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5/18/98
Rob Christensen: Smokers find a defender in politically incorrect author
It is perhaps a sign of the times that even Jim Graham, North Carolina's cigar-chomping agriculture commissioner, has taken down the sign from his office that read: "Thank You For Smoking.''
It was such a quaint notion. The sign might as well have read: "Please use a spittoon.'' Or "Ladies and Gentlemen are required to dress for dinner.''
Not since the temperance movement that culminated in the Prohibition era, from 1920 to 1933, has there been such public hysteria about a product as there is now about tobacco. Smokers are hounded worse than Hester Prynne. The cigarette industry is demonized. And a wide variety of people -- ranging from anti-smoking advocates to TV commentator Andy Rooney -- are calling for a new era of prohibition.
Can "smokeasys," gangster-controlled cigarette black markets, and knocks on the door and a whispered "Joe Camel sent me,'' be far behind?
Into the debate comes Jacob Sullum, who may be the most politically incorrect man in America.
Sullum dares question the prevailing political orthodoxy in his new book, "For Your Own Good -- The anti-smoking crusade and the tyranny of public health.'' Sullum recently made stops in Raleigh and Winston-Salem, visiting one of the few states in the country where he might get a fair hearing -- an area where tobacco empires built such universities as Duke and Wake Forest, where the major charitable foundations are funded by cigarette money, and where hundreds of thousands of ordinary people have made their living from tobacco.
Nobody, of course, argues anymore that cigarette smoking is anything but bad for you.
But Sullum says the anti-smoking movement does not take into account that intelligent adults can, of their own free will, choose to light up -- that they are not all hopeless addicts who fell prey to cigarette advertising as teenagers and have been slaves to their habit ever since.
"Granted that smoking is bad for you in the sense that it raises the risk of certain diseases and tends to shorten your life,'' Sullum said at the John Locke Foundation breakfast the other day. "But might smoking also be good for you, in the sense that it provides pleasure, relieves stress or offers some other benefits?''
People smoke to control stress, to stay slim, to keep focused at work, to fill idle time, to mingle at parties and even to define identity, says Sullum, a syndicated columnist and senior editor at Reason magazine.
I still miss my pipe nearly a decade after I gave it up. And my wife says not a day goes by that she doesn't covet a cigarette. She threw away her last pack six years ago because she said she didn't want to risk giving me cancer.
Actually, the dangers of secondhand smoke are one of the great myths of the anti-smoking crusade. There is little evidence that you can be harmed by the smoke from someone sitting next to you in a restaurant or airplane.
Living with a spouse who smokes does increase the risks, but not greatly. According to the calculations of an epidemiologist at the state Health Department, a nonsmoking woman who lives with a smoker faces an additional lung cancer risk of about 6.5 chances in 10,000, which would raise her lifetime risk from about 0.34 percent to about 0.41 percent.
Nor does smoking necessarily cost society: Because smokers tend to die earlier, the costs of tobacco-related illnesses are balanced and probably outweighed by savings on Social Security, nursing home stays and medical care in old age, Sullum argues.
There is also little clear evidence that people start smoking because of advertising, Sullum says. People smoke because they are following the example of their parents or peers, or to seem more adult or more sophisticated, or to rebel. Many kids start smoking for the same reason that they put rings in various parts of their body.
Nor is the perception correct that once hooked, most smokers become nicotine fiends. There are about as many former smokers in the country as there are smokers, Sullum argues. He says many of those who say they can't stop smoking are actually ambivalent about quitting.
The constant nagging, pressure and ostracism is working. The fraction of Americans who smoke has dropped from more than two-fifths in the 1960s to about one-quarter today.
But that substantial progress has not satisfied the modern-day Billy Sundays and Carry Nations, some of whom won't be happy until there is a tobacco prohibition.
They argue that people don't have the right to make unhealthy decisions like smoking. But do people have the right to engage in other risky behavior -- to drink alcoholic beverages, eat fatty foods, lead sedentary lives, ride motorcycles, sunbathe unprotected, drive without a seat belt, or spend their weekends parachuting, bungee-jumping or mountain climbing?
Meanwhile, Graham has replaced his old "Thank You For Smoking'' sign with a new placard quoting humorist Mark Twain.
"I smoke in moderation,'' Twain wrote. "Only one cigar at a time.''
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