Butt Out of Smokers' Lives

The aerobicized, six-mile-a-day-jogging, health fanatic, Ivy-League-degree-holding yuppies of this country have taken time out from their management consulting jobs and weekly therapy sessions to wake America up to the perils of smoking.

Thirtysomethings all over America have traded in their Camels for Power Bars and Evian bottles and, when Congress held hearings on the Smoke-Free Environment Act last week, the parking spots of our nation's capital were no doubt filled with Volvos and Saabs.

The problem with these proselytizers for health is that the measures they are crafting in an effort to outlaw smoking, while well-intentioned, only serve to increase smoking's allure.

Most smokers begin when they are 12 or 13 and still in the throes of pre-adolescent "fitting in" complexes. To a young smoker, a cigarette holds the mystique of a taboo, adult act. That first secret drag behind the school with friends is so rich (all the sweeter in memory) because it is so daring. The smoke rises up in tiny white clouds, and you all smile conspiratorially at one another. You've taken the folks for another ride and done what you shouldn't have. And, at the same time, you've secretly stolen a tiny bit of their adulthood--taken on their trappings, if not their responsibilities.

Smokers start smoking for the same reason drinkers start drinking and for the same reason Adam and Eve took the proverbial apple from the Tree of Knowledge: the forbidden fruit is always the sweetest.

When we see smoking in this context--as a rite of passage for so many, as an indelible part of our culture, and as an act still in many ways symbolic--it makes no sense to expect to eliminate it by legislating it out of existence. While outlawing cigarettes in our workplaces and restaurants may make the air in some areas cleaner, and play to specious claims about the dangers of second-hand smoke, it also makes tobacco more mysterious, more difficult to obtain, and makes smoking even more of a symbolic act. Suddenly those secret puffs become not just a brief escape into adulthood, but, more significantly, an act of rebellion.

If the manner in which lawmakers are trying to curb cigarette smoking is flawed, there also seems to be a problem with the premise of limiting smoking at all. Te chief complaint of non-smokers, repeated over and over like the sort of modern-day mantra they might use in their yoga classes, is that cigarette smoke isn't just bad for the smoker but for society as well. Non-smokers, even those out all worried about the possible health risks they might incur from second hand smoke.

Indeed, though tobacco companies make claims, often backed by scientific data, to the contrary, several studies see to support a link between second-hand smoke and heart and lung diseases.

The Environmental Protection Agency, a hotbed of the anti-smoking crusade, is quoted in a New York Times editorial of March 24 as estimating that there will be 3,000 lives saved annually by banning smoking in public buildings. Thousands more, no doubt, might be saved by ending smoking altogether.

In reality, though, we accept other's behavior each day which we know to be detrimental to ourselves, and yet do nothing to prevent, it. We ignore our collective safety for the right of the individual to act as she or he chooses with respect to her or his own body.

When the speed limit on interstate highways was lowered to 55 in the last decade, for instance, traffic fatalities were drastically reduced. Driving slower did appear to have a significant effect on the harm to society as a whole, in terms of the loss of human life. And yet, recent years have seen an effort by states to take back the right to impose their own speed limits because of what many took to be an unreasonable restriction on the way in which individuals chose to live their lives; specifically, the manner in which they chose to drive.

Alcohol use, too, is deeply harmful to society in many ways and yet is not significantly curbed. Each year, alcohol consumption is the cause of innumerable drunk driving deaths, spouse abuse, homelessness and loss of job productivity. In terms of personal and societal, emotional and physical harm, there can be little argument that alcohol is a far worse danger than cigarettes.

And yet, Prohibition, America's last experiment in outlawing alcohol use, was not only a fiasco, but broke down in exactly the terms I have already discussed. Eliminating alcohol consumption was a failure because, like cigarette smoking, legislative limits only made it more alluring. People felt the essential unfairness of being told how they could live their lives in sacrifice for a greater good, and that unfairness served to make alcohal more appealing than ever.

The truth is that each of us deals daily with things that others do which, while uncomfortable, or even unsafe, we accept in the interests of giving one another personal freedom.

My freedom to smoke is as important to me as a woman's right to choose might be to her. And claims about the imposition of my cigarette smoke on an abstract "society" are as wrong-headed as ideas that a woman's decision to do what she wants with her body will destroy the future of "society." In an effort to protect the community from the minority, we are trampling on what makes our community worth living in.

I am reminded, finally, of two Italian priests quoted in this month's Harper's. When asked why they smoked, one answered, "I feel my mortality in my bones. I know my immortality in my soul. You jog, I smoke."

While I'm still able, I think I'll go have a cigarette.