Campaigners shamelessly ramped up the evidence that the vice harmed others, and attacked anyone who said otherwise. “The effect of other people smoking in my presence is so small it doesn’t worry me,” declared Sir Richard Doll, who with Sir Austin Bradford Hill had proved in the 1950s that smokers were killing themselves. Anti-smoking activists dismissed the eminent scientist as a crank and a tool of the tobacco industry.

“No one is seriously talking about a complete ban on smoking in pubs and restaurants,” said the director of ASH (UK) in 1998, adding that the suggestion was a “scaremongering story by a tobacco front group.” In June 2005 Britain’s public-health minister described talk of such a ban as “false speculation”. Parliament voted it into law just eight months later. Even then campaigners called for further illiberalism, citing everything from litter to toxins from cigarette butts leaching into groundwater and the harm smoking allegedly does to birds.

Other activists now follow anti-smokers’ lead. Flying, drinking bottled water, wearing perfume and burning wood have all been called “the new smoking”; terms like “passive obesity” and “second-hand drinking” do the rounds. “Today it’s smoking. Will high-fat foods be next?” asked a tobacco firm in an advertisement in the 1990s. No doubt the ad seemed ridiculously alarmist at the time.

© The Economist Newspaper Limited 2009