Myth Communication: Selling a Smoke-Free Society

Speech at Reason Weekend

Jacob Sullum | March 13, 1998

(Page 5 of 7)

But that is not the case even now, since a minority of smokers do start as adults, and the number of people in that group is likely to expand if efforts to discourage underage smoking are successful. While it may be true that the young are especially attracted to smoking, it is probably also true that individuals who are especially attracted to smoking tend to start young. In many cases, keeping people away from cigarettes until they're adults may simply delay smoking rather than prevent it.

That is not to say that we shouldn't make a more serious effort to enforce laws against the sale of cigarettes to minors. It should be at least as hard for teenagers to get tobacco as it is for them to get alcohol.

But we should also keep in mind that policies supposedly aimed at protecting minors, such as banning advertising or doubling the price of cigarettes, affect mainly adults, who represent more than 90 percent of smokers.

For those callous few who don't much care what happens to smokers, no matter when they pick up the habit, tobacco's opponents insist that

Nonsmokers must be protected from secondhand smoke.

In terms of broadening support for the anti-smoking movement beyond activists and public health specialists, this has probably been the most effective argument of all.

For centuries nonsmokers have been annoyed by secondhand smoke. In his Counterblaste to Tobacco, James I showed much concern for the bystanders who had to endure "the black stinking fume" from pipes. He reported that many men had reluctantly taken up the habit "to be as one that was content to eat Garlicke (which hee did not love) that he might not be troubled by the smell of it, in the breath of his fellowes." And he called it "a great iniquitie...against all humanitie" that a smoker "shall not bee ashamed, to reduce thereby his delicate, wholesome, and cleane complexioned wife, to that extremitie, that either shee must also corrupt her sweete breath therewith, or else resolve to live in perpetuall stinking torment."

Such complaints have been strengthened and legitimized by two ideas: 1) that secondhand smoke is a health hazard as well as a nuisance and 2) that people have a right to a "smoke-free environment." Armed with these two claims, tobacco's opponents are gradually eliminating the locations outside of the home where people are allowed to smoke. In California, it is now illegal to smoke even in bars.

Bans on smoking in businesses operate at a practical level, making smoking less convenient, and at a symbolic level, helping to transform what was once a perfectly respectable habit into a shameful vice. They push smokers out into the cold both literally and figuratively.

The thrust of this campaign is illustrated by a billboard from the California Department of Health Services. It shows a suave, nattily dressed man--the sort of smoker you might see in an old movie--asking the elegant woman beside him, "Mind if I smoke?" She replies, "Care if I die?" Smoking near someone is thus depicted as a kind of homicidal negligence.

That portrayal exaggerates both the strength of the evidence against secondhand smoke and the level of risk involved. Consider the claim that secondhand smoke causes lung cancer, which is the one that has received the most attention, largely because it was endorsed by the EPA.

The association between secondhand smoke and lung cancer is so weak that we may never know whether it represents a causal relationship. The EPA estimated that a nonsmoking woman married to a smoker is 1.19 times as likely to get lung cancer as a nonsmoking woman married to a nonsmoker. By comparison, smokers are 10, 20, or 30 times as likely to get lung cancer as nonsmokers.

With a risk ratio as low as 1.19, it's probably impossible to rule out alternative explanations.

For example, researchers classify subjects as never-smokers based mainly on self-reports, which are not always accurate. Some of the subjects identified as never-smokers are in fact former smokers and therefore have a higher risk of lung cancer. Since these misclassified women are more likely to be wives of smokers, they introduce a systematic bias in favor of a relationship between secondhand smoke and lung cancer. In a 1995 report, the Congressional Research Service concluded that plausible levels of misclassification could entirely account for the observed relationship between secondhand smoke and lung cancer.

Even if we accept the EPA's findings, there's no reason to panic about exposure to secondhand smoke. The estimated risk is not only small when compared to the risk from smoking; it's small in absolute terms as well.

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