As I’m sure you will be aware, members of Cumberland Council’s health overview and scrutiny committee met recently to discuss its ongoing plan to make the county smoke free by 2030.
Top of the agenda was an update on progress so far, contained in a report with the catchy title Tackling smoking addictions through delivery of a tobacco dependence improvement programme and a campaign to highlight the dangers of general vape usage.
From it, we learn that to help them achieve their aims the council has been given £400,000 by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) – a government department until now I never knew existed.
Is that a lot of money? Is it a little? How much does it cost to go smoke free? I have no idea. But it is now up to the health overview and scrutiny committee to decide how best to spend it.
An account of the meeting, published in the News & Star, provides a fascinating insight into their thinking so far.
Vapes, it seems, are not the way forward. According to Coun John Mallinson, once a heavy smoker himself, the main problem for those trying to quit is what to do with one’s hands. He suggests smokers could be issued with Rubik’s Cubes.
Kathryn Lewis, the council’s new smoke free programme lead, agrees. She did the same job in Durham for 19 years, and they gave out fidget spinners.
A cynic might wonder: what if the smoker has no fingers, either as a result of a smoking-related disease or, God forbid, some terrible industrial accident?
Again Coun Mallinson has the answer: “Mars Bars are a good substitute,” he says, and he is right. They can indeed be held comfortably between fingerless palms . But perhaps he is also forgetting he is a member of the health overview and scrutiny committee.
These are early days, but it is probably just as well there are still five years until the 2030 smoke free deadline. By my calculations, the OHID funding would buy more than 66,600 Rubik’s Cubes, about the same number of finger spinners or a whopping half a million Mars Bars – and where on earth would you store them?
Meanwhile my daughter is 19 and, while she and her friends are dedicated vapers, they recoil at the idea of smoking cigarettes. I'm 56, and even among my own generation the smoker is the exception these days rather than the rule.
Were I a member of the health overview and scrutiny committee, I would be tempted to extend the smoke free deadline to 2050, by which time even the most dogged tabber will be dead. But then what to do with the £400,000?
It is at times like this I am pleased I was never tempted to stand for Cumberland Council.
Comments