There are times in life when it's necessary to tell someone to just stop being stupid. Much of teenage life needs to be met with this comment for example.
But there are also times when we have to tell politics -- or politicians -- the same thing. No, that's an idiot idea, don't.
As this newspaper reports, new regulations are being brought in which there is a “proposed prohibition of smokeless nicotine and tobacco products” and this is just the sort of thing I mean.
Abject nonsense, don't allow them to do it.
Now, it is true that smoking kills people. Kills -- depending upon who you believe -- one third to two thirds of those who take up the habit.
It probably is true that if someone invented it today, then we'd not allow it.
It's possible to get all high-minded about this too. High-minded on either side. If people want to do something that kills them then who are we to stop them?
We allow skydiving after all.
Or, if capitalists want to profit then why should we stop them -- a view held by very few, to be fair.
But the problem with a ban is that, as has been shown every time anyone has banned what many people do to harm themselves, the ban doesn't work.
People just carry on illegally and we get criminals supplying their desires with all the violence and corruption that entails.
The best we can do is harm reduction. Say, with alcohol, making sure that people are actually selling the drinking kind, ethanol, rather than the methanol that kills or blinds you.
With smoking, taxes -- and this works up to a point but it's possible to go past it as my native Britain is finding -- at punitive levels will reduce smoking.
But also alternative methods of gaining access to the active drug, nicotine, also work. Vaping perhaps, or these smokeless tobacco products, and so on.
The standard analysis is that people smoke for the nicotine and get killed by the tar. So, if people gain access to the nicotine without taking in the tar, then they're better off.
The other way to describe the same process is what is called “harm reduction.” People are going to do what people want to do and it seems absurd to ban a safer method of their doing so.
Sadly, there are people the English journalist -- the finest of his generation by a long way -- Bernard Levin used to call “single issue fanatics” or SIFs. They get the bit between their teeth. Get wound up by that one single issue, and become wholly fanatical about it.
The international anti-smoking bureaucracy is dominated by these SIFs -- and those who are not actually employed by the international bodies are often funded by the billionaire Michael Bloomberg who is particularly fanatic on this subject.
The aim of smoking control is, to them, to completely abolish the consumption of nicotine, anywhere and anywhen.
This is not the correct proposal for a free society.
Harm reduction in the consumption of nicotine is an entirely valid goal for a government. So, the active promotion of such things as vapes, smokeless tobacco, and so on is indicated, not the banning of the forms that don't kill people.
A useful piece of guidance -- advice if you like -- for good government is never to allow the SIFs to gain control of any area of policy.
The very idea of banning the forms of nicotine consumption that don't kill people is ridiculous. But that's where the current law is heading. It shouldn't.