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.

Smokefree Rights

One of the more important in tobacco prevention documents written in recent history is Samantha Graf’s There is No Constitutional Right to Smoke .  Published and updated in 2008 by the Tobacco Control Legal Consortium, the paper clarifies that due process and equal protection claims  to a right to smoke have been consistently denied by the courts.  If you haven’t enjoyed this paper yet it is highly recommended.

The confusion about a right to smoke is not an accident but the result of decades of tobacco industry deceit to the point of a 2006 conviction for racketeering and fraud under Federal statutes typically reserved for organized crime.  

A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of attending a local city council meeting where a smoke free skate park policy was being discussed.  The attitude was generally negative with one council person practically throwing a fit that his civil rights were being violated.  As an aside, the council person neither smoked nor skated.

Civil rights pertain to people not behavior.  The courts have been quite clear that there is no more civil right to smoke than there is to run naked in public or drive drunk.  Tobacco free policies are not about you but about children and the public health. 

Most recently it was learned the Little Rock City City Attorney’s office was in opposition to the policy over a concern for freedom of speech claims against tobacco free parks policies. This is specious to the point of absurdity. 

No one ever heard of a right to smoke until a couple of decades ago when public relations monolith Burson Marsteller started funding  and founding smokers’ rights front groups to challenge a growing trend for tobacco free public space and tobacco taxes. 

But what this shows is how successful the industry has been in its public relation’s measure, and in its fraud. Smokers are not a protected class nor is tobacco free space  an unreasonable reaction to regulating  hazardous conduct. 

Permissive tobacco policies are essentially a subsidy for tobacco companies and only serve to confuse corporate responsibility with personal rights, the right to protection from rogue capitalists.  We have a right to a  tobacco free environment, a human right...