During the past 23 years I have smoked cigarettes, pipes, and (currently) cigars. It has bothered me for a long time that I have never been informed of how the health risks of these three choices compare. I did not know low-tar cigarettes are “safer” than regular or unfiltered cigarettes. I still don’t know how much risk I am facing by smoking one cigar every evening rather than switching to chewing tobacco, or perhaps smoking two filtered cigarettes.
My Ignorance
Thanks to W. Kip Viscusi’s new book, Smoke-Filled Rooms: A Postmortem on the Tobacco Deal (University of Chicago Press, 2002), I now know low-tar cigarettes are about 20 percent safer than regular cigarettes in terms of the lung cancer risk. I do not know a single fellow smoker who, if asked, could tell me smoking light cigarettes reduces his chance of lung cancer by about 20 percent.
None of the ads for the above-mentioned products makes comparative health claims, nor does such information appear on their packaging. I can recall having been told just once that smoking less has genuine health benefits. That one person was a cardiologist in Rockford, Illinois, who said smoking fewer than 7 cigarettes a day was probably harmless . . . an observation so astounding to me that I have repeated it to many fellow smokers over the years, prompting more than a few to attempt to reduce (but not quit entirely) their smoking.
As a smoker, I want to know about the risks of the products I use. I am not too stupid or addicted to understand comparative health claims and act on them. Research by Nobel Laureate economist Gary Becker and others has found people with strong habits and addictions nevertheless react rationally to information and incentives. The spread of light cigarettes demonstrates my fellow smokers are not too apathetic to change their conduct in response to information.
So why aren’t we told about the comparative health risks of different tobacco products?
No Advertising Allowed
Health care claims are missing from tobacco advertising because tobacco companies are discouraged or prohibited by the courts, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Surgeon General from making comparative health claims in their advertising. The assumption underlying such policies is that having more information might prompt those who would otherwise quit to merely switch to a less-risky form of the same vice, or trick people (especially young people) into beginning a habit with the idea that it isn’t as dangerous as it used to be.
I recently attended a debate over tobacco advertising in which Matthew Meyers, head of the Coalition for Tobacco-Free Kids and a leading anti-tobacco activist, said adult smokers must be denied access to comparative health claims in order to avoid attracting children to tobacco products. Whether advertising targets teenagers or has much influence over their decisions is much disputed. (I addressed that subject back in 1996 in an essay titled “Joe Camel is Innocent!” which you can still find on Heartland’s Web site.) But more to the point, Meyers has no right to deprive smokers of information about the choices they are making.
In his personal reflections on morality and justice, Meyers is free to put the interests of children ahead of adult smokers if he likes. But he has no right to use the power of the state to impose that choice on others. Prohibiting comparative health claims from appearing in tobacco advertising deprives 25 percent of the adult population of information they genuinely want and would put to good use.
This is an injustice at least, and probably an act of aggression done under the cloak of “public interest advocacy.” Either way, it is a violation of my rights and the rights of some 45 million other Americans.
A Producer’s Right, Too
The producers of tobacco products, too, have a right to communicate the features of their products to consumers. The U.S. Supreme Court has held producers have the conditional right to convey truthful information about their products to consumers.
The First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . . .” I have never been able to find in these words an exception for commercial speech, though some courts have and many regulations currently assume such an exception.
While courts and regulators have been less than consistent in upholding a First Amendment right to commercial speech, it is a bedrock issue for civil and economic libertarians. As Robert Ekelund and David Saurman wrote recently:
The crucial point is that advertising is an expression of opinion in addition to being factually informative. For personal and individual freedom to exist in a society, government cannot regulate or suppress the free exchange of opinion between free people, be it news, literature, editorial commentary, or advertising. Individual freedom is eroded once governmental regulation and control of the market for ideas is imposed.
Carving out from the First Amendment an exception for commercial speech assumes false distinctions between ideas and goods, thoughts and actions. Can freedom of speech genuinely be protected if speech referring to goods or services we wish to make available to others is somehow considered “nonspeech”? What ideas and thoughts do we have that do not relate in some way to what we are willing to do for others, and under what terms?
As historian Richard Pipes wrote recently, “what a man is, what he does, and what he owns are of a piece, so that the assault on his belongings is an assault also on his individuality and his right to life.” “Advertising,” write Ekelund and Saurman, “seems to be the lone exception to the rule of no government interference in the ideas market, an exception steeped in illogical and contradictory argument.”
What it’s About, Really
The rights of smokers and the companies who produce tobacco products are being violated, and as a result the health of millions of smokers is being put at risk. If just 10 percent of smokers switched to smokeless tobacco, for example, an astonishing 26.8 million life-years would be saved. That won’t happen because smokers aren’t being told of the benefits of switching.
Restrictions on tobacco advertising are hardly the only assault smokers have had to endure lately. Just last week, the Illinois state legislature approved a plan to “solve” the state’s huge budget deficit principally raising cigarette taxes another $0.40 a pack, to $0.98 a pack. Smokers will bear virtually the entire cost of bailing out the state. Nary a voice was raised against the obvious injustice of such a deal.
Why is this situation tolerated? I think smokers became fair game for regulators, tax hikers, and self-anointed do-gooders when our numbers fell below 25 percent of all adults in recent years. There are now more ex-smokers than smokers in the U.S. This seems to be a magical threshold: Politicians can do whatever they want to smokers now that our votes are too few to put them out of office.
Being a white heterosexual male of middle income and no illegal drug habits, I’ve avoided falling into a bona fide minority group until now. I’m beginning to feel the sting of official discrimination that ethnic and other minority groups have long felt, of being punished for something that should be nobody else’s business but my own. I’m angry because I know there is no political solution to my predicament: Non-smokers get to make tobacco policies, regardless of which political party is in power.
It’s almost enough to make me consider quitting my long-time habit. But then, I enjoy smoking and smoke only in moderation.
On second thought, I may just drive 30 minutes south to Indiana. Cigarette taxes there are just $0.13 a pack.
