KATHY SHERIDAN: History may show that smoking began its terminal decline late in the year 2002. That's when the world's biggest cigarette company, Philip Morris, declared its Australian headquarters a smoke-free workplace.
Now, anyone who is not pole-axed by that piece of news has surely been living at the bottom of a well for the past 30 or 40 years. It's not quite as if Guinness turned teetotal, but it is a monumental step.
This is the American giant that only seven years ago gained exemption from workplace anti-smoking laws by threatening to move its headquarters out of New York. Weeks before its recent volte- face, it was reported to have tried to influence Australian regulations on workplace ventilation so as to play down the significance of passive smoking.
This, remember, is the big cheese of Big Tobacco, the industry which knowingly, painstakingly, calibrated the amounts of one of the world's most addictive substances in its products, to seize and hold its patrons in ever-intensifying, till-death bondage. And swore blind for decades that it did no such thing, that its products were not addictive, that there was no causal link between tobacco and cancer, and that passive smoking was a nonsense.
"It causes fatal disease, whether you're a smoker at Philip Morris or not," its corporate affairs director told ABC radio. As corporate cave-ins go, it was nearly up there with the best of them. The firm admitted to knowingly producing a product that kills. Against that was the effort to skate around the issue of potential liability for the death or disability of Philip Morris employees exposed to workplace smoke.
The fact that its Melbourne factory and offices have been fitted with specially ventilated smoking areas well away from the work zones allows it to put a gloss on what is a major PR disaster. On the other hand, it has had to accept that many of its 800 employees might prefer an alternative to the long-standing perk of free ciggies; they may take a cash payout of around €4000 instead.
Now, if Philip Morris has finally got the message, where do the rest of us stand?
According to the World Health Organisation, passive smoking can increase the risk of lung cancer in non-smokers by 20 to 30 per cent; adverse health effects on children include pneumonia, bronchitis, coughing and wheezing, and the deterioration of asthma conditions.
This week, a scientific study carried out for the Western Health Board by senior environmental health officer Maurice Mulcahy found that all 164 12- and 13-year-old boys and girls selected from three Galway secondary schools had been exposed to environmental tobacco smoke over the preceding two to three days, even though half of them had no memory of it.
Smoking in the home by parents accounted for most of the exposure; restaurants and cars were responsible for a fifth of it. And - surprise, surprise - the study demonstrated that sitting in the no-smoking sections of a cafe is no protection.
The case against is open and shut, and has been for aeons.
Yet, as night follows day, when there is talk of official measures to discourage people from smoking themselves or those around them to death, someone will always be heard to mutter fiercely about the "nanny state", amid snorting imprecations to "get a life".
Last October, in a column for the Sunday Business Post, Alan Dukes railed against the "politically correct nannies" who were "constantly" telling us what was good - or bad - for us, "whether we like it or not". One of his targets was the Minister for Health, about to implement a ban on the display of point-of-sale promotion material for cigarettes and other tobacco products. These regulations, Mr Dukes noted, would require retailers to keep the products in a closed cabinet, out of sight of the customer. "If a cigarette manufacturer now finds a way of making its products less offensive," he complained, "there is no legal way in which that information can be conveyed to smokers."
Interestingly, the Philip Morris challenge to the new legislation is similarly framed. It charges that the Act has "stripped manufacturers of the last remaining means of communicating with adult smokers in Ireland". To anyone who has examined the history of Big Tobacco and its sterling efforts to lure in children and dupe the consumer into thinking that its products were "less offensive", this argument is simply risible.
Big Tobacco lost the right to consumers' trust a long time ago. In the mind-bogglingly unlikely event that it produces a tobacco product that is verifiably harmless - and proven to be so after massive, independent, 40-year trials, as for any lethal substance - that news can be passed on by its exceedingly well-paid PR swarms via science journalists.
What we know right now is that Big Tobacco's products kill - often following enormous cost to the nanny state's health service. And that it kills the poor in disproportionate numbers.
Cool, pro-tobacco pundits like to argue that, unlike alcohol, cigarettes do not trigger violence and destruction. The difference is that the kind of destruction wreaked by tobacco is sinister, slow-acting (usually) and heart-breakingly silent.