Tobacco ban is killing smokers

Justice for RSA – an NPC, newly formed off the back of a Facebook group called #Smokers Against Lockdown Cigarette Ban – has launched yet another legal challenge to the ban, filing an urgent direct access application with the Constitutional Court last week.

This is not the first challenge to the ban since it came into effect back in March. Both the Fair-Trade Independent Tobacco Association (Fita) and British American Tobacco South Africa (Batsa) have cases pending before the courts.

The North Gauteng High Court in June dismissed Fita’s urgent application to have sales declared lawful and in July, an application for leave to appeal. The association is now in the process of petitioning the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) directly. Btsa, meanwhile, argued its case before the Western Cape High Court last week and judgment was reserved.

This is, however, the first challenge levelled by ordinary South Africans as opposed to big tobacco.

Also read: Smokers launch own legal battle against tobacco ban

Justice for RSA director Bradley Hirner says in the papers, smokers were “being used as mere pawns…”

“Where we have no voice in what is happening to us but where some faceless entity dictates what we are allowed to put in our bodies and giving some sort of vague unproven reason … we will take up hospital beds,” Hirner added.

He said while tobacco products were widely viewed as a guilty pleasure, they were, for many, the difference “between normal life and chaos”.

“There is clear evidence that individuals with a history of depressive disorders and substance use disorders are at a high risk of relapse due to nicotine withdrawal,” Hirner said. “Normally these symptoms are not life threatening, but should a person with a history of depressive disorder relapse and is not treated, it could lead to self destructive behaviour and even suicide.”

Included in the papers was a report penned by clinical psychologist and substance abuse specialist Dr Johan Scholtz, as well as 17 affidavits deposed to by smokers and their loved ones in support of lifting the ban.

With reference to the former, Hirner, in the papers, pointed to Scholtz’s recent experiences of “a higher occurrence of relapse in patients that have been stabilised for extended periods of time” and “patients discharging themselves prematurely from the facility in search of tobacco which, in itself, could be life-threatening.”

With reference to the latter, he pointed to a 62-year-old power station worker who had contracted a lung condition as a result of an accident at work.

“[He] explains that he has been smoking pipe all these years, even though he has an apparent hole in one lung. Having been forced to resort to formerly ‘cheap’ (illicit) cigarettes, his lungs have started bleeding and his condition is deteriorating,” Hirner said.

Of another 36-year-old Pretoria woman, Hirner said: “At an incredibly young age, she was brutally raped, which caused her endless anxiety attacks and her only solace is the ability to smoke a cigarette which calms her.”

He also highlighted the affidavit of the husband of an educational psychologist whose income had dried up over the course of the last almost five months, as a result of the closure of schools.

“This has elevated her general state of mind to the extent that she became suicidal and professed on numerous occasions that she wanted to die,” he said.

Hirner said very few of the 57,000 odd members of his Facebook group had given up smoking in the wake of the ban.

“Most of us have been forced to look at the illicit market for cigarettes,” he said.

They felt they had been “reduced to common criminals,” he went on.

“They must scheme and plan, almost the same I would imagine [as] when buying illegal drugs, where to buy cigarettes without being caught by the police.”

Hirner labelled the ban an infringement on smokers’ constitutional rights – and an unjustifiable one at that – and urged the Constitutional Court justices to hear the case.

They had, as of yesterday afternoon, not yet handed down their decision.

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