Myth Communication: Selling a Smoke-Free Society

Jacob Sullum | June 16, 1999

(Presented at the National Press Club, Ottawa, Canada, June 16, 1999)

Great causes have stirring slogans. The American Revolution had "Give me liberty, or give me death." The civil rights movement had "We shall overcome." The anti-smoking movement has "You shouldn’t smoke because it’s bad for you."

This injunction is direct and to the point. It tells you what to do, and it tells you why. On the other hand, it’s a bit one-sided. Granted that smoking is bad for you in the sense that it raises the risk of certain diseases and tends to shorten your life. But might smoking also be good for you, in the sense that it provides pleasure, relieves stress, or offers some other benefit?

Many smokers seem to think so. The journalist Christopher Hitchens says "cigarettes improve my short-term concentration, aid my digestion, make me a finer writer and a better dinner companion." National Review columnist Florence King writes, "I believe life should be savored rather than lengthened, and I am ready to fight the misanthropes among us who are trying to make me switch."

Tobacco’s opponents typically dismiss such statements out of hand. Scott Ballin, former chairman of the U.S. Coalition on Smoking or Health, once told me, "There is no positive aspect to [smoking]. The product has no potential benefits....It’s addictive, so people don’t have the choice to smoke or not to smoke."

Hence smokers who acknowledge the risks of their habit but cite countervailing rewards are dishonest or deluded, displaying the classic defense mechanisms of rationalization and denial. The sociologist Anne Wortham, herself a smoker, says tobacco’s opponents believe that if you smoke, "you are in a state of false consciousness, because you are not aware of what is in your interests. It’s the refusal to acknowledge people’s capacity to make choices. You just define them out of the discourse. ‘Addiction’ says they can’t even talk about their own likes and dislikes. We can decide for them."

The refusal to acknowledge the benefits of smoking–to admit the possibility that anyone could rationally choose to smoke–illustrates the arrogance of insisting, "You shouldn’t smoke because it’s bad for you." Who are you, a smoker might well ask, to say what is good for me?

That objection has especially strong force when tobacco’s opponents seek the government’s assistance in discouraging smoking. To gain public support for that effort, they need a stronger argument.

One you will often hear is that smoking threatens the public health. The phrase calls to mind the control of infectious diseases, which has long been considered a legitimate function of government. Tobacco’s opponents emphasize that pedigree, calling smoking "Public Health Enemy Number One," "the greatest community health hazard," "the single most important preventable cause of death," "the manmade plague," "the global tobacco epidemic."

The problem is that smoking is a not a disease. It is a pattern of behavior, something that people choose to do. Unlike typhoid or cholera, it is not transmitted to other people against their will, which is the aspect of communicable diseases that justifies government intervention.

Treating risky behavior like a contagious illness has troubling implications. If the government is authorized to discourage personal decisions that might lead to disease or injury, there is no end to the interventions that could be justified–and no safe harbor for individual freedom.

Anyone who recognizes limits to government should be reluctant to join the march toward a smoke-free society under the banner of "public health," which turns out to be little more than a fig leaf for paternalism. Tobacco’s opponents have therefore offered a series of arguments intended to overcome the suspicion that their movement is aimed at protecting people from themselves.

I’ll discuss seven of these arguments. Five of them question the legitimacy of the decision to smoke because of the circumstances in which it is made. The other two arguments suggest that smokers do not harm only themselves, so the government should step in to protect innocent third parties.

If cigarettes have no benefits, as Scott Ballin says, it’s a bit of a puzzle why so many people continue to smoke them. One answer is that people smoke because of advertising.

This argument relies on a perception of advertising as a mysterious force that seduces people into acting against their interests. That view, which was popularized by social critics such as Vance Packard and John Kenneth Galbraith, remains influential among intellectuals and the general public–though, tellingly, people rarely apply it to their own behavior.