Two items that remind us that tobacco politics requires subtler thinking:
Misused Money and Misleading Labels
The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial board op-ed on April 4 about how dependent states have become on the settlement money from lawsuits against the tobacco industry. They suggested that a quote from a former Massachusetts Attorney General might be an apt new warning label on cigarette packs: "Certainly, many of us never anticipated that states would become addicted to the tobacco money as a way to finance their operations."
That is funny — but we must hasten to point out that some critics, particularly the American Council on Science and Health, did foresee this problem. The state governments have shown that they would rather have the tobacco industry endure and milk it for cash than effectively warn the public away from smoking, putting the tobacco industry out of business altogether.
The Journal is right that states, despite promises, are devoting the money to purposes utterly unrelated to health, such golf course maintenance, and right that states are now scrambling to help out tobacco companies such as Philip Morris by lowering the amount of money the companies must put up while appealing court cases — but the Journal, like many who criticize tobacco politics from the right, contributes in its own small way to the confusion around tobacco by scoffing at one of the central arguments made by plaintiffs in the recent $10 billion suit against Philip Morris: that they had been misled by advertising into thinking that "light" cigarettes are less dangerous.
Dismissing this argument is arguably even more callous than saying "buyer beware" or arguing that sellers have no obligation to explain the risks of their products clearly. Since any reasonable person, smoker or non-smoker, is likely to interpret "light" and "low-tar" as meaning "less dangerous," the Journal is in effect going beyond "buyer beware" and saying that sellers have a right to lie — or at least that sellers of cigarettes do, though they seem like the last people deserving of special treatment.
Let's hope the message that all cigarettes are dangerous spreads, sales decrease, and those funds for golf course construction dry up soon.
Anxiety in Iraq
Just days before the Journal op-ed appeared, the Associated Press reported that U.S. soldiers in Iraq found that being deprived of cigarettes when they ran low on supplies was one of their greatest sources of anxiety aside from the more obvious stresses of combat.
It would be easy for defenders of smoking to interpret this as a reminder that lighting up can relax an agitated smoker, to add the slogan "Our troops need cigarettes" to the much more inspiring slogan uttered by a liberated Iraqi (as reported in the New York Times): "Democracy, whiskey, and sexy!" And we would hardly suggest that our troops ought to be distracted by deprivation in the midst of battle.
But wouldn't it be even better if all those brave people weren't addicted in the first place?
