Did My Grandfather Have a Point After All?
In 1977, my father moved our entire family to Spain. A few years earlier, he had taken over the tobacco wholesale business from his father, Jan, so consulting the founder of J. van Horssen BV was, to say the least, appropriate.
You have to understand that the tobacco trade was a very different world back then. There were no health warnings on cigarette packets, tobacco advertising and promotion were perfectly acceptable, and the general attitude towards smoking was overwhelmingly positive. It is almost impossible to imagine today, but in those days it was perfectly normal to receive a carton of cigarettes on your sixteenth birthday. Try that now, and you might find yourself stripped of your parental rights.
And yet, there were already signs that change was coming. Nothing dramatic, but somewhere on the horizon, dark clouds were gathering for everyone who held tobacco dear.
When my father, Niek, asked my grandfather whether moving to Spain was really a good idea for the future of the company, my grandfather uttered the immortal words:
“Son, with all the legislation coming our way, our industry has no future anyway.”
I suspect that even my grandfather, visionary as he already was, could never have imagined just how bad things would become.
Although the descent into today’s madness was gradual, we tobacco merchants have now become the pariahs of the Dutch business community. Smoking bans everywhere, plain packaging, track and trace, cigars hidden from view, retail restrictions and excise duties spiralling completely out of control: these are the issues we face every single day. There really is nothing that we, as tobacco traders, are spared.
The strange thing is that we are not unreasonable people. We are not immoral criminals or merchants of death. And despite everything being forced down our throats, we are not complete idiots either.
We fully understand that the minimum smoking age should be high. In fact, I would personally prefer 21 over 18. We find it entirely reasonable that smoking should be prohibited in public indoor spaces, because smoking should be a choice, not something imposed upon the person sitting next to you. We also understand that every prospective smoker should be properly informed, through health warnings, of the risks they are taking with their health.
But that is where it should stop.
The point is simple: smoking is unhealthy. Fine. But every human being has the fundamental right to decide how to treat their own body.
I am a smoker. I absolutely love lighting up a cigar, frequently and with great pleasure. It makes me happier, and that is something a non-smoker simply cannot understand. This personal choice will probably mean that I die earlier than someone who does not smoke.
