Saturday, January 15, 2000

Label this idea misguided
Grotesque pictures on cigarette packages won't cut smoking

Clifford Orwin

You heard it first here. The antismoking mandarins in Ottawa will rather that you had never heard it at all.

You know about that sweet little idea of theirs, to embellish cigarette packages with photos of cancerous lungs? They're really proud of it, especially since public opinion polls seem to confirm that people will then be less willing to buy those packages. And you can understand why the antismoking people are desperate. They've already gone about as far as they can in the realm of mere verbiage to discourage us from smoking. "WARNING: Health Canada advises that danger of frying in hell increases with amount smoked." "WARNING: Health Canada advises that chicks won't put out for guys who stink of tobacco smoke." And so on.

I've never been a smoker, and I hold no brief for smokers let alone for tobacco companies. It's a filthy habit and as for those who stoke it, their danger of frying in hell increases with profit levels.

My own vice is drinking, although I'm distinguished from your typical rummy by the inefficiency of my procedures. He pays as little as he can per grade of alcohol, while I pay as much as I can for an expensive label. So I'm probably more sensitive to labels than he is. I've tried to think through the labelling question in terms of wine. South of the border an unholy alliance of the health and soft drink lobbies has pushed through a bill requiring a warning on every bottle of wine sold in the U.S. Yet wine sales have continued to soar, so it's obviously time to mobilize Coca-Cola to push Congress to go the next mile.

One of my favourite wines in the good old days when great wines were affordable was Chateau Ducru Beaucaillou, Second Grand Cru Classe of Bordeaux. As a youthful wine snob, one of the things that attracted me to Ducru-Beaucaillou was the highly distinctive label, the same then as it is now, all warm browns, rich golds and creamy whites, with its drawing of the Empire-style chateau rising proudly from among its vines. Only now has it struck me that those same tones would be just perfect for an artist's depiction of cirrhosis of the liver.

But I digress. I was going to tell you something about Ottawa's proposed policy on tobacco warnings that they don't want you to know. It's where they got the idea for it. They borrowed it from that distinguished crusader for public health, Larry Flynt. Back in the days when Flynt's vast empire of sleaze was only a modest cess-pool, he was anxious to attract tobacco advertising to Hustler magazine. Trouble was, the cigarette companies weren't anxious to place it there. They deemed themselves respectable advertisers, and not recognizing with Milos Forman that Flynt was a paladin of the constitutional right to self-expression, they myopically dismissed his publication as filth.

But advertise they eventually did, and here's why. In place of the missing cigarette ads, Flynt ran just the sort of photos now coveted by Antismoking Canada. My, they were colourful. He must have calculated that grossly disgusting pictures would bring the tobacco companies to heel without reducing sales of the magazine. That would have been counterproductive: Advertising rates depend on circulation figures. And, when you think about it, such trash was only too appropriate to a publication whose raison d'etre was voyeurism. They probably increased sales of the magazine. If you didn't know what female genitalia looked like, you could learn that from Hustler, and if you didn't know what a man dying of mouth cancer looked like, you could learn that too.

There are important issues of public decorum here. Is our government really going to stoop to Flynt's level? Cigarettes are a legal product, and the government doesn't dare criminalize them. So instead it tries to frighten consumers and to this end browbeats them incessantly. But liberal democracy also implies limits to browbeating. Citizens are to be presumed capable of leading their own lives and making their own decisions. They're not to be subjected to vivid and visceral propaganda; that's for illiberal regimes. To inform them of the medical consensus that smoking is harmful is one thing; and they know it already anyway. To move from words intended to persuade to images intended to terrorize is to cross a prohibited line. A decent government doesn't wage psychological warfare on its people.

Besides which, the new policy would backfire. If I were the bureaucrats I wouldn't trust those public opinion polls. The present warnings don't lack for direness, but it's not as if each smoker actually reads them whenever he or she purchases the weed. Warnings, like any messages showered on an unwilling audience, are made to be ignored. Before too long, pictures of cancerous lungs too would fade into the convenience-store background.

If the bureaucrats really think that teenagers are going to be deterred from buying cigarettes (or anything else) by the grossness of the images displayed in their vicinity, they should meet some teenagers. I'll lend them mine.

But wait a minute. Maybe Flynt had it right. Let's run the revolting pictures, and when the tobacco companies cry uncle, let's sell the space on their own labels back to them. Joe Camel will resume his rightful place, bumping the ravaged lung, and we'll spend the proceeds of the label resale on antismoking programs. It's such a brilliant idea, I wish I'd thought of it myself.

Clifford Orwin is professor of political science at the University of Toronto.