Tobacco Wars

The social costs of smoking reflect the cost of liberty itself

By Kevin M. Neylan

Government efforts to stamp out smoking and combat the tobacco industry increased on two fronts over the past few weeks. First, federal health officials banned the sale of flavored cigarettes on Tuesday, September 22, in the first major crackdown since the Senate granted the Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate tobacco this past June. The ban, conceived of with potential youth smokers in mind, is intended to forbid the sale of tobacco products with chocolate, vanilla, clove and other flavorings. The agency is also considering regulating menthol products and hinted that it might soon take action against the far larger market of small flavored cigars and cigarillos.

In addition to this, New York City is currently debating a ban on outdoor smoking. New York City’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, said on Monday, September 14, that he would seek to prohibit smoking in each of the city’s more than 1,700 parks, playgrounds and recreational facilities, as well as seven beaches spanning fourteen miles of shoreline.

Both acts are well intentioned. The federal ban on flavored cigarettes aims to reduce the incidence of youth smoking, and New York’s ban on smoking outdoors would both decrease the amount of secondhand smoke and make it more difficult for smokers to maintain their habit. However, both pieces of legislation ought to be opposed.

In the interest of full disclosure, I do not consider myself a smoker. While I do occasionally enjoy a cigarette or two on the weekends, perhaps in front of the steps of Claverly surrounded by a group of friends (some partaking, others not), I do not smoke regularly and have bought no more than a handful of packs of cigarettes in my life.

Not that I feel the need to apologize. I, like everyone else who buys or smokes cigarettes, understand the risks. I know that cigarettes are terribly unhealthy, that smoking regularly can lead to cancer and heart disease. I have no problem with bans on indoor smoking in commercial or public places, public transportation, and many areas of the workplace, as well as spaces like elevators where smoking may pose a fire hazard. Age restrictions are acceptable insofar as they help ensure that those who choose to purchase tobacco products are mature enough to make responsible decisions about their health and wellness. Restrictions around schools, playgrounds, or other places where young children congregate are perfectly reasonable. The government has every right to promote an anti-smoking agenda through public service announcements, the Surgeon General’s warning, and excise taxes. But these new restrictions go too far.

Flavored cigarettes and tobacco are indeed attractive to young people. They are attractive to old people as well, not to mention those in the middle. The reason is very simple: they taste good. People choose to buy and smoke them because the sensation is pleasant, because they enhance social experiences in many of the same ways a round of cocktails or a pint of beer lubricates the spirits of fraternity and community, and because, to many, tobacco products possess a certain aesthetic charm. One need only recall T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, who strolled “at dusk through narrow streets/ and watched the smoke that rises from the pipes/ of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows.” Or the following, from Bellow: “a long perfect ash formed at the end the cigar, the white ghost of the leaf with all its veins and fainter pungency.”

On the other hand, cigarettes are also addictive and, far too often, deadly. But there is an enormous difference between those who enjoy the occasional mid-party cigarette or after-dinner cigar and those pitiable men and women who feel compelled to pull down a pack or more each day. As Chesterton once said about the allure of alcohol and the puritanical crusaders bent on draining the world’s decanters, “The dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only mistaken, they make the same mistake: they both regard wine as a drug and not a drink.” So, too, with tobacco.

But what about secondhand smoke? Surely one person’s decision to risk hastening the inevitable should not impose a burden on those around him who do not wish to partake of his puffing pleasure. True enough; hence bans on smoking publicly indoors.

But come now, those concerned about inhaling some errant smoke around park benches or sand dunes should seriously reconsider strolling about anywhere in the industrial world. As one woman quoted in the New York Times declared, “I love clean air. And if I go somewhere like this [Union Square, of all places], I want to smell clean air.” Ah yes, New York City, that utopic haven of atmospheric purity.

As far as youth smoking and cloves are concerned: enforce the laws already on the books, and leave the rest of us to our business.

But beneath the hand wringing over the practicality of proposed legislation runs a more important philosophical debate. As one of my friends put it, expressing a common sentiment among abstainers, all smoking should be banned because smoking serves no purpose. Or, as the aptly named Cheryl Healton, president of the anti-tobacco American Legacy Foundation, asserted to the Times, “There is no redeeming value in smoking at beaches or parks.”

Except, of course, to the one who has chosen to smoke. I will concede right now that indulging in a cigarette or cigar provides little to nothing of public value. Perhaps its net contribution to GDP or some equally soulless measure of wellbeing is in fact negative. But what precisely is meant by “value” or “purpose”? My uncle spent a small fortune on a delicious steak dinner last weekend in Boston when we could just as easily have heated up some Uncle Ben’s, gotten the same nutritional value, clogged our arteries a little less, saved oodles of money, and donated the rest. What is the purpose of eating a costly steak when more sensible alternatives abound? Perhaps Dr. Healton would retort that at least a steak has some nutritional value, which a cigarette obviously does not. Fair enough, but it is equally obvious that the marginal benefits of a lavish steak dinner are irredeemably outweighed by the attendant costs when compared to more basic substitutes.

And, obviously, an outright ban on tobacco would make very little sense unless accompanied by a ban on alcohol. We already tried that, and it failed, but that is not my point. I assert that even were we able to ensure a perfect ban, we ought not to. What is the “purpose” of leisure, of culture, of studying Latin poetry or African tribal art? In this postmodern age in which all gods are supposedly dead, who has the right to impose their own metanarrative on the rest of us, to claim for relativistic man an overarching “purpose,” one that is allegedly undermined by each successive puff?

Conceivably Dr. Healton would reply that there is very little value in artistic or poetic pursuits, but at least they do not carry the social costs associated with tobacco and alcohol. Perhaps there is some truth to this, but liberty is not devoid of cost. There is a reason our First Amendment allows so much garbage to pollute our media, poison more pernicious to the health of a nation than the smoke curling up from a neighbor’s cigar. If we value ordered liberty, we must be willing to accept, within reason, the social costs that inevitably attend it. After all, something has to get us in the end; we may as well enjoy ourselves while we have the time.