with those wondrous machines that spray a fine mist of cooling water into the air, so it was an excellent place to watch overweight and overheated tourists battle the entreaties from waiters on the footpath that they should join their patrons in comfort.

I was savouring a Mythos poured into a glass so frozen that tiny beer-ice crystals were dancing on my tongue, when I was distracted by a melodramatic sigh from an American lady who was about to sit down nearby with her red-faced, sweaty brood.

Tracking her glare, I deduced she was unhappy with the wealthy-looking Greek fellow at the next table to us, who was sucking on a mighty, possibly Cuban, cigar to accompany his postprandial balloons of Metaxa 12-star brandy.

Until then I’d paid him no attention, perhaps because after a month of travelling through Spain and the Greek islands I had become inured to the aroma of tobacco smoke, but more likely because I couldn’t care less if people around me want to indulge in a legal hobby, especially in their own country.

Either way, I was happier sitting beside him rather than Sanctimonious Mom.

But boy, do those Mediterranean types enjoy their ciggies, no matter how bad they are for you. Across northern Spain, where the unseasonable weather was more likely to give you frostbite than heatstroke, the locals were eating, drinking and smoking determinedly, crowded under heaters outside almost every bar and restaurant. Many of the staff joined them, chatting in the doorway then tossing a half-finished butt into the gutter to return to the counter when a customer approached.

How could these low-wage workers afford it, I wondered, knowing a packet of cigarettes in Australia costs somewhere in the region of $60. Fortunately my keen investigative journalism skills paid off: I popped into a nearby ‘Tabaco’ outlet and asked how much for 20 Rothmans. Three euros. Less than five bucks. Our government’s got a pretty sweet tax thing going on, I reckon. Must be agonising to weigh the revenue against the nanny-state instinct to ban everything.

My grandfather smoked 40-odd Senior Service a day for most of his life, presumably calculating that they wouldn’t add much to his lungs that half a century on the footplate of a steam engine hadn’t already deposited; but otherwise I grew up in a non-smoking family.

Nevertheless, strange as it may sound today, for many years my parents maintained a silver box on a side table containing cigarettes for guests who might fancy one after dinner.

Not far away, my friend Mike’s living room was like the top deck of an old London bus, a thick warm fog from the mouths and ashtrays of his mum and dad; chimneys, if they wore caps, would have doffed them in admiration.

Mike has therefore never needed nor wanted to smoke, although he sometimes talks of taking it up at 70 when it won’t have much time to hurt him, “just to see what all the fuss is about”.

It’s a vaguely appealing thought, and better than using those preposterous, kazoo-shaped, strawberry-smelling vape things. The government, naturally, intends to get rid of them, too, but they’ve missed the opportunity to employ shame (a much more powerful motivator) instead of coercion. Allow people to vape, but why not oblige manufacturers to incorporate the workings of a real kazoo into the mechanism?

Hard to look cool if you’re playing a silly buzzy tune with every wheeze.