I was born and reared in a major tobacco-growing and manufacturing state, Virginia, and was educated and lived for a long time in an even more important tobacco state, North Carolina. In that environment it was difficult not to be seduced at an early age into making cigarettes part of one's way of life. Back in the 1940s, salesmen from such nearby cigarette-producing citadels as Richmond, Durham, and Winston-Salem used to swarm like grasshoppers all over the campuses of the upper South, hustling their wares. Usually dressed in seersucker suits and wearing evangelical smiles, they'd accost you between classes and press into your palm little complimentary packs of four Lucky Strikes or Chesterfields, give you a pep talk, and try to sell you their brand. If you were not a smoker, which was rare at a time when cigarettes were not only in vogue but the norm, you would soon become one, made helpless by the unremitting largesse. I was hooked at age fourteen, initially succumbing because my role in a school play—that of frenetic Chicago gangster—called for me to be a chain smoker. It was a delightful rationale for commencing my addiction, although I'm certain that, given the intensity of peer pressure, I would have started smoking anyway, especially since I had acquired a whole laundry bag full of those little packs and was looking forward not only to an exciting habit but to one that for some time would be absolutely free.
Like renegade Catholics and alcoholics who have sworn off, ex-smokers are often tediously zealous about the addiction they have left behind. I confess to being a member of that group and in fact feel so strongly about the dangers of cigarettes that the subject has frequently turned me into a bleak moralist. But I have my reasons. In my mid-twenties, after I had been smoking for a decade, persistent attacks of bronchitis drove me to a very good New York doctor who examined me with a fluoroscope (no longer in general use) and told me that he had detected what looked like scar tissue on my bronchial tree. He advised me to stop smoking, which was fairly advanced advice for a physician of the early 1950s, who could only have deduced empirically what the later reports of the Surgeon General demonstrated scientifically: cigarettes are a direct cause of chronic bronchitis. The Surgeon General's reports also point out another sinister fact: the earlier one begins smoking, the greater the risk is of permanent damage to the lungs, especially the bronchial tubes.
I ignored the doctor and continued to smoke for the next fifteen years. I stopped cold turkey after a winter of bronchial attacks that came one after another and left me weak and, I might add, rather scared. I have never had a moment's doubt that my decision to stop salvaged me from dire illness, and I only wish that the cure had been more nearly complete. I have abstained from cigarettes for twenty-three years, more than double the time one should stop in order to achieve the mortality rate of lifelong nonsmokers, and therefore I have reason to believe, or hope, that in terms of lung cancer and heart disease I bailed out in time. Yet although the attacks of bronchitis are not nearly so virulent and debilitating as they were when I was still a smoker, they do come back with chronic, often exhausting persistence, casting a somber cloud over all my winters. I trace their origin to that first long and thrilling drag I took from a Philip Morris at the age of fourteen.
I have dwelt in this clinical and, I'm afraid, somewhat testimonial way on my own experience only to lend credence to the all but blind rage I feel I must express when confronted with the cigarette companies and the Tobacco Institute and their stupefying lies. It is intolerable to be told by their mouthpieces that no causal link can be shown between smoking and any serious illness, when after ceasing to smoke I experienced immediate and long-lasting relief from the acute manifestations of a disease. Plainly the Tobacco Institute proceeds on the assumption that most lay people are too stupid, or too supine, to care to take a look at either of the Surgeon General's major reports, which, for bureaucratic documents, are written in surprisingly lucid prose.1 The reports show that the lungs of a young person who began smoking at fourteen or earlier will often show damage, while those of a young nonsmoker will most likely show none. It is intolerable to accept the bland claims of the cigarette industry that such a finding has no bearing on health. Of the quartet of major diseases caused by smoking—lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, chronic bronchitis—bronchitis is the least deadly, yet it is a wretched ailment and a possible precursor of emphysema. The fact that the havoc it causes is often the result of smoking at an early age should justify outrage at anyone who would promote or tolerate cigarette advertising, which even in a television culture is read by the very young.
But the advertising of cigarettes in the print media isa troublesome matter because it presents ethical issues that a zealot like myself would initially like to see sidestepped. It is necessary to adopt the politic view. That cigarettes might be phased out of existence through education and by way of antismoking laws currently being enacted everywhere is a bright hope in lieu of making them illegal, which would likely be impossible if not undesirable, given the memory of Prohibition. Although the warnings attached to media ads possess good sense, if limited efficacy, an outright ban on advertising does not seem to square with our accepted principles of freedom of the press as long as cigarettes remain legal. That leaves the moral option in the hands of the newspaper and magazine publishers, who have not shown themselves willing to make honorable decisions.
In defending their right to help seduce the young through cigarette ads, newspaper publishers like to protect themselves by some blurred doctrine of fair play, pointing to the inconsistency of eliminating cigarette advertising while retaining ads for numerous products that might in some way harm the flesh or addle the brain. Chief among those, of course, is alcohol. But to equate in this way the harm, actual or potential, of liquor, wine, and beer with that of cigarettes seems to me a cop-out—for reasons I will mention—and also brings into focus two factors concerning cigarettes that are generally overlooked: their aberrant nature as articles of pleasure and their uselessness.
No possible claim can be made for cigarettes as enhancers of life on any level. The solace they provide is a spurious one, since they merely quell the pangs of an insatiable addiction created by one of their pharmacological components, nicotine. Also it should be remembered how recently cigarettes have appeared on the scene. In the chronicle of human pleasure, cigarette smoking is a gruesomely freakish phenomenon. In any universal sense cigarettes have existed for scarcely a couple of generations, and their toxicity and carcinogenic nature have been scientifically validated only in the past twenty-five years. They should be regarded, then, as the vile little marauders that they are, possessing no merit and vast lethal capacity, needing to be banished with the passion that we banish any other product that we innocently adopt only to discover that it endangers our lives. (How many truly conscientious publishers would have continued advertising products containing DDT or an item like the Dalkon Shield after learning of their deadly nature?)
With alcohol, by contrast, we have lived in a state of mixed grace and distemper since the dawn of the species. It has been an integral part of our experience, rooted in virtually all cultures as deeply as food and fire. It has been far from an unqualified blessing. Its destructive potential has been recognized ever since the first crocked Cro-Magnon slid into a gully, and measures have always been taken to restrict its use. Most of the current limitations placed on the advertising of various forms of alcohol are judicious enough, especially those that help curtail their use by minors; still, it would seem intensely desirable to reduce the flamboyance of much alcohol advertising to a tone commensurate with moderate tippling, enjoyment of wine and beer as an adjunct to meals, and safe driving. But unless one is a prohibitionist one could not discover an ethical need for the eradication of ads for liquor, wine, and beer, since it would be tantamount to calling for an end to those beverages themselves. It is difficult to find any persuasiveness in the publishers’ view that so long as they are allowed to advertise alcohol the banishment of cigarette ads would be a form of discrimination. Throughout history there has been bountiful pleasure and a calculated risk in drinking; in its own short and nasty history, cigarette smoking has produced merely bogus pleasure and incalculable harm. The publisher who cannot accept this simple distinction might be able to cover himself with honor if, in forgoing a small slice of what are often enormous profits, he would consign those malign solicitations to the oblivion they deserve.
But I suspect that this is a vain hope. Whenever I think of the self-concern and intransigence that prevent certain people from facing up to this plague, I recall the tobacco manufacturer I encountered some years ago. I am an alumnus of a so-called prestigious Southern university, and I met the gentleman on a spring morning when we sat in our robes waiting for the commencement exercises to begin. The university has been endowed principally through fortunes made in cigarettes, so it was not unfitting that he, a member of the board of trustees, was also chief executive officer of one of the largest tobacco companies in America. Although he lived in New York, he was a Southerner (you could tell from his down-home accent and a kind of countrified friendliness that he was a good ole boy), and as we sat in the heat, shooting the breeze, I gradually perceived that he was in something less than robust health. His complexion was sallow—no, waxen—bags hung haggardly beneath his eyes; his lips had a violet, cyanotic hue. His end of the conversation was interrupted by thick, croupy coughs. Unfiltered cigarettes of the brand he manufactured never left his lips except when he removed a butt to light a fresh one. He was a caricature of a chain smoker, but then I asked myself, What did I expect? Certainly not abstinence in a tobacco tycoon—but even moderation?
Finally his voice grew serious. He said he was in a long, drawn-out fight with the Surgeon General, whom he called a son of a bitch. He expressed his belief that the Surgeon General's report on smoking was a plot, although he didn't say whose. I listened patiently for a while, and I suppose I should have been more circumspect, but I wasn't. I told him, in as delicate a fashion as possible, that I had quit cigarettes some years before due to chronic bronchitis and that, begging to differ with him, I felt that the Surgeon General's report had made a good case for smoking as the cause of my trouble. At that point I sensed a veil coming down between us, and his eyes narrowed, reflecting betrayal. “There's not an iota of truth in that entire book,” he said sharply, “and you are very gullible if you buy any of its cheap line of garbage.” Those were his exact words, and they are imprinted on my memory as clearly as the terrible convulsion that seized him at that instant, turning his face crimson and causing him to lose his voice in a fit of strangulation. Both embarrassed and concerned, I rose to fetch a glass of water, but when I returned I saw that he had wheeled about and his back was implacably set against me. I was the enemy. We never spoke again. Thus always yawns the chasm between the apostate and the true believer.
[Nation, March 7, 1987.]