My special objection to the new breed of priggish, authoritarian anti-smokers is two-fold. First they employ public funds to extend creeping coercion against the freely chosen preferences of 1 in 3 of average workers, plane and train travellers, restaurant and cinema goers. Secondly, they rely on exaggerated claims and emotional intimidation in their divisive aim of setting mostly tolerant people against the sizeable minority of their fellow men and women who enjoy smoking.

Democracy does not give a licence for the majority to persecute even the smallest minority, let alone to over-rule the preferences of 17 million adult citizens in a mature free society. For its part FOREST has always insisted that smokers should set an example by exercising courtesy and consideration, in respecting the preferences of the still smaller minority who appear to find something objectionable in tobacco smoke.

Such neccessary mutual tolerance is now put under further strain by the intemperate language and manipulative methods of the latest lobby sheltering behind the innocent-sounding banner of Parents Against Tobacco. In this paper a nonsmoking author, a parent of young children, puts PAT under searching scrutiny. He concludes that its own propaganda violates the cannons of a free society far more seriously than the open advertising of cigarettes which goads the mostly well-meaning critics to such persecutory extremes.

Chris Cooper presents his analysis and argument in strong form. I commend his conclusions as providing a salutory warning against all single-issue lobbyists who think their ends so good as to exempt them from too much scruple over means.

During 1990 a pressure group calling itself Parents against Tobacco (PAT) was established in the United Kingdom. Its goal, in its own colourful words, was:

"to create a blockade between the tobacco pushers and traffickers and our children and young people".

Prominent among PAT's numerous objectives are, to paraphrase:

- The stricter enforcement of present laws against selling tobacco to under -16's.

The organization will press for local authorities to be compelled to survey retailers and to prosecute those who break the law. Local voluntary groups will obtain evidence against errant shopkeepers and give praise and good-conduct certificates to the law-abiding ones.

- New laws.
PAT will seek:
Increased fines for lawbreaking shopkeepers; laws against breaking open packs of cigarettes in order to sell odd ones; a ban on vending machines in places to which under-18s have access (note the pushing up of the age of consent); a ban on tobacco promotions on shop fronts and at points of sale such as supermarket checkouts. In the future, they want BBC and ITV coverage of tobacco-sponsored events to be progressively restrained until after five years there will be "no reference" to such sponsors on TV.

- Most of all they want to work on the nation's attitudes - to arouse anger against the very idea of children smoking.

Again, in its own words:

"Our sims are simple:

- To make it extremely difficult for the tobacco industry's promotional activities and messages to reach our children.

- To make it extremely difficult for the tobacco industry to sell its products to our children.

- To support our children's initiatives to create "smoke-free" space,s for themselves.

- In pursuing the objectives outlined.... we are exercising our right as parents to fight for the health and wellbeing of our children."

The lists and photographs of founding members, advisers, "political vice-presidents" and campaign team members roll on over pages of its tabloid-sized introductory document. This is not revolution from below. These are the "top parents": the great, the glamorous and the newsworthy are there. All the political parties are represented. There is a duke for president. There are sports and stage personalities, the professional campaigners, the TV consumerists, a Dimbleby or two. There are heros of the enterprise culture and a commendation from the prime minister. And bestriding these like a colossus is the creator of PAT: Des Wilson.

But the members of this sparkling assembly are modest about themselves. In all their literature they refer to themselves simply as "the parents". If you are a parent, they seem to say, you are practically enrolled already. If you are against PAT, you must be against parenthood.

PAT has the besetting vice of all single-issue campaigns: it wishes to trample on general considerations of principle about the structure our society for the sake of specific measures to achieve a narrow goal. Before returning to this danger, let us examine the tactics peculiar to this campaign, as revealed in its own publications

These are without doubt masterly. They do not have a word in the wrong place. Did Des Wilson perhaps in the early stages of drafting his denunciations of the buying of cigarettes by children ever blurt out anything indiscreet, such as "You negligent, improvident, irresponsible parents let your children run wild without thought for their health - and now we, the right-thinking, energetic, caring parents are going to have to do your job for you! ". If he ever did, squads of PR people stepped in to soften the message, without moderating the excitable prose:

"The parents of this country will not allow the health of their children to be threatened and their lives to be potentially curtailed by the activities and products of a ruthlessly cynical industry........"

In public the top parents do not have one word of criticism for those other parents (scarcely worthy of the name). For those others are the infantry who must be mobilized, and they are not to be alienated.

Furthermore, adult smokers in general are not to be criticized: the instructions on this point are firm:

"The campaign will not be directed at existing adult smokers (except to draw attention to those places/situations where their smoking can influence children)."

There are, of course, no places where adult behaviour does not influence the young. This is a highly significant hypocrisy, Its explanation is that PAT's chosen method is to ease the conscience of the adult public, the better to whip up hatred against tobacco makers and sellers. And there is certainly no criticism of children to be found. On the contary:

"Nor do we intend to lecture children or young people - that would be counterproductive."

Which may be paraphrased as: We do not intend to argue, inform and persuade - that might not work, and anyway children (like parents) are never to blame.

This last quotation is one of the few places in the PAT literature in which the phrase "young people" is used. Elsewhere "children" is preferred. It is necessary for PAT to do this, for the organization's theme is the theme of passivity, dependence, subordination - of reflex responses to the manipulations of powerful external agencies. For this, its language must be appropriate. Thus PAT talks of "illicit sales to children", never of "illicit purhases by children" and certainly never of "illicit purchases by young people".

When you understand the implications of the PAT's objectives listed at the beginning of this essay, you find a message of restriction that our great-grandparents might have thought a trifle strict.

"To make it extremely difficult for our children to see or hear any of the tobacco industry's promotional activities and messages."

"To make it extremely difficult for our children to buy any of the products of the tobacco industry."

We are close to the heart of the issue. The activists of PAT know as well as any other parents that the teenager who is experimenting with smoking is above all someone who is reaching out towards adulthood. One thing that adults do is to choose for themselves whether to indulge in a whole variety of activities that may be accompanied by risks. PAT's documents deliberately suppress that awareness in order to paint a picture of helpless infants manipulated by powerful interests.

They go further. Not only do they turn a blind eye to the role of under-age smokers' parents: they are also blind and mute on the subject of their own role. Since they want all adults to join in, there is no mention of any obligation on any PAT supporter to be a non-smoker.

Now it is very common for smokers to hope that their children will not smoke. It isn't yet very common for them to shuffle off their own responsibility for their childen's smoking. But PAT's strategy is calculated to encourage evasiveness on this issue. For what they say (but not out loud) is: Smokers are not to blame for their children smoking; they have been victimized by a rich industry; it is the industry that must be made to suffer, not them. They, like their children are sheep who have had bad shepherds. But now they have found better guardians in the top parents.

My children will hear this insulting and paternalist message repeated again and again as they grow up, whatever my wishes. I shall combat that message as strongly as I can.

What should be the priorities of children's guardians when confronted with dangerous sentiments like this?

PAT's priorities are clear: they say they are determined to defend the health and wellbeing of their children. Well I am a parent too - a lifelong nonsmoker, as it happens. As you may have guessed, I am not enrolled in PAT. My son is six years old, my daughter is four. They are only a few years away from the age when they will begin to be tempted by smoking. That will present their parents with dilemmas. Yet I know that if PAT gets away with imposing its desires on a gullible society, my children will live in a worse world, not a better one.

First, it is right and proper that the existing law should be enforced. A respect for legality in general is vital even where laws a lot more questionable than those concerning under-age smoking are involved.

The tobacco industry is bound by its own words to support the campaign against under-age sales. It spends £ 1 million per year on exhorting retailers not to sell to the under-age, and providing those posters we see at counters. It claims that it wants to keep smoking as an adult pursuit, but that, not being responsible for law enforcement, it cannot do much more. In the words of Mr Clive Turner of the Tobacco Advisory Council:

"We do not condone a single illegal sale, and would very much like to help reduce such trading. It does us no good. It reflects very badly upon responsible retailers. And it affords all too much opportunity for tobacco detractors to criticize."

I believe that the industry are sincere in these protestations. Some governmental authority has come up with a figure of £70 million of sales per year to juveniles. This sum represents one percent of the industry's gross sales. It can hardly be worthwhile to take any public-relations risks for such a figure.

We may assume that the industry is staffed by people of perfectly conventional, respectable views. They doubtless think, like most people, that it is highly undesirable that young children should experiment with the unhealthy (but unfortunately enjoyable) weed. But they also feel, quite reasonably, that all they can do is raise the retailers' and public's awareness of the law - which they have done. And doubtless they also feel that an adult activity should not be controlled solely by considerations of the harmfulness of children's indulgence in it.

This publicity by the industry and others leaves no one in any doubt about the law. But it cannot make everyone obey it.

According to surveys conducted by PAT all over the country, a very high proportion of retailers - about 50 per cent overall - are willing to sell cigarettes to children, even when the children are obviously under-age. Some shopkeepers will even sell single cigarettes, so they can't pretend they thought they were being bought for Dad.

I am surprised and intrigued by this news. In these retailers' position, I don't think I would be so obliging to my young customers. Surely there cannot be much profit in this activity and I doubt that these retailers are secret advocates of Kids' Lib. Perhaps they just don't think teenage smoking is anything to fuss about.

However, the errant shopkeepers are in PAT's sights now, and will soon be made to care. When the retailers have mended their ways underage smokers will simply have to buy their cigarettes from 16-year-olds. I doubt that there will be much influence on the level of under-16 smoking.

But the actual effects of a law are not the main concern of these meddlesome campaigners: the real trophies are the public commotion, the legislation, the public spending. Travelling hopefully is the point: arriving would be anticlimax, When future surveys show that underage smoking continues despite retailers' compliance with the law, PAT will be able to recycle a paragraph from its present statement of aims without altering a word:

"... the sheer determination of the industry to promote its lethal product, and the enormous wealth it has at its disposal, is undermining all the steps taken to protect our children. Drastic new measures are necessary and it is for these that we shall campaign ...."

No activist has ever besn known to call for the repeal of one of his own measures when it proves futile.

I am most interested, however, not in PAT's retail sales campaign but on the attitudes on which it rests.

The world inhibited by campaigners is rather like the world of voodoo: everything unwelcome happens because some enemy makes it happen. Tobacco sales to the under-age happen because the industiy intends it. Since the trivial income that the industry receives is obviously not a motive, PAT is obliged to propose another one: the industry needs to get the next generation of smokers hooked while young. They need 270 per day, it is claimed, just to replace those who die from smoking.

As an aside, it is instuctive to look at the antismokers' use of figures in connection with "recruitment" of new smokers. This figure of 270 per day (100,000 per year) has caught the imagination of the media and activists of all sorts since PAT first put it out. I have a stack of press cuttings on my desk in which this number crops up again and again - on radio chat shows, in leading articles, in letters to magazines and newspapers, in news reports.

This figure corresponds to the estimate that at least 100,000 people die each year from diseases caused by smoking. However, according to the Royal College of Physicians, someone who smokes the high figure of 20 cigarettes per day will have their lives shortened by five years on average. If a lifelong smoking career is reckoned to be about nine times this, 45 years, it follows that to replace these 270 people per day is going to require one-ninth this number of recruits to the ranks of lifelong smoking. The point of this statistical aside is simply that a false figure can be carelessly distributed in a PR handout, taken up by slovenly journalists and scattered abroad without anyone exercising enough responsibility and common sense to see through it.

But whatever the true figure is, the assumption of PAT is that whatever the tobacco industry needs it gets - just by spending another few million on promotion. Campaigners - like voodoo priests - won't admit that their enemy might not be so very powerful.

Well, the industry is not getting its new recruits, is it?

Since the early 1970s smokers have consumed less each year than the year before: 33 percent of adults smoked in 1986 compared with 42 per cent in 1976. The total number of cigarettes they smoke has fallen slightly more: sales in 1986 were 73 per cent of what they were in 1976. The fall is mirrored in young people, who each year smoke less than their predecessors did at the same age.

It is unlikely that this fall will be reversed, unless unexpected discoveries that overturn the present medical consensus occur.

This world trend shows that advertising does not play the role that anti-advertising campaigners would have us believe.

It was information that had this effect. The antismokers did not have to bother with huge advertising budgets - though they had colossal sympathetic media coverage. In flat contradiction to the tone of their propaganda, the antismokers have been Goliath rather than David in this battle.

How much is advertising responsible for the total amount of smoking? It must be decisive, the anti-advertisers say: why else should manufacturers spend so many millions on advertising? They will not accept the standard answer: that the money is spert in the competitive struggle for a share of a market whose size is largely beyond the advertisers' control. Yet this claim is plausible enough elsewhere. The most fiercely advertised products include cars, teabags, soap powders, cereals.... Total demand for these staple goods can't be talked up at will. It is no wonder that tobacco advertising is fiercely competitive as the market for tobacco shrinks.

The campaigners insist this is a piece of specious reasoning by the industry: but the evidence, such as it is, is not on their side. The prevalence of smoking has been studied in many countries with varying degrees of restriction of tobacco advertising and sponsorship. It is found to vary without regard to the level of advertising. Thus, in Norway, where controls are strictest, there has been a ban on all forms of tobacco advertising since 1975. The present rate of smoking among the young there is higher than in England and Wales. Hong Kong is one country where advertising restrictions are not stringent and yet smoking among the young is low. Surprisingly, it is even lower in Argentina, where again there are few advertising restrictions and where I would have thought machismo would have demanded early entry to the smokers' world. Varying national cultures and a complex of influences from family and friends seem to be more important.

Much of this research is financed by the tobacco industry. However, the World Health Organization - which cannot be accused of being sponsored by advertising interests - wasn't able to find any differences among smoking behaviours and attitudes of children in four countries - the UK, Finland, Norway and Austria - with wide differences in advertising practices.

But given such national variations, will there be reductions nonetheless within any particular country if an advertising ban is imposed?

Well it didn't happen in Finland when tobacco advertising was banned completely in 1978: the rate of juvenile smoking, which had been falling, stopped falling and remained stable until 1985, when it started to rise again. In Sweden, restrictions imposed in 1979 were followed over the next three years by increases in general juvenile smoking (except that smoking among 16-year-old girls fell - at a much lower rate than it previously had). Norway's 1975 ban on smoking ads was followed by a reduction in teenage smoking: but there had been no surveys to show what the trend was in the years immediately before the ban - and extra taxes were put on cigarettes in the late 1970s.

In the United States, a ban on cigarette advertising on "electronic media" from the beginning of 1971 did not stop a general increase in smoking that had begun in 1969 and peaked in 1973. In Australia no correlation could be found between demand for cigarettes and either advertising expenditures or an electronic media ban on advertising that has been in place since 1976.

At least one of the tobacco industry's critics, Elizabeth Whelan of the American Council on Science and Health, has concluded that an advertising ban would probably not reduce cigarette consumption in her country. The worldwide evidence should give cause for less stridency among anti-advertising campaigners in the UK - on the naive assumption that effectiveness, as opposed to public clamour and turmoil, is what they seek.

We should resist any call to ban tobacco advertisements. Even in such an apparently image-oriented field of marketing as tobacco, the informational role of ads is as important as anywhere else. The function of the advertisement is to get the smoker matched to his or her most preferred brand as efficiently as possible - and that includes getting people to smoke the low-tar brands and the pipe tobaccos, if safety is important to them.

We all know how important advertising is to us in our daily life. We should trust our instincts and not allow the advertising by the top parents and others to persuade us that we are victimized by advertisements. They are the oil that lubricates economic life, not the fuel that powers it.

You cannot sanction a ban on tobacco advertisements without legitimizing unlimited potential interference with advertising and other aspects of buying and selling. Des Wilson isn't going to accept early retirement once he's decided PAT is a success and can get on without him. He'll be coming back for more. The truce with adult smokers will be ended. Alcohol will be high on his shopping list. Advertising of any food containing added sugar will be a candidate for prohibition in a few years. This may seem fantastic now: it will take only a few more years of health campaigning to make such outrages seem normal and natural.

It will not matter that such policies could not succeed, and could not be consistently applied to any food or drink without being applied to all. The people who put health first want to knock off their targets one by one, each precedent supporting the next intrusion.

I am, as I've already said, a nonsmoker - one of many who write on behalf of the right of tobacco producers, users and traders to deal freely with each other. FOREST is paying me for this essay - writing is my living - but they're not paying me nearly enough to express an opinion that I don't hold wholeheartedly. I defend their right because it is defending my wider stake in a free society. There is no principled ground on which to interfer with the tobacco people that will not justify an infinite number of interferences with any product that has bad consequences as well as the good ones for which it is sought. And of course, that means all products.

Autonomous individuals in a free society make use of advertisements as they make use of the choice of products that they find in the shops. If anyone thinks they are being subverted by the advertisements or other marketing devices they encounter, there is no shortage of countervailing influences they can seek out. There are "consumerist" magazines and a barrage of "consumerist" columns and features in print; no end of broadcast warnings; no end of pressure groups ready to put you on their mailing lists. We all learn from these sources and act on what we learn.

The independent individual is one who keeps a level head in all this and does not demand that his or her pet enthusiasms be subsidized or given a cheap victory with the help of legal force and taxpayers' money. To me any health message is acceptable that keeps the question of health firmly in its place as one consideration among the other purposes and values of a free society - especially where the young and impressionable are concerned.

Why do young people start to smoke? Not because they like it, that's certain: the liking comes only after a great initial effort.

Often it is because of what their parents forbid. For generations smoking has been forbidden to the young - long before people regarded it as dangerous. Perhaps it was thought slovenly or unclean if not practised in a mature way; or it was altogether too relaxed an activity to be carried out in the presence of one's elders; or perhaps it was just too expensive to be seemly in the young. With such implicit endorsements it flourished, of course, behind the legendary bicycle sheds.

All rebellion is conformity to some alternative set of norms. Young smokers yesterday, like those of today, rebelled against their child status and attempted to initiate themselves into the adult society to which they aspired.

Today most of the young are being thoroughly scared off smoking by the mountain of evidence about its ill effects, and of course it is completely legitimate that they should be. Some of these will find another way of reaching out to adulthood: perhaps joining the PAT campaign. It affords an opportunity to deny something to their fellows in a Good Cause. Anyone can participate in its easy victory, so temptingly close - PAT rhetoric about the powerful opposition notwithstanding. The mass actions - the petitions, the rallies, the demos, the denunciations, the rock concerts, the democratically decided prohibitions, the legal test cases - these seem to be the means by which so many unquestioned "goods" are fought for. This is how rainforests are saved, polluters curbed, working conditions improved, apartheid shaken - so the most virtuous thing in the world is to march behind a banner. This is how youth currently contrives to rebel and conform at the same time.

But perhaps too there are the occasional adolescents who gaze on the roll of honour of the PAT founder members and decide that this is not what they want to be like. They might aspire to a society that is not sententious and authoritarian, at once whining and demagogic, hostile to trade and industry, conformist and collectively minded, I will do my best to cultivate that spirit of independence. Embracing such ideals may give some young people further spurious reasons for smoking as a protest - but I would think it a good bargain nonetheless.

Now how are young people - sorry, "children" - going to be insulated from the knowledge that there are sane and upright people who smoke and that every adult enoys the choice of whether or not to do so?

PAT wants to put an end to sponsorship by tobacco companies of events that interest the young. They hope that this, together with restrictions on displays inside and outside shops, will gradually erase the consciousness of brand names from children's minds, like disgraced exleaders erased from a Stalinist history book.

This proposal has what every campaigner wants: he potential to cause the maximum uproar in society. PAT pretends that the desire for smoking is stimulatedjust by seeing the brand names. After this enormous disruption has been inflicted, I predict that it will not take long to discover that children are smoking as much as before. It will probably be PAT that is most eager to point this out.

But the plan that makes me most uneasy is the proposal to take an important slice of education away from teachers and parents (those other parents, who are not PAT founders and activists). PAT wants to create "smokefree" zones for places that children frequent - especially schools.

Today there can hardly be a classroom in the country where pupils are forced to breathe teachers' smoke. The playgrounds - and, of course, the bicycle sheds - are all as tobacco-free as the command of authority can make them. So what does "creating a smokefree zone" mean?

In the first instance it means making the school a fit place to win a prize in one of several competitions that PAT is organizing. There are various "special" competitions for individual school pupils or groups of pupils: for a Young Reporter who writes an "investigative" piece on any aspect of tobacco industry activity as it affects children and young people; for a poster design to dissuade under-16s from seeking to buy cigarettes; for a local campaign to assist in "blockade-building", for an interview with a non-smoking sports personality; for an anti-smoking rap.

This is the meaning of "our children's initiatives": investigations that must lead to a predetermined result; mini campaigns against fellow school pupils and adults; recitations to the music of PAT's predigested information. To talk of initiative here is a sham. And when pupils do what they are asked with flair and originality, it will be their sanctimoniousness and intolerance that will be receiving the prizes. I can only hope that the main prize, a Macintosh desktop publishing system, soon falls into the hands of children independently minded enough to use it for diatribes against these obsessive secular missionaries.

The main prize will be awarded to a school on the basis of its entries in the specialist categories and also:

"The extent that si the school is genuinely smoke-free.

The extent that its ami-smoking programme extends across curricular, recreational and other key aspects of school life."

The PAT publications are vague about the meaning of "a genuinely smoke-free school": but it isn't hard to work out what it must mean.

It must mean, first of all, extending smoking bans to the rooms now set aside for staff who smoke.

This is a kind of lie: a sort of pretence that adults don't smoke; or that there is one law for adults and children, a lie refuted the moment they step out of the school gates. Or it is the lie that smoking is something to be ashamed of - a message that, as we have seen, PAT finds it expedient to omit from its publications. So the objectives of PAT nei to be expanded to read: To make it extremely difficult for the personal smoking activities of teachers to reach the eyes of our children.

And the deeper lesson children will be taught is that it is admirable to dictate other people's personal activities in this way. They will be receiving an education that will equip them for later life: to carry the battle against smoking into the premises of local authorities, of unions, of companies - not to accord consideration to the wishes of all, but to win totally "smoke-free" zones. They will discover only later that the same kind of campaigns may be turned against their own chosen preferences, hobbies, life-styles or indulgences.

What else must a "smoke-free school" be if it is to stand a chance of winning the PAT prize? Must there be nothing but "smoke-free" literature in the school library? I doubt if there will be wall posters called "The Romance of Tobacco". No promotion or information from the tobacco industry will be allowed: none from the anti-smoking industry, however questionable its morality, will be barred.

Will the film club have to ban Casablanca and most of the great films of the past and degenerate to pop videos and Watership Down? What will happen in the lessons? Will there be genuine debate? To enable pupils to write a critical, reasoned essay on the subject of smoking, will they be allowed access to materials on both sides of the question? Will FOREST's materials be distributed by teachers, and if they were would FOREST be subsequently accused of "promoting" smoking and trying to gain fresh recruits for the "tobacco traffickers" (for this is what ASH constantly accuses them of doing now). What friction will there be between head teachers with their eyes on that Macintosh computer and members of their staff who are resistant to being recruited into a propaganda campaign?

What will the re-educationists do about the frequent references in the literature and art of the past to the culture of smoking - including the use of pipes, cigars, and snuff - which has been cultivated for centuries, as the culture of food and drink has been cultivated? It will take a sustained educational effort to stop the young from discovering that normal people enjoy smoking.

The PAT top parents are not the only anti-smokers with a distorted view of what is important in educating adolescents. Consider the values displayed in the government film and TV campaign launched at the end of 1989. One advertisement shows a young woman being told by a friend that blowing cigarette smoke into a boy's face means you fancy him. Now I would think that in real life the results of this action would be unpredictable at best. In the advert, of course, the lad is immediately turned right off. In reality I expect that young people will turn this little nugget to their own uses. Smokeblowing assaults could become quite a joke amidst their courtship ceremonies. I await the sociologists' reports. (2)

In another gem, a would-be Lothario practises smoking in front of a mirror in an attempt to look sophisticated. When he makes a polite approach to the chosen girl he gets drastically insulted. Perhaps he just isn't doing it well enough. The advertisement is called Practice makes Perfect and I imagine that this is the message the viewers will take away with them.

These adverts are as bad as any cigarette commercial I've seen. They are as inept and patronizing as most government health campaigns: doubtless they make the sharp operators of PAT wince. They are futile too. It is hard for the old (and these were made by David Bailey!) to teach the young about their own way of life, about what sexual advances will or will not work for them, about what links they should make between smoking and other things.

The adverts are degrading, too, in their pandering to the worst vices of adolescents. The makers, like all advertisers, have carefully studied the values of their target audience. They have picked the worst to exploit: adolescent fear, conformism and cruelty - everything that the young should be helped to surmount. There are many corrupt advertisements to be seen around us - corrupt because they trade on vices that should be tamed. These government messages belong in that category.

The European President of the Philip Morris tobacco company is quoted by PAT, explaining why Marlboro sponsors Formula 1 racing:

"What we wanted was to promote a particular image of adventure, of courage, of virility."

The values that are being traded on here are values that should be cultivated, should be emulated. Whether Marlboro's makers can establish the link in the minds of race-watchers, I don't know: but they foster the values by sponsoring motor racing, an activity that demands them. Health is important: but so are adventurousness and courage (I leave out the foolish term "virility"). I don't see any awareness of this in the antismokers' effusions.

There is more to education than health: there is also citizenship, there is also morality. These include such things as a firm insistence on toleration: my demand that those of my practices that affect me alone be tolerated by others, which goes hand in hand with my recognition of their corresponding right to my forbearance. Toleration is not a matter of wanting an easygoing society in which we are not too troubled by what goes on around us: it is a matter of demanding your rights whilst stoutly defending the rights of others.

Here are some of the things I want my children to learn at the age when they are experimenting with ways of being adults.

My children will not be in any doubt about my own views on smoking. Doubtless we shall have discussed the issue ad nauseam. I have never smoked, and I think it absurd to put effort into acquiring a costly and health-imparing habit - one that will prove difficult and uncomfortable to break. I don't mind others smoking in my presence, except over a meal (not that I've never known anyone make that request), but I do expect them to be courteous enough to ask my permission - in any public place and, of course, in my own home. In their home it's entirely a matter for them: and I would think it atrocious manners to moralize to them in any way.

My children will also know how much I admire independence of mind and how little I respect sheeplike submission to peer-group pressures in matters of taste.

My wife will also not be reticent about her view of the habit. But my children will observe that she likes the occasional smoke herself, and they will doubtless take that into account. With the advantage of parents like these, how can they go wrong?

Very easily, I suspect. Not being what other people want you to be is something we all do, noisily or, more usually, covertly. Adolescents seem to be genetically programmed to do it with apoplexy-inducing thoroughness. Our children may be inspired or put off by our values. There's not much we can do except give expression to those values. Hedging our children round with prohibitions just isn't going to work. I don't intend to spend very much effort on trying, probably unsucoes,sfully, to postpone their smoking experiments by a couple of years. I don't want to run myself ragged trying to shape the behaviour of my children in this private sphere when I have a lot better things to do with my own life. And as everything I've written above is meant to show, I don't happen to believe the effort would teach very admirable lessons.

How far below the standards of PAT's top parents I fall! I preach unashamedly: they never engage in "counterproductive" lecturing. I place responsibility squarely on children and adult smokers: they ingratiate themselves with both those groups. I try to strengthen my children by helping them become independent of pressures, manipulations and seductions: they try to protect theirs by building "blockades" around them. My home will be open to smokers and nonsmokers alike: theirs will be "smoke-free zones". And I in the disparaging words of Des Wilson, "try and switch the discussion to the rights of adults to smoke, and thus move onto [my] favourite territory, the right of the individual to choose" while they keep well away from that hated area.

I have a few more lessons to teach. One is that life is to be enjoyed. Foods and alcohol are great pleasures, to be cultivated. The most delicious foods and drinks are not always the healthiest and most nutritious. But then, the healthiest people are not always the happiest.

I don't know anything about the pleasures of tobacco: if my children are interested in those, they will have to consult the novelists and poets. And, of course, I can't stop them from asking any articulate smokers of their acquaintance.

The above comments should not be construed as defending the smoking lobby but suggesting that it is easier for us adults to blame powerful "others" - cigarette companies, advertising agencies and the media - than to accept the full responsibility as the major force in forming behaviour patterns of our children.

One of the siren voices of the anti-smokers tells us that smokers are addicts, that addicts are not free and that therefore legal restraint of tobacco defends the "real" freedom of those who would otherwise be trapped.

There is a relevant analogy to do with handling money. Someone who falls into debt suffers a loss of freedom (in one sense of that word): they find themselves restrained; it becomes difficult or impossible to do much of what they want to do, many good things are denied them. If laws are passed to prevent all people from offering or taking easy credit, are the people who would have been customers for that credit more free or less?

It isn't hard to see that, whatever else might be said in praise of such a policy, it would be the grossest hypocrisy to call it an extension of freedom. It would be a denial of opportunity to the majority who might gain from it, as well as to those who would have stumbled. Likewise, if tobacco sales are restricted, don't let us call it a defence of freedom.

So I would argue that wherever there is an opportunity there is a pitfall. There are many people whose lives are made miserable by some bad relationship to food, or drink, or money, or tobacco. That doesn't mean that the abundance of food, drink, other consumer goods and credit that we enjoy today are bad things. It means that we have to teach our children, and remind ourselves, to make wise use of these resources.

I do not want to shield my children from advertisements. I endorse these words of the Centre for Applied Social Research, an Australian organization:

"... the critical factor on whether children actually carry out the desired health-giving or injury-prevention behaviour is the actual behaviour of their parents.

There are two views of society before us here. One is that of the social architects, who wish to mould society in the form they desire and believe that it is possible and desirable to have their own way with everyone else. The other is the more mature philosophy of what were once properly called "liberals", who assert the individual's responsibility, power of self-direction, right to buy and sell freely, and right (and need) to communicate freely with others.

My preference is for the view that seeks to expand the sphere of the individual's liberty as far as it can, short of encroaching on the liberty of others, rather than shrinking that sphere in favour of the collectively administered public realm controlled by majority voting.

The collectivist view has strong roots in present-day society. A small example is the chilling figure presented by PAT. From one of its surveys 39 per cent of respondents approved of banning all "unnecessary mention" of tobacco and smoking in television plays. PAT exults in such facts such as this. I find them profoundly depressing.

Society draws firm, if not always consistent, lines around children and places them under the guardianship of adults. The illiberal view of society seeks to prolong that guardianship throughout adult life: we all become children under the wing of the parental state. The liberal sees adulthood as consisting precisely in emerging from guardianship to a stage where there is an extensive private life, where cooperation is voluntary and where each decides for herself or himself where the balance of risk and benefit, pleasure and pain, lies in every course of action.

It is in adolescence that young people first discover which view of society most appeals to them. This is where the example of adults counts for most. It is precisely in curbing this process of self-discovery that the work of Parents Against Tobacco can do most harm.

(1) These results are cited in J. J. Boddewyn, ed., Juvenile Smoking Initiation and Advertising, International Advertising Association, New York,1989, pp 38, 42-43.

(2) Since writing this, I have heard lines from this advertisement being quoted by teenage boys queuing at a swimming pool. They were, of course, all puffing enthusiastically at cigarettes!

Chris Cooper is a graduate in physics and did his post-graduate research in theoretical physics. He is a self-employed editor and writer, principally on scientific issues. He has worked on such journals as Home Computing and All About Science, and has written on advertising for The International Journal of Adverbsing and on equal rights for women in Over 21. His special interest is the education of young people in science.

He has co-written two books, How Everyday Things Work and How Does It Work, edited Race To Mars, and has edited many other works aimed at young people for both Readers Digest and Usbornes. He has also written for Scope, the journal of the British Association of Young Scientists.

He has worked as a volunteer teacher in Ghana, is a Governor of his local primary school, and is married with two children.

He is a non-smoker.