IT is unsurprising south Bristol has such a high incidence of lung cancer.

It is impossible to separate this part of the city from the tobacco industry. Thousands of people in south Bristol worked for Wills. And those who didn't, knew people who did.

All of them had access to cheap cigarettes whenever they wanted them. Everywhere there was encouragement to smoke. There were adverts everywhere for cigarettes and for the ones made in this city, the added attraction of Embassy coupons which people traded in for gifts.

The factory at Hartcliffe was acclaimed as the biggest single hall of cigarette production anywhere.

Now, 30 and 40 years on, the legacy of south Bristol's obsession with smoking is brought home.

And those who have fallen victim to lung cancer are paying the most dreadful price for their addiction.

Their example should be enough to stop anyone taking up smoking, yet tens of thousands do so every year. The Government takes no real steps to stop it. The Treasury is happy to keep coining in money from the taxes levied on tobacco.

It is willing to spend millions of pounds a year treating people whose illnesses have been caused by smoking. It is willing to spend millions more on adverts warning of the dangers of smoking.

Yet it runs scared of taking any real action to stamp it out.

It offers token gestures, such as banning smoking in public.

If the government was serious about cutting deaths from smoking, it would make smoking illegal.

Imagine if someone developed an activity today that would result in tens of thousands of people dying agonising deaths every year.

Politicians would be falling over themselves to ban it.

So why don't they ban cigarettes and give the next generation a better chance of a healthy life?

Or is that too simple?