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Kicking ButtThe international jihad against tobacco.

By William Saletan
Posted Friday, Aug. 17, 2007, at 8:09 AM ET
Illustration by Rob Donnelly. Click image to expand.

I hate smoking. It's a filthy habit. It kills hundreds of millions of people, including bystanders. Just being around it nauseates me. Cities, states, and countries all over the world are banning smoking in public, and I couldn't be happier.

In fact, it's such a rout, it's getting out of hand.

The problem with tobacco all along was that politicians and the public didn't recognize it as a drug. They called it a tradition, a "crop," and a "legal product." As though coca and marijuana weren't crops. As though a product's legality should decide its morality, instead of the other way around. When it came to smoking, culture overpowered reason.

Now public opinion and governments have turned against tobacco. But the anti-smoking jihad, born of science, is beginning to outrun it. Culture is trampling reason again, this time in the other direction.

Nonsmoking areas in restaurants haven't worked too well. The smoke just drifts from one area to the other. To fix this, European countries are now isolating smokers in sealed rooms with separate ventilation. Lest any waitress encounter a toxic cloud, Holland, Slovenia, and other countries have outlawed eating in the smoking rooms. That's pretty harsh. I thought we were trying to remove smoke from eaters, not food from smokers.

Likewise, the point of recognizing tobacco as a drug was to regulate it as strictly as comparable drugs, not more so. Five months ago, a report by a British commission found that the financial health costs of alcohol and tobacco were equal. Tobacco was by far the bigger killer, but when the analysis moved beyond self-destruction to harming others, the annual death toll from alcohol-related car accidents exceeded the toll from secondhand smoke in the workplace. Drinking, unlike smoking, played a role in 78 percent of assaults and 88 percent of criminal damage. The commission concluded that if legal drugs were classified like illegal ones, alcohol would be judged more serious than tobacco. Instead, British law allows advertising of booze but not cigarettes.

The strangest thing about the current round of smoking bans is its focus on pubs. All over the world, reporters have been interviewing bar patrons about the merits of expelling tobacco. "It means I can drink and not come out [of] the bar stinking like an ash-tray," one guy in Hong Kong told Agence France-Presse after a night of partying. There's nothing more annoying than a stinking cigarette when you're trying to get stinking drunk.

Tobacco myopia isn't just a British problem. In South Korea, a university president has proposed to permit booze but "remove smoking students from our school." In Amsterdam, coffee shop patrons will soon be allowed to smoke marijuana but not tobacco, despite evidence that two joints cause as much noncancerous lung damage as five to 12 cigarettes.

In the private sector, the tobacco crusade has turned personal. According to a recent survey, 1 percent of companies refuse to hire smokers. Some use random urine or breathalyzer tests to spot nicotine. If you flunk the test or refuse to take it, you're out. Officially, the rationale is that smokers cost companies too much money in health insurance. But some policies go further. One company forced out several smokers, including at least one who wasn't on the company health plan. By her account, employees were told that the ban applied even to nicotine gum and patches, which don't produce secondhand smoke or drive up insurance premiums.

Urine tests are a warning sign that the war on smoking is morphing into a war on nicotine. The latest target is snus, a tobacco product that delivers nicotine without smoke. Despite studies showing it's far safer than cigarettes, most European countries allow smoking but prohibit snus. In the U.S., sponsors of legislation to regulate tobacco under the FDA are resisting amendments that would let companies tell consumers how much safer snus is. The president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids complains that snus will "increase the number of people who use tobacco," letting "the big companies win no matter what tobacco products people use." But the goal shouldn't be to stamp out tobacco or make companies lose. The goal should be to save lives.

The bill's opponents are no better. They'd rather stick with the idiotic current policy of letting the FDA regulate nicotine in gum and patches—its safest delivery vehicles—but not in cigarettes. They insist tobacco products can't be made safer or less addictive. That's just wrong. In addition to snus, one biotech company has already engineered tobacco plants that are almost nicotine-free.

A year ago, when a study showed an increase in cigarette nicotine levels, anti-smoking activists accused the tobacco industry of boosting its narcotic dosage to make people smoke more. But against the FDA bill, which would reduce nicotine levels, activists are making the opposite argument: that in order to get the same nicotine fix, people will be forced to smoke more cigarettes. Either way, they think manipulation is the problem. In the past, that was true. But today, manipulation is the solution.

Instead of indiscriminately vilifying tobacco, we should reengineer it. Bypass the combustion, purge the tar, dial down the nicotine—whatever serves public health. We could even use it to cure people. Two years ago, Henry Daniell, a biologist at the University of Central Florida, proved that an anthrax vaccine could be grown in genetically engineered tobacco. Tobacco was a logical vehicle, he said, because it was prolific and wouldn't end up in the food supply. Last month, he reported progress in growing a protein to prevent diabetes, but he had to do it in lettuce—a food supply risk—"due to the stigma associated with tobacco." When the war on smoking has come to this, it's time to step back and take a deep breath.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.
Illustration by Rob Donnelly.
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Remarks from the Fray:

The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids argument strikes me analogous to a position that favors abstinence education. In both situations, there is something we don't want happening: consumption of tobacco and kids engaging in sex. And now, in both situations there is a way to do these things in a way that is safer but not wholly safe: opting for snus and engaging in safe sex.

I wonder if everyone who is against snus favors abstinence-only sex ed., and if they don't, how they differentiate between the two?

--dudeguy

(To reply, click here.)

I can't imagine too many people seriously disagreeing with the notion of re-engineering tobacco for non-smoking-related research and such. Go for it! As long as it keeps the nicotine and the harm of other smoke-related stuff away from our lungs and innards, why not?

But some of the alternatives you thought were so hunky-dory for re-engineered tobacco included things like nicotine-reduced cigarettes (will we still have to deal with smoke??) and snus (didn't your linked article on this suggest pancreatic cancer hovering in the future??). I don't know, they all sound like just more creative ways to get people hooked on yet something else they don't really need. Is that what you're after?

Well, heck, go for it with that stuff, too! But good luck to you. In that hilarious book and movie "Barbarians at the Gate," RJR's attempts to test market a smokeless cigarette got this flat-out pronouncement: "it tastes like shit and smells like a fart!"

--Dana

(To reply, click here.)

Although the majority of the article is interesting, I'd have to disagree with Saletan's contention that banning smoking in pubs and bars is "strange". I'd imagine that any non-smoker living in California or NY would agree with me. As a native New Yorker, I can testify that the bar experience changed overnight (in a resoundingly positive way) after the smoking ban passed. Before, I was loathe to ever enter a bar, because even minutes spent inside meant that my clothes would stink of tobacco smoke all night. All of a sudden, I could actually sit down in a pub and engage in an hours-long debate with friends without stinking like an ashtray! My bar attendance and that of most of my friends skyrocketed.

I'd like to hope that Saletan's comment "There's nothing more annoying than a stinking cigarette when you're trying to get stinking drunk" was not intended to be as snarky as it comes off. Perhaps he's unaware that not everyone goes to a bar to get "stinking drunk"? When I was a grad student, the local bar was the hub of grad student social life. As we had weekly Monday exams, nearly the entire class would converge on the one bar with Monday-night drink specials every Monday night, even the teetotalers. While some were admittedly there to get "stinking drunk", most of us were there to socialize with our classmates, dance and relax. And yes, a bar full of stinking cigarettes would have been awfully annoying when I was trying to socialize, dance and relax.

--IgmoA23

(To reply, click here.)

About a year ago, I filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of my daughter (then 5) the first of its kind in the nation lawsuit involving secondhand smoke. I sued the owners of the Oakwood apartment complex in Woodland Hills, where she has lived her entire life, to require them to prohibit as a public nuisance smoking in the outdoor common areas of the complex, where even today smokers arrayed around the swimming pool, etc. can make the facilities we pay rent for unusable to her.

The trial court dismissed the suit, and that decision is now on appeal. I am somewhat confident as an attorney that the state court of appeal will reverse the trial court and revive the lawsuit. But the trial judge's decision only underscored -- for about the 300th time in my experience regarding the issue -- the need for a "give no quarter" approach at every legislative level to eliminating the involuntary exposure to secondhand smoke wherever people have a right to gather. Because the flimsy, reflexive justifications for not doing so have become enmeshed in the fabric of American culture. And the mythology (largely employed by ersatz libertarians on the right) that government is controlling your life and denying your freedom when it tells you you can't smoke somewhere still has cachet.

Even a seasoned trial judge viewed the issue through the false prism of competing "rights": those of the smoker and the person that doesn't want to breathe what all credible science has established as the toxic byproduct of that activity. And almost everyone, I would venture to say, has encountered the recalcitrant smoker that refuses to refrain from lighting up with the proffered justification, "I've got a right to smoke here."

But there is no right to smoke -- at least insofar as the term right has legal meaning, and isnt just being used colloquially to mean, "something I want to do whenever and wherever I feel like it."

A right must have a recognized textual source, e.g., a constitution, statute, judicial decision, contract. The test is whether there is a corresponding obligation and limitation on the part of the government to enable you to exercise that right. Now who can cite to a single ruling by any judicial or quasi-judicial body in favor of a smoker challenging a smoking restriction?

The fact is that for decades smokers dictated what everyone else in their vicinity had to put up with, be exposed to, and risk. Needless to say, this socially sanctioned behavior has led to a sense of entitlement in many smokers approaching that of Mitt Romney. It will continue to take the kind of backlash that makes some smokers feel aggrieved to disabuse them of these fallacies -- and embolden non-smokers to stand up for their rights. Far from being time to step back (based on a quirky anecdote at that), it is time to become even more relentless in driving the effects of smoking exclusively into the confines of the smoker's lungs.

--johnnyb

(To reply, click here.)

(8/21)

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