March 03, 2005

Etiquette tips, please

Posted by John Quiggin
Here in Brisbane, we’re not really up with which fork you should use first and so on, so I was concerned to this piece from the New Statesman by Nick Cohen (reprinted with the usual delays in Australia by the Financial Review)
I think you can smoke in the Groucho1, but you can’t in Waitrose or at any Islington dinner party I’ve been to in the past decade. The social taboo against smoking is becoming absolute, in the middle classes at any rate … it is social death to put a cigarette in your mouth, not to stuff cocaine up your nose.
I’m obviously out of touch here. Last time I checked the etiquette manual was de rigeur to go to the bathroom to snort cocaine, and to go out to the porch to smoke. But now I fear total embarrassment at my next middle-class dinner party: obviously I should have the cocaine served at the table. Can anyone give me more details here - are individual salvers the way to go, for example, and is it OK to ask guests to bring some of their own?

To be fair to Cohen, he’s making a serious point, namely that consumers of cocaine, as well as risking imprisonment and health damage, are financing bloody and brutal drug dealers (though, as he concedes, the only real answer is legalisation, and he’s apparently not prepared to advocate that).

But do we have to have the standard whine about how hard done by smokers are compared to other drug users? Apart from coffee, tobacco is the only recreational drug you are legally and socially free to consume in public at any time of the day or night2, subject to the minor restriction that you don’t blow the smoke on other people or smoke in an enclosed space with the same effect. Is Cohen’s tiresome repetition of old-fogey cliches a required part of the process of becoming an ex-lefty?

1 A fashionable club in London, it appears.

2 The law on public alcohol consumption varies from place to place. But, almost everywhere, the social strictures are far tighter than in relation to smoking.