Should smokers' breaks be deducted from their lunch hours?

I work in government. There have recently been a lot of retirements due to retirement incentives. Department commissioners have been replaced, and the new commissioners are now dealing with less staff and the same amount of work.

One of my friends in another department told me that they have a new commissioner, and there are 16 retirements out of 40 workers. Therefore, there are way less staff to do the same amount of work. The new commissioner told them that smokers’ breaks will be deducted from their lunch hours. Therefore, for example, if a smoker takes a 15 minute break to smoke a cigarette he will now have a 45 minute lunch break instead of the hour that we get in our contract.

I have never heard of this. This seems overly harsh. I am not a smoker but it seems like a real strict boss that would enforce such a thing. However, in the past i have known non-smokers to resent the breaks smokers take often, while the non-smokers don’t have such leeway. It just seems to take it out of a lunch hour seems unheard of.

What do you think? Does this new policy seem fair to you or does it seem overly cheap? To be totally fair, then what about the coffee drinkers? I mean the list could go on and on.