If they didn't ooze so much hypocrisy, the campaigns by RJR Nabisco and Philip Morris to head off the eventual classification of nicotine as a regulatable drug (it's already been classified a Class-A carcinogen) would provide grand amusement: large, overstuffed, spoiled companies singing "oh, poor me!" in full-page ads in major publications. But the hypocrisy is inescapable, poisoning the fun as surely as tobacco sears the lungs. While the tobacco companies know and have known for decades that what they peddle kills people, they have nevertheless calculated the proper dosages of nicotine to keep people hooked and have relentlessly tried to enlist everyone of every age as a user, even angling to get kids into the smoking habit about the time they hit double digits (and the children have responded nicely, upping their participation rates as the adult population has decreased theirs).
(And just to make the hypocrisy equal opportunity, while the government, through the Food and Drug Administration and the exhortation of the president, seeks to restrain the tentacles of the tobacco squid, it provides agricultural welfare to tobacco growers and promotes the export of the poison through advertising subsidies that aid the companies in pushing their product into foreign markets.)
But perhaps the most insidious move by the tobacco companies comes not through its marketing or advertising or its cultivation of pliable politicians but through its campaign for something called "smokers' rights," rights clearly pitched as equal in reverence to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The focus of the campaign is simple: brand any attempt to regulate the health hazard of smoking (including second-hand smoke) as bringing the country one step closer to Big Brother. Thus, in an odd twist of logic, very rich, authoritarian corporations cast themselves as staunch defenders of individual liberty, and any attempt to regulate them, they protest, becomes an assault by health fascists upon the foundations of a free American society. But we can't forget that that smokers' rights campaign simply provides a smokescreen for the "right" of the companies to sell their toxic product wherever and whenever they like and aims to distract people from the real issue, which is regulating this obvious (and preventable) health hazard and promoting the health of citizens.
But what, exactly, are "smokers' rights"? Do they have the right to put whatever they want into their bodies? Yes. Do have the right to buy tobacco? Yes, again. If Congress passed some sort of Volstead Act tomorrow, I would oppose it. Do they have the right to impose their addiction on others by smoking in the presence of those who don't smoke (especially given the dangers of second-hand smoke)? This is where the line gets drawn. Smokers have the "right" to smoke because we recognize a "right" in American society to do with our bodies pretty much as we see fit without government interference. But they don't have the "right" to put others in danger, and efforts to segregate smokers and make as many places as possible smoke-free (even outdoors, as the town of Sharon, Massachusetts, has done) do not violate smokers' rights because no smoker has the right to endanger the lives of non-smokers.
Ample precedent exists to justify this approach. Because smoke migrates, whenever a smoker shares space with non-smokers, smoking then becomes a public act and can be regulated like many other public acts. We follow a similar tack in dealing with DWI: no government can tell an individual not to drink, but when the private act of drinking mixes with the public act of driving a car, then alcohol is no longer a private matter. And we do this with threats to public health: no one can dump garbage in the street anymore because to do so puts all people at risk, and no one has a Constitutionally protected right to do that. To regulate such a well-documented danger as smoking by keeping the harmful substance away from people who don't want it does not deny any rights, Constitutional or otherwise, any more than inspecting beef abrogates a butcher's "right" to sell contaminated meat.
I wish people who smoked didn't. But they do, and most likely will continue to do so. Given that, two sets of rights need to be harmonized: the smoker's right to form an addiction and the non-smoker's desire for safety and comfort. The best way to achieve this harmony is by segregation. At the workplace, send the smokers outside or someplace completely away from everyone else. In restaurants, give them their own sealed and ventilated space. And so on. Until the addicts give it up, smoking must be accommodated, but it doesn't have to be liked, and none of us have to endanger ourselves by breathing in the wrong air at the wrong time. By restricting the substance and the companies that purvey it, coupled with continued strong campaigns to educate adults and children to give up the habit or never start it, we can avoid ersatz debates about ersatz rights and get on with the business of making our lives and the lives of others healthier.
AN AFTERTHOUGHT: The way we can deal with the addiction of smoking is a good lesson for our drug war. We let people use it who want it, regulate its trade and purity, and derive revenue from it. In addition, we let the power of education make drug-taking less acceptable and enact commonsense legislation that protects non-takers without prohibiting takers from using. It would be a good deal all around, which is more than can be said for the drug war, which has stopped nothing, saved no one, and cost more than we'll ever know.
(November 1995)