Understand that I’m no anti-smoking fundamentalist. My valued guests can smoke in my house, and I don’t whinge about the smell, at least, not aloud. I just feel that inhaling fumes from a known cancer-causing agent, and calling it "pleasure", is ludicrous habit. Many in Bhutan feel the same. The Land of the Thunder Dragon, as it’s known, wants to become the world’s first "smoke-free" nation—18 of 20 districts have banned tobacco sales. Sure, that means smuggling but not on the scale—say—of rum-running into Gujarat or Haryana (in the dark days when it was dry). Only stubborn Thimpu, the small but bustling capital city, and a border district near nicotine-mad China, still allows the open sale of cigarettes and gutka. I wandered the country, trying to find people breaking the law and found only school children who lecture fluently about the evils of tobacco. Even in Thimpu, where packets of Wills and 555s lie on panwallah’s trays, only Bengali and Bihari labourers, and the odd Bhutanese of Nepali descent, felt free enough to puff away in the streets. The health minister, Sangay Ngedup, says the impetus for the ban on tobacco comes from local government, not his ministry. He admits snuffing out cigarettes in Thimpu is probably a pipe dream, but adds that Bhutan was the first country known to have banned smoking in public places, way back in 1762! And the Buddhist saint most revered in Bhutan, Padmasambhava, wrote about the evils of smoking centuries earlier, long before Sir Walter Raleigh brought tobacco to Europe from his farm in America.
