Scandinavian Smokers Huff and Puff as Legal Restrictions Get Tougher to Swallow

Shoved into corners, banned from local flights and excluded from some hotel floors, smokers in Scandinavia say they have had enough and are beginning to fight back.

Smokers have banded together in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark to combat perceived discrimination, to lobby against new anti-smoking laws and to share tricks to sneak a smoke against the rules.

“We want to protect smokers’ rights. We don’t want to encourage people to smoke, especially not young people,” said Bengt Oste, chairman of the Swedish lobby Smokepeace.

“Too many smoking bans were coming from all over the place. It was about time somebody did something about it,” said Tore Dinesen of the Danish smokers’ organization, Henry.

In their latest action, the pro-smoke groups published a pamphlet on how to avoid the smoking bans on local flights by Finnair and SAS, the Scandinavian Airlines System. The rule was extended Nov. 1 to any international flight less than 100 minutes long on these airlines.

The “Smokers’ Guide To Smokers’ Flights in the Nordic Area” lists flights by other airlines with smoking sections that have stopovers in the region.

Smokepeace, which adopted the symbol of an Indian in feathered headdress puffing a peace pipe, says it just wants a fair deal for smokers and non-smokers.

In 10 months it has drawn 1,500 members. Some are non-smokers offended by discrimination, Oste said, and 53% are women.

“Smokers have to back down a bit, so as not to harm or irritate non-smokers,” said Oste, an anchorman for Swedish TV news who says he has been a pipe smoker for 45 years.

At the same time, fair provision should be made for smokers, he said.

Henry, launched two years ago by a Danish wine and tobacco merchant, enlisted Denmark’s pipe-smoking Foreign Minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen in an advertising campaign last spring to plead that “tolerance and consideration are the basis of living together.”

Although it doesn’t release financial figures, Henry reportedly gets part of its finances from the Danish tobacco industry.

Norway has enacted some of the world’s toughest anti-smoking laws, which critics say make lighting a cigarette indoors illegal almost everywhere except at home.

Sweden’s parliament is in the early stage of drafting a comprehensive law, which many legislators want to fashion on the Norwegian model. Steps toward a similar bill in Denmark were interrupted by an election and have been dropped for now.

Among Norway’s regulations is a ban on smoking in any office occupied by more than one person, even if everyone in the room is a smoker.

Smoking was outlawed in schools, hospitals, theater lobbies and public transportation. Selling tobacco to youths under 18 is illegal.

Many Scandinavian hotels have no-smoking rooms, and some have barred tobacco from entire floors.

Most workplaces have set aside smoking areas. The Stockholm daily Aftonbladet banned smoking anywhere in its new nine-story building except in a few glassed-in rooms by the coffee machines on each floor. They are so poorly ventilated that workers refer to them as “the gas chambers.”

High tobacco taxes also are meant to deter. In Norway cigarettes cost about $4 a pack, slightly more than in the other countries. Roll-your-own tobacco is becoming more popular in Denmark, where pipe tobacco is taxed less.

One dodge from smoking bans is snuff, a plug of tobacco that many Scandinavians stick under their upper lip.

The government in Oslo adopted an ambitious and, critics say, unrealistic target of making Norway smoke-free by the end of the century.

The critics note that although tobacco has not been advertised since 1973, four out of 10 Norwegians smoke, and consumption is rising by 500 tons of tobacco a year.