Eradicate the Tobacco Industry?

The group Airspace ASH has been doing one of these informal online polls, "Should the tobacco industry be eradicated?" My reply of course is Absolutely! Or if I may restrain my enthusiasm suggest that removing the opportunity for massive profit could accomplish the same. The tobacco industry is an historical anomaly. No industry receives such freedom from regulation and none causes as much inherent disease, death, and correlate health care cost. None. None accidentally. None incidentally. None.

Yet the tobacco industry retains blue chip status in stock markets around the globe.

The challenge to tobacco must include opposition to the bizarre economics of permissive tobacco policies subsidizing the rogue capitalism and complexity of nicotine addiction. That is why incremental approaches to de-normalizing tobacco, (taxes, tobacco free space, market reform) are considered effective. Prohibition is not effective prevention. But prohibiting means of profitably marketing nicotine may well be. Hence, the increments.

In an age of transnational corporations it is perhaps oversimplified to call for the eradication of the tobacco industry. They have a tendency to morph and are as aggressive as the most pernicious cancer in pursuing profit. But it is most certainly a worthy goal to remove the profit for which these corporations exist. It is this predatory profit that drives the pandemic.

I do take issue with those that suggest more accessible nicotine is an appropriate response. One need not eradicate tobacco to de-normalize the popularity of nicotine addiction. But it may well be possible to regulate nicotine delivery, access, marketing, etc. to the point where tobacco use is much less desirable or socially acceptable.

Tobacco corporations are archetypical in their amorality. As we slowly inch our way toward a tobacco free society in more developed nations they open new markets on the Pacific Rim and in Africa. Talking about snus and nicotine vapor is counterproductive when transnational corporations are recruiting share croppers and new markets in the rest of the world. We will be successful in our challenge to tobacco someday but it will not be expedited by ignoring the global accommodation and predation for which the tobacco industry continues to distinguish itself.