Wednesday 23 February 2011

Honduras shows us how to do it!

From The Times of India:

Lighting up a cigarette at home could bring a visit from Honduran police if a family member or even a visitor complains about secondhand smoke.

A new law that took effect on Monday banning smoking in most public and private spaces doesn't actually outlaw cigarettes inside homes, but it does have a provision allowing people to file complaints about secondhand smoke in homes.

Violations would bring a verbal warning on the first offense . After that could come arrest and a $311 fine — the equivalent of the monthly minimum wage in the country.

Even some anti-smoking advocates suspect that part of the law may not work. Armando Peruga, a program manager at the World Health Organization's Tobacco-Free Initiative, said the clause allowing family members to call police on their smoker relatives is confusing.

The clause "does not make much sense since the law clearly does not prohibit smoking at homes" , Peruga said. Some also say that the law will be almost impossible to enforce in a country of 8 million people with a rampant crime problem and only 12,000 police officers.


Note that the bansturbator-in-chief does not say that the law is completely insane and repressive; he merely says that it's "confusing", which is short hand for "an outright ban would be nice and simple".

That police-to-public ratio of 1:667 is impressive, that's about half European levels.

4 comments:

foreversmokes said...

Well this just shows us that there really are no limits! suing a person for smoking in their own place- who has ever heard of that??

Mark Wadsworth said...

FS, lots of us did, i.e. some councils won't let you smoke in a block of flats, and California or some such hell hole won't allow you to smoke on a balcony. And what if you own a pub? You're not allowed to smoke in there either. etc etc.

Span Ows said...

I'll be there in a couple of weeks...I'll tell you what "the people" say about it.

Rob said...

Honduras is a step ahead of us on the road to a Marxist utopia, where everything is illegal so allowing the government to arrest and prosecute whoever they want to.