IF children take up smoking at an early age, isn't it more likely that they've been exposed to cigarette smoke at home or while travelling in a car, rather than they've seen packets of cigarettes on show in a shop?
If passive smoke harms adults in pubs and clubs and the like, then passive smoke in the confines of a car - sometimes from the earliest days of their lives - has got to have a much more harmful effect on children.
Doesn't inhaling passive smoke create nicotine receptors in the brain? Don't some children who have never smoked already have a nicotine craving before they reach adolescence because of all the smoke they've inhaled from their parents smoking?
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Doesn't the sight of someone smoking - especially someone who is looked up to - make smoking appear to be cool and attractive?
Around the 1920s, tobacco companies wanted to make smoking (a man thing) more attractive to women (to increase profits), so they approached the psycho-analyst, Siegmund Freud. He suggested they get leading actresses to smoke on the "silver screen". Overnight, women took to smoking.
Shouldn't we be banning smoking in parks and other children's areas, before packets of cigarettes are hidden under the counter? Shouldn't there be heavy fines for discarding cigarette ends? They litter Britain in their billions - not clean and green.
If pub landlords can be fined £2000 for allowing customers to smoke inside, why aren't hospital managers being fined for allowing visitors and patients to smoke at hospital entrances?
My local hospital has great big sign at the entrance saying that smoking is banned inside and out. It seems that smoking affects the eyesight and the brain, as well as the heart and lungs.
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