Even in the digital world, where there’s smoke, there’s ire

Annabel Crabb
October 28, 2012
The Age

‘There are now 107 smoking apps. Authorities are freaking out.’

Outraged calls to ban tobacco-related apps might, just possibly, be missing the point.

SO NOW there’s apps for smoking. Your smartphone, previously useful for key life-improving functions like getting you run over while you cross the road or causing your dining companions silently to confirm their opinion of you as a wally, can now set you on the road to lung cancer.

According to a University of Sydney report that made headlines around the world, there are now 107 smoking apps, thanks to which a user can jauntily puff away on a digitally-simulated gasper simply by applying their lips to the phone screen and inhaling hard.

Health authorities are freaking out, as you might expect. Millions of these apps have been downloaded worldwide. They are available to kids, who are now free to pretend to smoke without having to go to the bother of picking up a twig or a pen, as they were required to in the bad old days of analogue.

And that’s not all – imagine the implied threat to the world’s virtual dolphin and sea turtle population, who now face a vast influx of cyber-butts flushing through the waterways and lodging fatally in their digestive systems.

It’s chilling, really. And where will it end?

Online behaviour is a rehearsal for the real thing, as any poorly sourced gut instinct will tell you.

Next thing you know, you’ll be able to walk into an actual shop and buy an actual packet of actual cigarettes that would give you actual cancer!

Oh, Lord: That’s right. You ALREADY CAN.

Do you ever get the feeling that, as a nation, we have missed a step in our moral jihad against cigarettes?

I mean, I’m not going to stand up and defend the little bastards. Yes, they’re evil and smelly and harmful and pernicious and so forth.

But at some point, we need to ask ourselves a serious question. Take a break, that is, from designing new and hideous ways to photograph a pus-oozing lung for cigarette packets, or bullying corner-shop proprietors into pretending the things aren’t for sale, or fretting about tobacco money sponsoring korf-ball championships and the like, and ask the question that should actually be at the root of all this.

And that is: Are we here to fish or cut bait?

If smoking is so clearly and uncontestably evil and repellent, then why is it still legal?

Anti-smoking advocates are keen for Apple and its cyber-droogs to prohibit the smoking apps. This would leave them in the same position as other banned apps, like Smuggle Truck (Operation Immigrant)*, Jew Or Not Jew, iPlayboy and the Financial Times app, all of which were deep-sixed last year by Apple on the grounds of various beyond-the-pale moral offences (trading in human misery, anti-Semitism, depiction of pornography and failing to give Apple a cut of the profits, respectively).

The argument is that the apps are a breach of the otherwise watertight sanctions on advertising tobacco products. But a system that prohibits the feigned smoking of a digital cigarette while freely permitting the consumption of a real one has got things a tiny bit arse-about, hasn’t it?

And anyway, lots of things in this world make people feel like a cigarette.

Movies, beers, the late stages of a generously-catered wedding. School reunions. Staff Christmas parties. Funerals.

I’m not a regular smoker myself, but after years of watching Nicola Roxon waging federal war on moral weakness, I cannot glimpse her calm, lovingly judgmental face on the telly without experiencing a perverse craving for an extra-mild, a lighter and an alcopop.

We all have our triggers, I guess.

In some cases, human nature is stubbornly undirectable. My ABC colleague Richard Glover – father of two boys – tells the story of his family’s determination to keep the house free of toy guns. It was only when the lads resorted to gnawing their Vegemite toast into pistol replicas and shooting each other over breakfast that Glover realised he had been squaring off against a higher evolutionary power.

Prohibition’s spotty record, world-wide, is one of the arguments against the straight-up banning of cigarettes.

Last week’s federal budget update provided another one.

In the 2011-12 fiscal year, tobacco excise poured $5.45 billion into the parched coffers of the federal government.
Where mining super-profits and the dollar-sensitive exporters of morally uncontroversial products have failed us, tax-wise, the gaspers just keep on giving and giving. This might give you the ghost of an idea why they remain legal, despite the government’s otherwise settled mask of hostility towards the dried, cut and commercially packaged leaves of the plant known to the scientific world as Nicotiana tabacum.

Christian doctrine instructs us that we should revile the sin, but never the sinner.

Things work slightly differently in budgetary doctrine, where the sin may be deplored, but never the revenue.

*Smuggle Truck, the app banned by Apple for making a game out of smuggling dispossessed Mexicans over the US border in a truck, has since been successfully re-released – substituting fluffy animals for immigrants – as Snuggle Truck.

â– Annabel Crabb hosts ABC2’s Kitchen Cabinet, at 9.30pm on Wednesdays. She tweets as @annabelcrabb.

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