1984(14): Tobacco rationing

From "Nineteen Eighty-Four" by George Orwell:

He [Parsons] had lugged out a huge and filthy pipe which was already half full of charred tobacco. With the tobacco ration at a hundred grammes per week it was seldom possible to fill a pipe up to the top. Winston [Smith] was smoking a Victory Cigarette which he carefully held horizontally. The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he had only four cigarettes left.

One hundred grammes per week = half an ounce per day (what we smokers colloquially refer to as 'half an ounce' is in fact slightly less, or 12.5 grammes in NewSpeak), quite enough for thirty or so rollies, which is roughly what I get through. So if George Orwell saw this as a cruel restriction, it does beg the question as to how much he smoked. But never mind, George Orwell saw tobacco rationing as just one of a thousand ways in which an authoritarian State would infringe individual liberties.

So it's interesting to note that one of Paul Flynn MP's* most noteworthy comments on being sent a copy of 1984, just to remind him that it was a warning not an instruction manual, was "Previously, the anti-smoking ban people have traded on the concept of 'freedom' rather than the ban. Reading the document that came with the book I formed the impression from the final sentences that the smoking ban was the main complaint."

* Who can't spell Leg-Iron.