This column should probably be relegated to the pile of private thoughts that should never be published. But what the heck: it’s time for bluntness on all things. So I’ll just say it. I have doubts about the seeming success of the anti-smoking campaign. If all it achieved was an end to cigarettes, fine. But that’s not what happened.
Have you been to any big city in the United States lately? They all smell of weed, as in marijuana. This means Boston, San Francisco, New York City, Las Vegas, Phoenix, D.C., Denver, you name it. It is inescapable and overwhelming. If you don’t notice it, it is because you are a smoker yourself.
In the old movies, there were large parties where everyone is smoking. We look at those today and wonder how they can stand it. It must have been overwhelming. I can smell the nasty stench of cigarette smoke 100 feet away, and it lingers on people’s clothes long after they have snuffed it out. How did people in, for example, the show “Mad Men” stand it?
The answer is that they are used to it. Same goes for smoking on airlines. Oddly I have a very vague memory of taking a flight and lighting up in the chair. It must have been the last days of the practice and I must have been in my late teens. Even then, it didn’t feel quite right. Soon after, this was abolished.
And thankfully so because I cannot bear the smell. The health consequences are egregious too, of course. This has been known since the earliest parts of the 20th century. Actually, the first use of the phrase “coffin nails” for cigarettes is from 1789.
Clearly, it doesn’t make sense to light a dried plant on fire and breathe the smoke all day for years. No kidding: that is not good for you. Human beings are not stupid; people smoked for centuries despite the dangers.
Leaving cancer aside, it just screws up your lungs’ ability to take in air and feed oxygen to your fast-growing cells, like hair, fingernails, and skin. This is why long-term smokers look unhealthy. Their skin is lizard like, their hair looks dead and frazzled, and their faces are sullen. Look, it’s just a terrible idea.
So, yes, public health finally came around to seeing this and waged a war on it. Tobacco lobbying couldn’t stop the wild campaign. Finally the public caught on and responded. We see less cigarette smoking than ever in the United States. Apartments, restaurants, bars, and offices all ban it. I get it and it makes sense.
(As an aside, if we had genuine market signaling in health insurance coverage, with premiums adjusting based on individual risk, which is today essentially illegal, most of this would have taken care of itself.)
But there have been secondary effects. The oral fixation didn’t go away. Instead it has been replaced with food. Cigarettes repressed the appetite. Stopping unleashed it. You know this from experience. When people get together now, the only way to facilitate conversation is eating and drinking, usually liquor.
There is another problem. Instead of tobacco, we have a new tolerance for smoking weed in various forms. Could be cigarettes, or “bongs,” gummies, brownies, or vaping. This causes you to get “high,” which is a feeling of “Who cares?” which diminishes ambition and focus, and that’s the whole point. In addition, it massively stimulates the appetite for eating (“munchies”). So absent hunger-suppressing cigarettes, replaced by hunger-stimulating weed, plus the persistence of the oral fixation, what do we have? An obesity epidemic.
Obesity is associated with heart disease, diabetes, and early death. In addition, it fosters general life misery. You can’t fit in clothes, airline seats, or simple chairs, and the problem consumes your life, as your feet wear out and just getting around much less exercising becomes impossibly arduous.
Which is worse: heart disease or cancer? It’s hard to say overall but the point is that it is very possible that the anti-smoking campaign ended up feeding public health dangers that are nearly as bad, just as bad, or worse.
Did anyone consider this possibility over the last 50 years with the pious raging against cigarettes? Did anyone consider possible secondary consequences? I really don’t know but the point is this. In real life, there is never a chance simply to exterminate one vice without possibly unleashing others. It’s known as “unintended consequences.”
And now, we have the odd situation of every government taking big steps to further legalize weed. I’m not against that and I never saw much point to the war on drugs to begin with. But, still, these steps have dramatically increased usage and the potency of pot. I’m told that the typical variety is vastly more powerful now than it was when I was a kid.
This goes against my own expectation that legalizing these things would result in lower potency. Maybe it eventually will but that hasn’t happened yet. We shall see. Meanwhile, old-fashioned tobacco cigarettes are taxed to the point that the price is pillaging for those who still smoke them and most people have turned to other forms of substance abuse.
I was a smoker for many years until I realized what it was doing to me. So I stopped cold and never went back. All the talk about its addictive qualities didn’t change anything for me. Once my mind was made up that was it. I cannot even think of breathing in any form of smoke today. That was an individual choice, not a response to some big public health campaign.
Maybe we should all be more cautious about these huge moral crusades backed by government and media. We think we know what’s wrong and how to fix it but do we really know that the cure will not be worse than the disease? We’ve been through four years of trying and failing to defeat a common respiratory pathogen. And look what resulted: the massive loss of liberty and human rights.
Surely there is something we can learn from this. Improving our lives and the world at large comes from personal decisions at the margin, not from gargantuan “wars” against this or that. Such campaigns can be dangerous and unleash unexpected forces beyond our control.
U.S. Alcohol Prohibition is a perfect example. It was accompanied by a wild campaign against all liquor, and this was joined by “the science” and ministers. All respectable opinion favored the ending of the sale and consumption of liquor. Then what happened? Crime, corruption, and massive secretive drinking and the entire culture of speakeasies. It was a disaster.
To be sure, there is something correct about the aspiration of abstinence. No question about that. But the thing went too far and backfired enormously. By 1932, Americans were done with the whole thing, voting in FDR to get their beer back.
Here too, we defeated cigarette smoking but what do we really have to show for it? We now face myriad problems that have no such easy solution. As Thomas Sowell says, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
