by John Spritzler
February 23, 2009
The oh-so-liberal City of Boston has banned smoking in all workplaces, and
banned the sale of cigarettes in drug stores. It is all in the name of
improving our health. Where will it end?
Mom and pop drugstore owners (yes, there are still some in Boston) complain
that it's not fair they should be deprived of their income from cigarette
sales, but other businesses not. A Boston
Globe columnist who supports the ban on cigarettes in general made the
overwhelmingly powerful case today that this discrimination against drugstore
businesses is unfair. In all likelihood, the logic of this argument will lead
the zealots in the city's Public Health Commission to extend the ban on
cigarette sales to all businesses. Then cigarettes will be, for all practical
purposes, illegal to purchase in Boston, as alcohol once was in the days of
Prohibition. Unlike alcohol during Prohibition, however, the manufacture and
sale of cigarettes (outside of Boston, at least) will presumably remain legal.
No doubt these legally produced cigarettes will make their way into Boston via
a criminal black market, with all of the violence and sorrow that will entail.
I am not a cigarette smoker. But on behalf of cigarette smokers, I protest the
ban on cigarette sales, whether it applies only to drugstores or not. The ban
on cigarette sales reflects the liberals' approach to dealing with social
problems. They ignore the root of the problem, which in this case is the fact
that the wealthy owners of tobacco companies make huge fortunes by doing
everything they can to hook people on cigarette smoking. Instead the liberals
come up with "solutions" that only make life harder for the least powerful
people in society. One cannot help but wonder if the motto of the Public
Health Commission is the backwards version of the one that journalists are
supposed to have. Is the Commission's motto "Comfort the comfortable and
afflict the afflicted"?
Who smokes today? It is disproportionately the poorest people
from the working class, not professionals and the business elite. And why
is this? Academic research into this question is inconclusive, but the leading
theory is this. Working class people are as desirous of quitting smoking as
other people, but it is harder for them to quit because their lives are more
stressful and unforgiving. This makes it harder for them to endure the several
weeks of intense discomfort that comes immediately after quitting, and makes
it more likely they will "light up" during that difficult period. There are
other theories. One is that the immediate pleasure from nicotine (or at least
the relief from the displeasure of prior nicotine withdrawal) that "lighting
up" offers somebody matters more to a working class person who knows that his
or her life will be all down hill after the senior high school prom, than to a
person from a higher social-economic class who looks forward to a better and
better life in an advancing career. Another theory is that smoking a cigarette
is one of the few moments when a stressed out working class person can do
something just for themself, making smoking more valuable to a working class
than to an upper class person.
Instead of making it illegal for people who are addicted to nicotine to buy
cigarettes, as the Boston Public Health Commission may do, we should make it
illegal for anybody to make a huge fortune by hooking people on nicotine the
way the owners of the big tobacco companies do. At the same time we should let
people who wish to grow tobacco or manufacture cigarettes or sell cigarettes
in their store do so, but not get rich by doing so. We should let people who
want to smoke do so (in places where non-smokers are not forced to breathe in
the smoke.) If nobody stands to get rich from people being addicted to
nicotine there will be a lot less nicotine addiction and better health.
What this illustrates is that the problems in our society largely stem from
the fact that we let people make huge personal fortunes, and we define
"success" to mean acquiring vastly more wealth than others in a very unequal
society. If people can get rich by hooking people on nicotine they do it. If
they can get rich by hooking people on illegal drugs like heroin, they do that
too. Working class people around the world are being impoverished and stressed
out (and driven to smoke!) by the actions of banksters like Hank Paulson and
Bernie Madoff who did what they did for only one reason--it made them rich.
If we abolished the right of anybody to be inordinately wealthy then we
would eliminate the motive to do the nasty things that harm the rest of us. In
a society that did not permit the few to be vastly wealthier than the many
there would be no upper class who own vast amounts of land or huge factories,
and no lower working class who, because they don't own such things, must work
for those who do. Everybody would be the same class. In such an egalitarian
society people would have no material-gain reason for doing something harmful
to others. People would work for shared goals chosen to make life better for
all.
How would this impact smoking? One of the reasons why working class children
take up smoking is because official society tells them not to. Anti-smoking
campaigns actually seem to
increase smoking. In one study investigators
reported, "there has
been growing concern that antismoking campaigns may have unintended or
boomerang effects, in that exposure to such campaigns intensifies initial
prosmoking attitudes among young smokers (Meltzer, 2003) or increases
adolescents' smoking susceptibility (Farrelly
et al., 2002). One 21-year old male
participant in a qualitative examination of 150 college students' responses to
antismoking messages said the following: 'Those ads just make me want to light
up a cigarette' (Wolburg, 2004)."
For working class youths it is cool to do the opposite of what official
society with its anti-smoking campaigns tells one to do. Why is this? I don't
think it is because of innate human (or teenage) nature. I think it is because
our society is based on class inequality, with real power in the hands of a
wealthy upper class that treats working people with contempt, as "the hired
help" who exist only to serve the upper class and make them rich. The upper
class lies to working class people for selfish reasons and working class
people know it. Working class people, with good reason, do not trust the upper
class people who manage society and create anti-smoking campaigns.
As long as our society is based on class inequality, public health messages
about the health consequences of smoking will, with good reason, never be
taken seriously by all smokers. Class inequality is also the reason why
working people have lives that are so stressful and difficult and, quite
possibly, why they smoke. Class inequality is the root of the problem.