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Published on February 9, 2008

It didn't, possibly because I'd grown up sharing a house with my father, who went through a daily dose of 80 Player's Navy Cut.

The white ceiling in our lounge had turned grey, and amber above my father's chair, beside which our family sat watching TV through a sea of smog. Something we got used to.

If passive smoking causes dangerous diseases, as most people believe it does, then I hazard to guess that it doesn't cause cigarette addiction, as my mother never smoked in her life, and neither have my sister or I.

After 20-plus years of constant exposure to second-hand smoke - and three decades on from that - no one apart from dad in our family suffered any form of smoking-related illness. But perhaps we three people are statistically insignificant anomalies.

At 71, my father died of stomach cancer, helped on by a severe bronchial cough. Sadly, doctors said that he could have made 90 had he not smoked.

With anti-smoking laws becoming increasingly stringent, especially in Thailand over recent years, arguments about cigarettes have often been vehement and over-emotional. While smokers barricade themselves behind freedom-of-choice and human-rights arguments, anti-smoking activists have launched their crusades to save the rest of the world.

And while many smokers accept that their habit might be a danger to themselves, new restrictions over passive smoking have been hard for them to swallow. Whatever, I guess there's no smoke without fire.

The rise and fall

In the Americas, tobacco has been smoked and chewed for thousands of years, but its use in Europe didn't start until 1493, when one of Columbus' fellow travellers, Rodrigo de Jerez, lit up a Cuban cigar in public and was immediately thrown in jail by the Spanish Inquisition.

Since then, smoking has continued in a cloud of controversy. In 1604, King James I regarded tobacco as "an invention of Satan", but later changed heart by nationalising its industry and reducing tobacco tax.

At around the same time, the Romanov tsars punished Russian smokers by floggings or cutting their lips. In Turkey, Persia and India the habit was punishable by death, and Pope Clement VIII threatened to excommunicate smokers who lit up in holy places.

By the late 1700s, the relation between smoking and certain diseases became apparent. German Sammuel Thomas von Soemmering linked lip cancer with pipe smoking and in the US Dr Benjamin Rush wrote on the medical dangers of tobacco. And by the 1920s the link between smoking and lung cancer had been made.

Nevertheless, smoking gained in popularity, especially during the world wars, and in 1945 the tobacco industry began to peak. By the 1970s, statistically, the average British man was puffing away on 10 cigarettes per day, while each woman was smoking seven.

But in recent years, proof of the dangers from smoking has been incontrovertible, and suggestions convincing on how it affects the public in general. This has led to massive marketing restrictions, increased taxes, anti-smoking campaigns and reduced consumption.

Is the jury still out?

Today, passive smoking is a bone of contention, and current studies are still trying to prove or disprove that it causes diseases. As this subject becomes an issue affecting the whole of society, biased and emotional arguments are obscuring reasonable facts.

So, it should be noted that most reliable studies have concluded that second-hand smoke is dangerous, and it would seem that projects countering this theory have been largely supported by the tobacco industry.

What's more, in 1998, tobacco firms won legal grounds against smoking-associated lung-cancer deaths reported by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. But four years later, an appeals court overturned the verdict.

And 10 years ago the World Health Organisation was openly accused of suppressing information from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, because their paper linking lung cancer to passive smoking was weak on evidence.

The WHO later stated that the study had been "completely misrepresented" in the media, and the tobacco industry was counter-accused of engineering a conspiracy to discredit the organisation.

It would appear that freedom-fighting smokers are losing ground in their battle to prove passive smoking is harmless, and even the leading tobacco companies are in disharmony.

While Altadis remains non-committal, British American Tobacco and Philip Morris USA agree that second-hand smoke is harmful and they now accept the latest restrictions against them. On the other hand, Imperial Tobacco Group Plc and JT International doggedly reject that passive smoking can cause dangerous diseases.

As for me, I object if smoke is being blown in my face. But I consider the occasional whiff of cigarette smoke as merely a small part of the polluted air we breathe today.