In 1604, in his “Counterblaste to Tobacco,” King James I of England described smoking as “A custom loathesome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.” He slapped tobacco with a 4,000% tax increase.
Twenty years later, in a papal bull, Urban VIII threatened anyone caught smoking in church with excommunication. Mexico had beaten him to it, banning smoking in any place of worship in 1575. In 1647, the colony of Connecticut limited tobacco lovers to one smoke a day, “not in company with any other.” Enforcement was lax. In 1674, Russia decreed that smoking could lead to the death penalty, but the ban lasted only two years.
In the 20th century, smoke haters framed tobacco as a particular menace to women. Henry Ford published a 1914 pamphlet called “The Case Against the Little White Slaver,” with a foreword by Thomas Edison, who said he didn’t employ smokers. In 1908, New York City banned smoking by women in public — for two weeks. Hitler’s propaganda arm launched an attack on tobacco, arguing that women smokers risked sterility and so endangered the future of Aryans.
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In the 1920s, anti-smoking advocate Lucy Gaston, who in tandem with the temperance movement was instrumental in getting 15 states to ban smoking, linked tobacco to the Bolshevik menace. At the time, some cigarettes were imported from Russia. Smoking continued to increase. Gaston, pink lungs and all, nevertheless died of throat cancer.
What’s striking about a little volume called “The Cigarette Book: The History and Culture of Smoking” (Skyhorse Publishing), an alphabetical guide to ciggie factoids, is how consistently smoking has been treated as a menace down the centuries. C-sticks were always just about to be hounded out of polite company for 400 years of largely ineffective taxes, warnings and bans. None of it worked. Smoking rates actually increased in 1930s Germany (until World War II limited the supply of imports) and rose again in the postwar era.
Even after the Surgeon General’s Report of 1964 conclusively linked smoking with lung cancer, US smoking continued to rise, to a 1980 peak of 631.5 billion cigarettes sold.
Today, you can’t legally smoke in a bar in New York City — or Los Angeles, London, Paris or Dublin. Smoking rates declined to about 21% of Americans by 2004 — but have stayed there, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
That 21% rate is sticky and intriguing: In New York City the smoking rate hovered around 21.5% from 1993 through 2002. Then, after the double whammy of Mayor Bloomberg hiking cigarette taxes in 2002 and banning smoking in bars and restaurants in 2003, the rate began dropping again. Now, with cigarettes more than $10 a pack in the city, smoking is at the lowest level ever measured in the city: 15.8% of adults and, even better, 13.9% of teens. California, another strict anti-tobacco state, has driven adult smoking below 13%. Could it be that anti-smoking measures have actually worked to prolong American lives?
Yes. But the campaign to stomp out smoking has unrealistic goals. The city announced this year that it intended to reduce smoking by another 29% in the next couple of years, a figure that would exceed the cumulative reduction since 2002. (Sorry, Mayor Mike, but you can’t ban smoking in bars again, and the proposed ban on smoking in parks and beaches may be a butt too far.)
Even more farfetched is the British Medical Assocation’s goal of a smokeless UK by 2035. (Don’t tell James Bond, who once said, in Ian Fleming’s “Live and Let Die,” “You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy. Light a cigarette and be grateful you are still alive as you suck the smoke deep into your lungs.”)
The smoking rate is like the world record in the 100-yard-dash. The more you winch it down, the harder it becomes to shave off another tenth of a percent. It may be that one-tenth or so of Americans are going to stick with the cigarettes no matter how discouraging the medical evidence, no matter how high the price. If cigarettes were $100 a pack, that might be good news for Indian reservations that sell untaxed cigarettes or middlemen who sell them on the black market, but it’s not necessarily going to save many lungs.
Moreover, the lower the smoking rate, the more fringe it becomes. Fringe is sexy. What if the last kid in the school who smokes is the next Johnny Depp (who, incidentally, is seen lavishly enjoying a cigarette in the PG-13-rated “The Tourist”)?
Let’s give the nanny state a hand for how far we’ve come. Smoking is indisputably addictive and harmful, it hugely irritates (and may cause health problems with) innocent bystanders and efforts to decrease it are working. If every effort of the nanny state did so much good, it might be as popular as Mary Poppins.
To put it another way, your freedom to pollute your lungs was infringing on my freedom to have a beer without my air being befouled. Barmaids and restaurateurs who loudly protested that a smoking ban in taverns would kill their businesses have shut up. No one wants to return to the days when every New Yorker with a nightlife could smell the smoke washing off him in the shower every Saturday morning.
So battered is the tobacco business that this fall it leaked plans to begin marketing Camel cigarettes in a specially designed Williamsburg, Brooklyn limited-edition pack meant as a hipster magnet. The Camel website called Williamsburg “the most famous hipster neighborhood” (er, except hipsters hate being called that) and assured users that the brand would imbue them with “serious street cred” (dude, now you’re just sounding like Andy Rooney saying he just heard about this hot, new film “Reality Bites”).
Camel’s drive to kill off hipsters was an admirable one, but politicians with prestigious titles like “City Council member” reacted with predictable outrage. They needn’t have bothered. Camel’s idea was doomed from the start. So phony. So lame. So trying-too-hard. (None of those conditions are associated with Williamsburg, are they?) Bloggers at the site Stuff Hipsters Hate scoffed that the campaign sounded like it was aimed at “the 17-year-old poseur set in Toledo.” (Assuming there is one).
Without even needing to resort to associating smoking with Toledans, Mayor Bloomberg’s butt-kicking has helped make smoking uncool. Inside the bar, there’s music and conversation and girls showing off their cute tops. Outside the bar, where the huddled, bundled addicts, shivering deep in their downy outerwear, hurriedly puff to refill their nicotine tanks as quickly as possible so they don’t freeze their yellow-stained fingers off, the vibe is about as attractive as a board meeting of homeless dudes.
Yet the anti-smoking movement not only faces diminishing returns on quality of life — it faces diminishing returns for its budgets.
Many states are raising money selling “tobacco bonds” in which repayment is guaranteed by settlements every state made with tobacco companies after the lawsuits of the 1990s. Now those bonds are getting downgraded to junk status because of the risk of default. Analyst Dick Larkin, of Herbert J. Sims & Co., this year warned of possible tobacco-bond defaults by 2030, saying that assumptions about future tobacco sales were overly optimistic. Philip Morris parent company Altria said that only 16 of 57 state tax increases between 2003 and 2007 delivered on their revenue targets.
As was predicted at the time, states that tapped into the gusher of tobacco settlement money — $246 billion over 25 years — are losing interest in spending the cash on smoking cessation programs. From 2008 to fiscal year 2011, the amount budgeted by states for this purpose has plummeted 28%. It’s not too hard to imagine an America in which PSAs encourage smoking, and not just unintentionally. Ask what you can smoke for your country! After all, the president does it.
Maybe the state, at an unconscious level, understands that smoking is a way to give its budget a buzz. Anti-smoking campaigns have taken a weird turn. Arguing that smoking ruins a night out is one thing. Making the case that ciggies are a significant contributor to global warming or that secondhand smoke is killing our pets seems silly. And why was the city plastered with those strange posters showing that poor woman who had to get her fingers amputated because of smoking? I’ll bet more fingers have been lost to the products of Black & Decker than Benson & Hedges.
A law signed in June by the nation’s most prominent nicotine addict to make cigarette warning labels more gruesome and terrifying is unlikely to work and may even be counterproductive. (“Smoking can kill you” is one of the new warnings slated to replace the old ones that smokers have long since stopped noticing). A paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology said that overt mentions of death apparently made smokers more likely to cling to their C-sticks as “a strategy to buffer against existential fears provoked by death-related warning messages.”
As James Bond might say: My dear Moneypenny, if it weren’t dangerous, I shouldn’t bother.
PUFF PIECES — FACTS ABOUT SMOKING
* Tobacco, which had been growing in America since about 6000 BC, was popularized in Europe by Jean Nicot, the French ambassador to Lisbon. In 1560, he was given some seeds by Portuguese sailors returning from the New World, and he grew them and sent the leaves to Queen Mother Catherine de Medici, who liked to sniff the powder made from them.
* Cigarettes started to appear in the 1830s, but it wasn’t until the late 1850s that cigarettes from Philip Morris and Bull Durham were mass-produced.
* Smoking bans are as old as tobacco itself. The Catholic Church banned smoking in Mexican churches in 1575; Japan outlawed tobacco in 1620; and in 1638, China made the use and supply of tobacco a crime punishable by decapitation. The first US law was passed in 1632, when Massachusetts banned smoking in public places.
* Rutherford Hayes was the first president to ban smoking in the White House, in 1877.
* In 2005, Bhutan became the first nation to ban smoking completely. It’s illegal to smoke in public or sell tobacco.
* Pope John Paul II was said to smoke only three cigarettes a day, one after each meal.
* In 1908, New York City passed the Sullivan Act, which banned women from smoking in public. In 1929, Edward Bernays, the “father of PR,” wanted to increase market share for Lucky Strikes by getting women to smoke. He got models, debutantes and feminists to march down Fifth Avenue while smoking, in a “Torch of Freedom” march.
* The Camel Smoke Ring Billboard, above the Hotel Claridge in Times Square, blew a five-foot-wide smoke ring (made of steam) every four seconds from 1941 until 1966. That’s nearly 200 million puffs.
* The last cigarette TV ad in the US — a Malboro cowboy, of course — aired at 11:59 p.m., Jan. 1, 1971. TV stations were given an extra day for New Year’s Day football game revenue. ABC and CBS said the ban resulted in a 50% drop in advertising revenue.
* China is the world’s biggest market for cigarettes. There are 18 trillion sold a year there, approximately one-third of all sales. With cigarettes selling for as little as 30 cents a pack, 67% of men smoke, or about 360 million people.
* In Jamaica, it takes 44 minutes of work, on average, to buy a pack of cigarettes, compared to 5 minutes in Japan, according to 2001 figures. It’s 10 minutes in the US.
* In David Krogh’s “Smoking: The Artificial Passion,” he points out that 90% of all drinkers drink alcohol when they feel like it but leave it alone when they don’t; 10% have a compulsion to drink all the time. Smoking the statistics are reversed. Only 10% who start can take it or leave it.
* In Germany, the warning on cigarette packs reads, “Smoking can lead to a slow and painful death.” In Japan, it’s, “As there is a risk that it might damage your health, try not to smoke too much. And be sure to observe smokers’ etiquette.”
From “The Cigarette Book: The History and Culture of Smoking” (Skyhorse Publishing) by Chris Harrald and Fletcher Watkins