James Delingpole: Smoking. Yes, yes, we know it's no good for you. But is it really so bad?

Sometimes, in my more hypochondriacal moments, I try to imagine what I'd do if the doctor called me in to say I'd got terminal lung cancer. Be very unhappy, I expect. I'd go: "Why me?" I'd be racked with despair and self-pity. I'd curse the day I ever did something so stupid as to take up smoking cigarettes. But what I definitely wouldn't do is blame the Government for not intervening earlier to stop me from killing myself. As far as I'm concerned, it's not the Government's job.

Smoking is a bad, unhealthy thing, I know, but it's also one of the more enjoyable pastimes man has yet devised. Perhaps I wouldn't rank it quite as highly as meaningless sex with beautiful strangers, shooting one's first grouse, crack cocaine, fox-hunting, taking a tight bend round the Isle of Man TT circuit on a Honda Fireblade or a really good night's bridge. But as reliable, low-level, always-there-for-you-when-you-need-it pleasures go, tobacco takes an awful lot of beating.

This is one of the reasons why I'm so bothered by the state's bullying campaign to drive smoking out of existence. I don't want my children to die of cancer, obviously. What I want even less, though, is for them to grow up without the opportunity of enjoying, some time in their lives, an honest, lung-rasping, cup-of-coffee-enhancing, nerve-calming snout. And it goes so well with being a student. I love the devil-may-care, far-too-young-to-die way that young people smoke. Youth without cigarettes, in my view, is youth squandered.

Well, pretty much. Sure, I can just about conceive of the possibility of failing to smoke in one's late teens and twenties and yet emerging unscathed. But I'd be very suspicious of the sort of people who managed it. What kind of weirdo would you have to be not to want to try something that appears to make so many grown-ups so content? And what kind of lily-livered quitter would you have to be not to keep going till you became addicted?

I feel much the same way about all those other drugs to which, of course, cigarettes - especially in the case of marijuana - are intimately connected. If there's a substance out there that can help you see God or feel like God, or temporarily convince you that you love everyone in the world including Osama bin Laden, then surely it's your bounden duty as an inheritor of earth's bounty to try it at least once. How else are you going to appreciate the world in its infinite variety?

Yes, tobacco is naughty and it does lead to harder substances and I've little doubt that my body and brain were irreparably damaged as a result in the period before I quit smoking six years ago (cowardice, mainly).

But if I could claw back the lost years and do things differently next time round, would I? No way. For better or worse, all those fags (and the drinking and drugging that went with them) helped ease my path through life and shape the person I am. Cigarettes made grim InterRail trips across Europe more bearable; they enabled me to cope with difficult phone calls, grisly essay crises, hideous deadlines and bouts of post-relationship despair; they enhanced perfect moments and soothed anxious ones; they made me look cooler than I really am; they helped me pull girls with those cute origami roses you can make out of the silver foil; they gave me something to do with my hands at parties; they helped me meet lots of interesting new people.

Cigarettes are also good for: disguising smelly farts; warding off midges and mosquitoes; bonding with grizzled peasants in Greek villages; establishing a bond with your terrorist captors; escaping boring conversations; enjoying instant camaraderie with the huddle of fellow smokers outside the party (among them, very probably, Martin Amis or David Hockney); increasing the likelihood that you've got a light on you when your plane crashes in the middle of the jungle; saving the livelihoods of hard-working, honest tobacco growers in North Carolina and the developing world; warding off Alzheimer's; delaying your death by firing squad; giving you a sexy voice; connecting you with James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Steve McQueen, Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Groucho Marx, Clint Eastwood, Winston Churchill and all the other myriad people in history who ever looked good with a fag or a cigar or a stogy between their lips.

Of course, if you're a sworn enemy of tobacco (Hitler was, too, by the way), none of this is going to sway you. You'll feel towards our smoking heritage rather as antis do about hunting: "I don't care about the kennel men or the survival of the packs or the bloodlines or the disposal of the carcasses or the maintenance of the hedges and stone walls or the traditions or the rural community bonding or nyah nyah nyah not listening - just ban this evil activity now."

It seems to me, however, that anyone who sees the smoking ban as a pure, unmitigated good, devoid of any deleterious social consequences, must be missing a part of his soul. Like it or not, smoking has been an integral part of our culture since James I wrote his A Counterblaste to Tobacco and Marlowe declared that "all they that loue not tobacco and boies were fooles". To try to erase it in the name of societal good is as crass and dishonest and historically insensitive as putting on a museum exhibition about Brunel and then, as PC curators do nowadays, airbrushing out his famous cigar.

I don't want to live in a world where high streets no longer have a tobacconist; where the Marlboro man has no meaning; where public bars - such as that eerily joyless place in Cheers - are no longer filled with smoke; where it's impossible to sneak a tactical, gig- enhancing joint as the band plays your favourite song at the Brixton Academy; where we've lost the cultural thread that ran from clay-pipe-smoking Jacobeans in the village inn through to fag-smoking Tommies waving farewell at Victoria Station to 1980s City boys chain-smoking their way through yuppie mega-deals. Preserving traditions is what we do well and I'd like to keep it that way.

Which isn't to say that I want everything back. I'm delighted there's no longer any smoking on aeroplanes (all the smokers smoked as if the plane was about to crash, so the smoking section invaded the non-smoking one in a creeping fug), and it's great that you can come back from a night out now without your clothes reeking like an overfumigated kipper. But these benefits already exist. It's the new measures I object to, the ones telling us we can't smoke indoors anywhere outside our home - not even if it's a private club where both members and management are agreed that they'd like smoking to continue there. Now that for me is an assault on our liberty too far.

At this point, someone usually mentions the evils of "passive smoking" and I'm very glad they do because this is my chance to mention James Enstrom and Geoffrey Kabat. Between 1960 and 1998, these two American researchers - fiercely anti-smoking, both of them - conducted a survey of 118,094 Californians in a bid to discover once and for all whether or not the inhalation of other people's cigarette smoke causes heart disease or cancer. Their conclusion? No it doesn't.

So why are the results of the world's only large-scale, long-term survey in this field not more widely appreciated? Because these honest scientists have been ignored by governments and smeared by health campaigners as being in the pay of "Big Tobacco". Indeed this is partially true - but only because the anti-smoking organisations that originally supported their research (such as the American Cancer Society) dropped them like a hot potato the moment they realised they were failing to reach the "right" answer. Scientists need funds, so their work had to be completed with support from the tobacco industry.

"Passive smoking" in other words is a total lie, invented by health and safety agitators and connived in by the state in order to railroad through an iniquitous law by pretending it's about the "public interest".

It's not the only occasion that this Government has pulled this trick - think of the Iraq war. And it's certainly not its first assault on personal liberty. From hunting to identity cards, the defining achievement of New Labour is to have done more to erode our freedoms than any regime since Oliver Cromwell's.

What I hate most about this smoking ban is its arrogance and presumption. We British citizens are too ill-informed or perverse to reach sensible decisions about what's good for us, it says, so the only way forward is for the state to intrude ever deeper into our lives and micro-manage every last detail. But what if the gentleman in Whitehall doesn't know what is best?

What if the slight benefits that may accrue from having fewer smokers in the population are vastly outweighed by the expense of policing the new ban, and by the cost to civil liberty? What if there's more to life than clean lungs and longevity?

James Delingpole is the author of 'How to Be Right' (Headline Review)

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