The Government may not like smoking, but - like drinking - it remains perfectly legal. For how much longer though?
These two categories do not necessarily align with the laws of the land, but the law is a flexible instrument these days, enforced only where the authorities concerned choose to enforce it.
So if you want to harm your health by taking illegal drugs, be pleased to go ahead. If heroin is your poison, Whitehall ministries have in recent years established needle exchanges to help you with the required equipment and shooting galleries which have provided junkies with the finest ingredients to feed their habit.
You can claim state sickness benefits on the grounds that you are incapacitated because of your drug addiction, and around 50,000 people do so. This is not merely tolerance of harmful and criminal behaviour, it is rewarding it.
Alcohol is bit trickier, because a lot of voters don't like the way town and city centres have become theme parks for loutishness and violence at the weekends. The chosen response of Coalition ministers is to propose increasing the price of the cheapest alcohol - something that will punish the law-abiding poor but do nothing to curb the riotous Friday-night crowds in the stand-up drinking barns.
If you wish to drink yourself to death, a preferred option of a good proportion of the population, the Government will merely tax you on your way.
However, smoking, now that is something different.
I hold no brief for the tobacco industry or for any part of the smoking lobby. I fully accept that smoking is highly dangerous to the health of the smoker. I know that a large number of people, perhaps even a majority, regard smoking as unpleasant and they don't want smokers around them.
None of this justifies the absurd persecution of smokers that is beginning to stink more than a pub's worth of used ashtrays.
UK Health Secretary Andrew Lansley wants cigarettes to be sold in plain packaging, but the tobacco industry insists this would only help smugglers
The retreat of smokers from offices, shops, factories and restaurants during the 1990s was broadly popular and widely welcomed. But why did the 2007 anti-smoking legislation have to ban smoking rooms in office blocks? The smokers who used them could not conceivably have been harming anyone else.
Why was it necessary to ban smoking in all pubs and restaurants, even those that wanted to provide a haven for smokers? The pretext for this was that it was important to protect bar and restaurant staff from the dangers of passive smoking.
Passive smoking remains no more than an assertion backed by the force of the nanny state. There is no serious evidence that people who do not smoke are harmed by tobacco smoke in the general atmosphere. It is just something we are expected to believe.
The idea that bar staff might choose whether they wanted to work in a smokers' pub or otherwise is not entertained in this thinking. They appear to live under different rules from Christians, whom the Government is now advising to go find another job if their employer is unwilling to allow them to wear a token of their beliefs.
Health Secretary Andrew Lansley now wants to take the suppression of smoking a step further, with a law forcing all cigarettes to be sold under plain packaging. Mr Lansley tells us that 'there isn't a harmless level of tobacco smoking'.
The tobacco industry, ably assisted by Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke, who, as ever, is prepared to put his own opinions over any notion of Cabinet loyalty, says this is pointless. Cigarette boxes are designed for brand loyalty and to attract existing smokers from rival brands, it says. Removing branding will only help smugglers and hurt the Treasury, it claims.
Whether or not this is true, the Lansley plan will certainly contribute to the further branding of a large group of people, smokers themselves. Their cigarettes will be sold as a shameful product that cannot show its name in public, much in the way that pornographic magazines once were. Those pathetic little groups outside offices trying to take a puff as they shelter from the rain will have one more indignity and humiliation heaped upon them.
According to Professor Hilary Graham of the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York, smokers are now increasingly regarded by others as nasty, downtrodden, feckless, underclass people.
Professor Graham, whose current duties including advising Mr Lansley's department on health inequalities, called in February for the Government to stop painting smokers as a threat to everybody else. 'The history of public health is scarred by policies which, pursued in the name of health protection and promotion, have served to intensify public vilification and state-sanctioned discrimination against already disadvantaged groups,' she wrote.
Dispute: UK politician and smoker Ken Clarke says Andrew Lansley's call for cigarettes to be sold in plain packets will not stop youngsters from taking up the habit
In other words, she thinks that ministers are picking on the poor again.
If well-placed and highly respectable academics of not especially libertarian views think the Government is a little too intolerant of smokers, it is clearly time for Mr Lansley and his civil servants to stop.
Smoking and selling tobacco is lawful. Ministers clearly regard an outright legal ban on tobacco as unworkable and in that they are certainly right. But it is lazy, futile and mean-minded to turn smokers into public enemies instead.
One in five of the population still smoke despite all the evidence that they are harming themselves. In the end, it is only fair to let them get on with it.
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