Smoking

True to Howard Becker’s well-known aphorism that ‘deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label’, it is becoming rapidly plausible today to approach the habit of inhaling and exhaling the smoke of tobacco as a form of deviancy. Across the globe, particularly in developed countries, smoking bans of various types are fi rmly in place and public, often publicly funded, campaigns hard-press the message that ‘smoking seriously harms you and others around you’. Smokers are not merely segregated and banished, but increasingly stigmatised and vilifi ed as anti-social, irresponsible and dangerous.