Smokers are angry people.  I don’t say this with any mean spirit.  Their anger is perfectly understandable.

They were segregated, then banished, from all their favourite haunts.  The bars, the restaurants and cafés, the bingo halls that used to welcome them now spurned them in keeping with tougher smoking laws.  Smokers were booted outside, first to the entranceways and then further, to designated areas across the street.  In winter, huddling in alcoves and looking pained, smokers are among the angriest people around.

They are forced to look at ghastly, graphic images of diseased organs, bad teeth or penile dysfunction with every smoke.  They are targets for a bombardment of anti-smoking messages and campaigns from the public health community and disease associations.

With the ever-rising price of tobacco, smokers add mightily to the public purse in taxes and receive neither credit nor respect for their contribution.  In their eyes, the economy runs on their fumes.   As active daily consumers, they are avid supporters of small retail merchants and they keep the health care sector employed.

When anthropologists look back on the human’s long Tobacco Age they too will conclude that smokers were an angry people. 

They’re angry that they have this cruel habit overtaking them and over which they feel powerless.  Their nicotine addiction claws away at them and makes them antsy.  Maybe angry that they tried to quit again recently and failed.

Shunned, scorned, isolated and targeted, is it any wonder smokers present a particular challenge when asked to play nice with their cigarette butts and keep them off the ground?  If only we could appeal to the smoker’s better nature.

In the end, litter law enforcement and fines might be the only way to stop smokers from littering, but that will just make them angrier.  

Today Australia released its National Litter Index and kicked off a week of Keep Australia Beautiful efforts.

I have some pointed views on what governments could do to help prevent litter. 

They are not particularly drastic ideas.  In fact, they fit quite well with public programs that are already up and running.

Applying for a driver’s license, for example.  Here’s a perfect place to include litter prevention education and compliance as a condition of using a motor vehicle, the same as any other road rule.  Ditto for boating, fishing, camping permits and the like.

Litter prevention education ought to be included in the preparatory course for new citizens.  Municipal parks and facility permits should require users to clean up after their events or risk losing a "maintenance deposit."

Littering laws need to be upheld and enforced.  I like what they’re doing in Shimla, India: employing litter warden armed with whistles to whistle down litterers and ticket them if they can’t be shamed into putting their litter in the right bin.  (See the full story at Prevent Litter/Newsreel).

I propose a litter prevention school for anyone convicted of littering, running along the lines of the groundbreaking “john school” that was brought in for the procurers of prostitutes.  In that system, the convicted john attends a one-day educational session at his expense to learn the folly of his ways.   So, for convicted litterers I say, march them off to litter school and make them pay $500 to learn why they must never litter again. 

The accumulation of fees and fines would sustain the operation of the school and then some.  I have no idea what it costs to run a dedicated litter court, but no doubt a concerted attack on littering would reap more than enough dollars to implement such a system.

I don’t think these are radical ideas, but you tell me.  Send me your comments.

Is it totally off the wall to expect governments to do more than hand out plastic garbage bags to volunteers and encourage them to go clean up other people’s messes? 

As a society we have failed to make littering socially unacceptable.  We did it with smoking, unsafe sex and spitting, but haven’t stigmatized littering yet.  

After you say “don’t” to a toddler, inevitably, that young person will proceed to do whatever words followed your “don’t.”  For example, “Don’t stand on the chair.”  The fledgling child will stand on the chair.  You would be better to say, “Get down from the chair.”  Or, “Sit on the chair.”

The child doesn’t understand the negative concept as stated in the words “do not”.  The child understands a positive instruction followed, perhaps, by gentle assistance in achieving the desired outcome.  So too is this true about the person who litters, I’ve found.

“Don’t litter” is an ineffective message.   At the Litter Prevention Program we believe that positive sells.  We encourage people to do something good like respect the environment, use the proper bins, ‘think, look, place’, be clean – strong words that are far more easy to embrace than any negative, bordering on hostile, messages against littering like 'No. Don't'.

Consider the word ‘anti’ as in anti-litter campaigns.  Anti means against.  It rails in opposition and is not typically positive or proactive.  With litter prevention we want to do more than oppose it, we want it stopped.

With the right approach and ingredients littering can be stopped.  As with a young child, saying “don’t” to someone who litters isn’t the wisest approach.

An essential message is still missing from tobacco product packaging. 

While great emphasis is placed on the killer aspects of smoking, no attention at all is paid to the disposal of used tobacco products. 

Governments, the tobacco industry and users themselves have done a terrible job of addressing tobacco litter, which has grown into an identified worldwide environmental hazard.

There is no mandated message on cigarette packages concerning the correct disposal of this toxic product.   No one seems to want to talk about, let alone take responsibility for, cigarette butt litter. 

Why not require a “Do Not Litter” message on all tobacco product packaging and have programs that blend education with enforcement regarding smoking-related litter?

Tobacco companies net the profits.  The rest of us get the butt end.