The liberal conundrum
It is relatively easy, then, to dismiss the claims of smokers who knowingly harm themselves. The duty of governments is harder to disentangle. In most rich countries they have gone to great lengths to inform citizens about the dangers of smoking. Having informed, should they also discourage?
One argument that suggests they should is that smoking does harm not only to the smoker but to the rest of society too, by imposing on it the cost of looking after smokers who are dying. This argument is surely stronger than the claim that non-smokers are damaged directly by breathing in the leakage from smokers' puffs. But it is not as strong as it seems. A surfeit of cream buns is also bad for your health. Should cream buns then be punitively taxed, stamped with a health warning or banned from consumption in public places? Besides, smokers save society money too, by dying young.
If you take away the alleged social cost of smoking, the case for governments actively to discourage smoking begins to look a good deal weaker. And yet, in practice if not in principle, most rich countries have already gone far beyond the business of telling smokers the dispiriting facts about what carcinogenic tars do to the insides of lungs. They are deep into the discouragement business as well. The advertising of cigarettes is severely restricted. Selling cigarettes to minors is illegal. Cigarettes are taxed especially heavily. And the supposedly neutral "information" that is provided to smokers has begun to feel a lot more like propaganda: cigarette packets say in large letters that "Smoking kills" where once they merely said "Smoking may be harmful to your health".
In many places, this policy of official discouragement has fostered or strengthened an ugly climate of intolerance. As health warnings become increasingly strident, the smoker starts to feel that he is being admonished rather than informed. This is finger wagging of the sort enjoyed by the busybodies who have lately shooed smokers out of the public parks of Bellaire in Texas. It may well be beside the point too. What a recent book called the "sublime" beauty of smoking is tied to the pastime's nastiness and danger. A brand that called itself "Death" embraced this danger and still sold. Against this background, there comes a point when public education turns into hectoring, and encourages in non-smokers a disturbing lack of respect for the other fellow's private choices.
In the rich world, where this point has long been reached, the discouragement of smoking has gone too far. But should it be rolled back all the way to the point where the government merely informs and does not discourage at all? That would be the libertarian preference: leave people to make, and accept the consequences of, their own informed choices, even if these are self-destructive. But this would imply a radical change. By rights, cigarettes would then be advertised much more widely than they are now, and taxed less highly. More people would smoke, and die as a result of it. Though consistent, the policy would feel wrong to many people.
And it would feel wrong for some good reasons. The strongest has to do with children. Informed choice is all very well, but weighing the present rewards of smoking against the possibility of illness far in the future is hard, and children, for whom age and decay are especially distant, are especially bad at it. They are, however, poorer than adults, and more impressionable. This justifies abnormally high taxes on tobacco, together with some restrictions on advertising. Satisfying as it might be from a libertarian perspective to draw the line at information, there is a case, where tobacco is concerned, for some mild official discouragement as well.
And other substances? There are zealots who say that tobacco should be outlawed, on the grounds that other dangerous, and arguably much less dangerous, drugs such as cocaine or heroin are outlawed. The zealots have a point in urging consistency. Yet to most people the criminalisation of smoking sounds ludicrous, not just because it would be so obviously illiberal to outlaw an activity that generally damages nobody but the actor, but also because, as the prohibition of alcohol clearly showed, such measures do not work.
The bold answer here is not to outlaw tobacco but to apply to all drugs the policy of legalise-and-discourage that applies to cigarettes, with the degree of discouragement matched to the substance concerned. This would not only have the virtue of consistency. It would also be to acknowledge that, in the case of many drugs such as marijuana, cocaine and heroin the policy of prohibition has already collapsed almost as comprehensively as it did in the case of alcohol, and a lot more violently. Tobacco may be a scourge. It is also, oddly, a worked example of a better way for liberal societies to live with drugs.
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