THE SOUL-CORRUPTING ANTI-TOBACCO CRUSADE

I have smoked a pipe and cigars since I was a teenager. The joy and relaxation that cigars and pipes have brought me are very great. I do not regret having begun smoking. Life does not afford us an unlimited number of daily pleasures that are as largely innocuous as cigar and pipe smoking. As for my three children, I would not be particularly concerned if they decided to smoke cigars or pipes, and while I would be unhappy if they took up cigarette smoking and became addicted to nicotine, I would not be unduly so. I would be considerably more unhappy if they became addicted to television. In fact, if smoking cigarettes is the most dangerous activity or worst vice my children ever engage in, I will rejoice.

I therefore do not consider cigarette smoking, let alone cigar or pipe smoking, to be worthy of the crusade society is waging against it. A simple common-sense health problem has been transformed into America’s great moral cause. In the process, the war against smoking is playing havoc with moral values — with the truth, with science and scientists, with children’s moral education, with the war on real drugs, with the principle of personal freedom and much more that we hold dear. The war against tobacco, in short, has come to be far more dangerous than tobacco itself.

One particularly irresponsible aspect of the war against tobacco is the now commonplace equating of tobacco use with drug use. In California, which leads the country in sums spent on anti-smoking ads, billboards throughout the state proclaim that cigarettes and tobacco are drugs — implicitly no different from marijuana or even heroin and cocaine. In fact, it has become a staple of anti-smoking rhetoric that it is harder to end nicotine addiction than heroin addiction. Now the anti-smoking forces want the Food and Drug Administration to regulate nicotine as a drug.

The only conceivable consequence of equating hard drugs, which can destroy the mind and soul, with tobacco, which can actually have positive effects on the mind and has no deleterious effect on the soul, is to lessen the fear of real drugs among young people. How could it not? If taking heroin, cocaine, and marijuana is the moral, personal, and social equivalent of smoking cigarettes, then how bad can heroin, cocaine, and marijuana be? After all, young people see adults smoking cigarettes all the time without destroying their lives.

The truth is that tobacco doesn’t interfere with the soul, mind, conscience, or emotional growth of a smoker. As for the one trait cigarettes and drugs share — addictiveness — this tells us little. Human beings are addicted to a plethora of substances and activities. These include coffee, sugar, alcohol, gambling, sex, food, spending, and virtually every other human endeavor that brings immediate gratification and that people cannot, or choose not to, control.

In the past, when the moral compass of our society functioned more accurately, we fought the addictions that lead to social breakdown far more vigorously than those that can lead to ill health. Today American society and government do the opposite: They fight health dangers — and actually encourage social dangers. For example, government now encourages gambling (by instituting lotteries and legalizing casinos, which advertise more freely than tobacco); government largely ignores alcohol, the addiction most associated with child abuse, spousal abuse, and violent crime; and it fails in its efforts to curb real drug addiction. All the while, it wages its most ubiquitous war against cigarette smokers, who pose no danger to society or family life.

Another irresponsible aspect of the war against tobacco is the demonization of smokers. In the span of a few years, smokers have been transformed from people engaged in a somewhat dangerous but morally innocuous habit into drug addicts, child abusers, and killers. Smoking has become, incredibly, an issue of moral character, not merely of health.

Here is one result:

Judges in divorce cases are increasingly considering smoking as a factor in deciding where to put the kids and retaining custody. . . . If a judge is so inclined, he can depict smoking as negative in two ways: dirtying the child’s air and showing poor character.

In Knox County, Tenn., the Circuit Court has adopted a rule for all custody cases, and not just those in which the child has a health problem: “If children are exposed to smoke, it will be strong evidence that the exposing parent does not take good care of them.”

That rule led last year to a criminal contempt conviction — and a loss of all visitation rights — for a father who smoked during his time with his daughter. [Associated Press, April 18, 1997, italics added.]

Think of it: A thoroughly decent person and loving parent can now lose custody of his or her child solely because of smoking. This is moral idiocy, and it hinges on the fraudulent theory of secondhand smoke.

Since the Environmental Protection Agency listed secondhand smoke as a first-class human carcinogen in 1993, numerous eminent scientists have expressed skepticism. They include epidemiologists Dimitrios Trichopoulos of the Harvard School of Public Health and Alvan Feinstein of Yale Medical School. Dr. Philippe Shubik, editor in chief of Teratogenesis, Carcinogenesis and Mutagenesis, published at Oxford University, contrasts cigarette smoking — “an unequivocal human cancer hazard” — with environmental smoke. Officially designating the latter a human carcinogen, he writes, “is not only unjustified but establishes a scientifically unsound principle.”

In other words, anti-tobacco activists who ascribe murderous carcinogenic qualities to secondhand smoke are engaging in junk science and propaganda, just as were the pro-tobacco spokesmen who denied the carcinogenic properties of smoking.

Instilling fear in children has been one of the few successful educational techniques in America over the past generation. Educators frightened young children first about dying in a nuclear war; then about dying from heterosexually transmitted AIDS; then about being sexually harassed; then about being abused (hence teachers and day-care providers are told not to hug children); then about “stranger danger”; and now schools tell our children that their parent who smokes will die and may even kill them.

After frightening young children, the anti-smoking crusaders attempt to use them: Children’s grasp of the issue is not terribly sophisticated, which makes them all the more easily brainwashed and all the more useful as foot soldiers in the war against smoking.

Massachusetts — a state that prides itself on its commitment to “question authority” — puts its students to work unquestioningly on behalf of anti-smoking authority. Thus, second-graders in Mattapan are told to express their support for a smoking ban in restaurants. Fifth-graders in Chelsea are instructed to use an approach reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, namely, “to knock on the doors of friends and parents who smoke to educate them about the dangers of smoking.”

But frightening children is hardly the only abuse of which the anti-smoking zealots are guilty. Lies, half-truths, exaggerations, and distortions characterize the anti-smoking campaign — as much as they ever characterized the tobacco companies.

The first manipulation of truth concerns the number of Americans said to die from smoking. We are told repeatedly that 500,000 Americans die each year from “tobacco-related illnesses.” Even if the figure is accurate, citing it as if it were the only relevant statistic is dishonest.

What if anti-smoking billboards and ads told the truth about the two statistics that truly matter to anyone contemplating smoking: What are the chances that any individual smoker will die prematurely? And how many years does the average pack-a-day cigarette smoker lose? If anti-smoking announcements dealt with these questions, they would have to declare something like this: “One out of every three cigarette smokers will die prematurely,” and, “While the average American male who never smoked a cigarette will live until age 78, males who smoke a pack a day will, on average, live only until age 71.”

That’s it. The justification for all this hysteria — all the laws restricting speech in advertisements, all the bans on smoking sections in private businesses, all the regressive taxes, all this frightening of children about their lives and those of their parents — is that one-third of cigarette smokers die prematurely, at an average loss of seven years. And that may overstate the case. According to The Costs of Poor Health Habits, a RAND study published in 1991 by Harvard University Press, smoking cigarettes “reduces the life expectancy of a 20-year-old by about 4.3 years.”

Another claim, repeated by President Clinton in a radio broadcast in June, is that we must fight tobacco in order to “save the lives of one million young people.” I will leave it to others to determine whether this qualifies as a lie or sophistry. Whichever, it is untrue. Unlike drugs, drunk driving, and murder, which annually kill many thousands of young people, cigarettes do not kill a single young person. Those young people who die from cigarettes will do so at an average age of over 70. Tell that to the young.

One of the greatest distortions of truth by the anti-smoking crusade — one that can only be characterized as a Big Lie, since it is repeated so often, by so many, and has led to a money grab of unprecedented proportions — is how much it costs the public to cover the medical care of smokers.

We are told that treatment of sick smokers costs government billions of dollars a year. Unlike the claim of 500,000 a year dead from “tobacco-related diseases,” which is only misleading and can be neither proved nor disproved, this claim is easily exposed as a lie. Smokers actually save the public money. On purely financial grounds, the public is a net gainer from cigarette smokers. To put it differently: If everyone stopped smoking, the public would lose substantial sums.

This is because government makes a great deal of money from cigarette taxes, and it saves enormous sums upon the death of cigarette smokers, most of whom die at an age when they would otherwise collect Social Security and other public benefits. Moreover, as hard as it is for the anti-smoking movement to acknowledge, non-smokers impose great costs on society in their last months of life, just as smokers do.

Society has always had two means of discouraging behavior: punishment and stigma. What a society punishes and stigmatizes reveals what it values.

Consider a recent cover story in People magazine. The cover featured a photograph of actress Jody Foster, who is pregnant. The magazine overflowed with enthusiasm about her pregnancy and quoted one source after another welcoming the future Foster child.

This article would have been inconceivable a generation ago. For not only is Jody Foster unmarried, there is not even an identifiable father (presumably some anonymous sperm donor) for the child she is bringing into the world.

Yet this means nothing to elite America. Hooray for the deliberately fatherless child! Hooray for unwed motherhood! Those are the messages sent to America’s young women and girls and to its young men and boys.

People magazine, a pretty accurate reflection of America’s social attitudes, knew it ran no risk by celebrating a fatherless pregnancy. But there is one photo it would probably never dare show on its cover: Jody Foster smoking a cigarette.

America has made its choice: It reserves its stigma for cigarette smokers and is entirely nonjudgmental about bringing children into the world without a father. When I see smokers shivering outside buildings and regarded by many as pathetic or even dangerous people while unwed mothers are celebrated, I worry about America’s future.

Here’s another example of the misplaced priorities that the hysteria over cigarette smoking has wrought. The president of the United States and the country’s surgeon general summoned the national media to the White House for what they deemed a highly significant announcement: Smoking among black and other minority youths has increased. President Clinton and Surgeon General David Satcher appeared with a group of non-white children and spoke in the gravest tones about this threat to them.

But in six years in office, the president has never convened a White House conference to lament the plague of unwed motherhood. The majority of black children grow up without their father in their home. This is easily the greatest obstacle to black progress. Yet the president and the media focus on the increase in cigarette smoking among young blacks — and black smoking rates are lower than those of whites.

A question: Which would improve black life more — for every single black youth to stop smoking while the illegitimacy rate remained the same, or for every black youth to smoke cigarettes while growing up from birth to adulthood with both of his parents? With the nation morally at sea, many Americans may find this question difficult to answer.

At the heart of the anti-smoking lawsuits against the tobacco industry is the denial that smokers are personally responsible for smoking. They allegedly had no knowledge of the dangers of cigarette smoking and began smoking because venal tobacco companies used mind-numbing ads to convince them cigarettes were healthy.

The last thing America needs is a massive campaign further eroding personal responsibility. We already live in a country that regularly teaches its citizens to blame others — government, ads, parents, schools, movies, genes, sugar, tobacco, alcohol, sexism, racism — for their poor decisions and problems. Now we have the largest public-relations campaign in American history teaching Americans this: If you smoke, you are in no way responsible for what happens to you. You are entirely a victim.

The war against tobacco is telling teenagers in particular to look for others to blame. The latest ad campaign, in Florida — funded by tens of millions of public dollars — is directed to teens. It tells them that if they smoke, they do so solely because they have been manipulated by tobacco-company ads. This is the theme of all the approaches to young people by the anti-smoking forces: You kids have been manipulated by a cartoon camel.

This approach not only sends the destructive message to young people that they are not responsible for their behavior, that they are helpless when confronted with a billboard for Marlboro cigarettes, it also is intellectually dishonest. If young people are powerless in the face of tobacco billboards — tobacco ads are already banned from television, radio, and youth-oriented magazines — they are presumably powerless in the face of all advertisements. Why then allow advertisements for liquor, wine, beer, or R-rated movies? Aren’t young people equally powerless in the face of these ads? Why allow ads showing sexually suggestive gestures or behavior? Won’t those ads make young people engage in sex? Or is teen sex less worrisome than teen smoking? Isn’t the message that young people are not responsible for behaving as billboards urge them to behave a disempowering message?

The ultimate question is this: Why, given the far greater ills of American society and the minimal harm caused by tobacco, is America obsessed with smoking? The reason is that our moral compass is broken. Two generations ago, when our value system was comparatively sound, the vice America fought was alcohol, not tobacco. America understood that the effects of alcohol are incomparably worse than the effects of tobacco.

Cigarettes can lead to premature death. Alcohol can lead to murder, rape, child abuse, spousal beatings, family rupture, and permanent pathologies in the children of alcoholics. If all alcoholic beverages were miraculously removed from the earth, the amount of rape, murder, child abuse, and spousal beating would plummet, and no child would ever again suffer the permanently debilitating effects of having been raised by an alcoholic. If all tobacco products miraculously disappeared from the earth, the amount of rape, murder, child abuse, and spousal beating would remain identical, and millions of children would continue to suffer the horrors of growing up in alcoholic homes. In other words, morally speaking, little would change if tobacco miraculously disappeared.

In a more religious age, social activists fought alcohol; in our secular age, social activists fight tobacco — and a few other select ills, such as restrictions on abortion. Indeed, America’s elites now consider it immoral to let a bar owner choose whether to allow smoking in his bar. But the same elites are pro-choice when it comes to letting the alcohol flow in those bars and allowing mothers to extinguish nascent human life for any reason they please.

The same president who vetoed a bill outlawing “partial-birth” abortions, which are usually performed in mid or late pregnancy, vigorously opposes choice about smoking in nearly all privately owned businesses. In California at the end of the twentieth century, third-trimester abortions are legal, but smoking in bars and outdoor stadiums is not. I happen to favor keeping first-trimester abortions legal, but even I can see that it is quite a statement about a society’s sense of right and wrong when it deems secondhand smoke more worthy of legal restriction than the killing of human fetuses.

As early as 1994, New York Times columnist Russell Baker foresaw the dangers of the anti-smoking crusade. He wrote:

Crusades typically start by being admirable, proceed to being foolish and end by being dangerous. The crusade against smoking is now clearly well into the second stage where foolishness abounds.

Now something very sinister is developing. Some businesses are refusing to hire workers who smoke outside the workplace, on the ground that smokers’ health problems are bad for their employers.

This is an illustration of a crusade entering its dangerous stage. Give employers the right to control the habits of their workers outside the workplace, and you set the stage for a tyranny even worse than the evils of too much government which keep conservatives so alarmed.

Put this crusade in perspective. In the 1920s, America waged a war against alcohol. In the 1930s, it battled economic depression. In the 1940s, it fought fascism. In the 1950s and 1960s, it led the struggle against communism. In the 1970s, America grappled with its own racism and bigotry. In the 1980s, it ensured the defeat of the Soviet empire.

The next generation will ask: What preoccupied America in the final decade of the twentieth century — while unprecedented numbers of its children were being raised without fathers, while the country was living with rates of murder far higher than in any other advanced democracy, while its public schools were graduating semi-literates, while its ability to fight two wars was being eviscerated even as rogue nations built stocks of chemical and biological weapons and new countries were acquiring nuclear weapons? The editors of America’s leading editorial pages and the majority of its national politicians, state attorneys general, and educators will be able to answer together, “We fought tobacco.” Shame on them all.

Dennis Prager is an author, theologian, and radio talk-show host in Los Angeles. A longer version of this article appears in the May and June issue of his newsletter, The Prager Perspective.