The Earl of Erroll (CB)

My Lords, I will be very brief. I am worried not about whether it is right or wrong to try to stop smoking but about whether this would work. There is no point in passing laws that do not work, as they are not respected. I think back to the amount of pot that was smoked when I was at university, to all the drugs generally around the place, and to the switch from alcohol to ecstasy and other things when they were cheaper because the price of alcohol had been raised. We tamper around with it, but the problem is much deeper than that: people need to take things to stave off reality a bit, from time to time. I was not a smoker, because I saw my friends wheezing at school. I tried it; everyone was worried about the amount of chocolate I ate, so I briefly tried smoking. I gave up after my second sore throat and saw no benefit from it. To be honest, this will not be an effective way of stopping smoking, so I see no point in it. It will cause problems with policing. We can handle age verification in various ways, but I will not bore your Lordships with that now. We should not make life more complicated for everyone. They will go on smoking if they are driven to it, and we do not want to make it look attractive, which driving stuff underground does.