Second-hand smoke could be considered assault – Charles

Second-hand smoke may quite possibly be considered as an assault on the person that it is affecting.{{more}}

This possibility was put forward by attorney Mikhail Charles during a presentation at the inaugural World No Tobacco Day lecture, last Thursday.

“It is well established, going back to the 1800s that you can assault someone by spitting on them. Naturally an extrapolation of that assault principle means that if someone can spit on me and be charged for an assault, if someone exhales smoke and I inhale that and it causes all that damage, should that also not be an assault?” the young barrister questioned.

As in most of the presentations of the night, Charles pointed out that second-hand smoking is seen as more detrimental to health than actually smoking a cigarette.

In his address, Charles states that there is no legal right to smoke in St Vincent and the Grenadines. He added that had there been a law that gave persons the right to smoke in public, they would have been able to exercise this right without prejudice to the rights of non-smokers.

However, the high risk of smoking to public health may just be the reason that there is not a right to smoke.

“Naturally, environmental smoke comprises side stream smoke; that is smoke that emanates from a burning end of a tobacco product and mainstream smoke, which is the smoke that is exhaled by the smoker. About 85 per cent…of environmental tobacco smoke is side stream smoke while the remainder is mainstream smoke,” he said.

“Prohibition of smoking within public places is ethically and morally justifiable in defense of public health, which should necessarily trump individual rights to smoke freely. Since legal rights are necessarily conferred and defined by law, there is no such law that expressly vests the right to smoke freely in cigarette smokers,” he said.

Citing the 2008 World Health Organization report on the global tobacco epidemic, the barrister-at-law noted that the statistics for St Vincent and the Grenadines show no significant legal or other prohibitive measures for smoking generally. However, no other risky or self-indulgent addictive behaviour, such as cocaine abuse, directly endangers bystanders as much as cigarette smoking or tobacco use.

“It is my opinion therefore, that the protection of the public ought to be a critical mass of tobacco smoking discouragement policy or to follow bandwagons, so to speak, of the global wave of tobacco smoking restriction in enclosed public spaces,” he said.(BK)