Dangerous When in Power

Does government protect us from hazardous products, or does it put us in harm's way?

Walter Olson from the March 2007 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

 

Government Cigarettes

Then there's tobacco, a subject on which the federal government is, as they say, conflicted. Well into the 1990s, even as it ratcheted up its efforts to hector and badger smokers into quitting, and long after Surgeons General had begun to rail against the nicotine habit, Washington was still a major promoter of the worldwide tobacco trade. Until the Clinton administration finally curtailed the practice, the feds funneled aid to tobacco-related development projects abroad, subsidizing farmers' efforts to export the demon weed, sending diplomats on junkets to pry open markets for U.S.-based cigarette giants, and so forth. In doing so, they were pursuing a great tradition of government entanglement with-and promotion of-the nicotine habit.

 

Not long after the coffin nail was invented, government tax authorities around the globe began cutting themselves in as partners in its sale-reason enough for them to collaborate in a smooth flow of its product to customers. So vital was the tobacco business as a revenue source, in fact, that until recently it was common for governments to assert a state monopoly over it. Japan, for example, did not end its monopoly until 1985.

 

In general, state tobacco monopolies have not fallen over themselves in efforts to curtail access to their product on grounds of paternalistic concern for their customers. Some of the world's highest male smoking rates have been observed in countries where profit-making private enterprise was long excluded from the tobacco trade, including China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and France. Anti-smoking activists in this country sometimes suggest that youngsters would never think of taking up the smoking habit were it not for the wiles of Madison Avenue, and yet-as Reason's Jacob Sullum has noted-the parts of the world historically known for a relatively laissez-faire approach to tobacco promotion, such as the English-speaking countries, actually rank far down the list in male smoking prevalence.

 

Governments have also participated in the promotion of smoking in a less obvious way, through the management of their armed forces. Historians have observed that soldiers were early and hard devotees of the cigarette habit and did much to spread it into civilian circles. Never in American history did per-capita cigarette production rise as fast as it did during the Second World War-this at a time when expenditures on consumer frills and luxuries generally were being curtailed in drastic fashion.

 

At first blush, this might look like mere cultural happenstance. After all, military men are known for taking up all sorts of exotic practices frowned on by their parents back home, from jazz dancing to tattoos. Yet there may have been more to the military's generous provision of cigarettes to the troops. During World War I, General Pershing had famously proclaimed that tobacco was as critical an item of war materiel to be rushed to the front as food or ammunition. Were war authorities merely responding to the troops' spontaneous clamor for the commodity, or perhaps trying to prevent their enlisted addicts from having to go cold turkey?

 

Probably not. As was well recognized from early on, cigarettes confer psychopharmaceutical benefits of a sort long familiar to students cramming for finals: They temporarily focus the powers of concentration, they keep boredom and anxiety at bay, and they serve as a basis for sociability with comrades. These effects happen to have high potential value in counteracting the danger, monotony, and loneliness of combat missions. Even nowadays, with the military having joined civilian authorities in officially disapproving of the habit, service members' smoking rates soar when they are assigned to Iraq and other war zones, as they effectively take steps to self-medicate against the stress of combat. In days past the brass was happy to abet the self-medication. Hence the many subtle and not-so-subtle encouragements for wartime G.I.s to take up the drug, from the inclusion of cigarettes in even non-smokers' rations to the many "smoke-'em-if-you-got-'em" breaks announced by the sergeant.

 

None of which kept the federal government from filing a lawsuit alleging that the smoking habits of millions of federal dependents-including veterans-were tobacco companies' fault.