Opinion: Great American Smokeout, or, Newspapers Shame Smokers Day
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Today is the annual Great American Smokeout, the 24-hour period of the year when all bets are off on anti-smoking pontification. Newspaper editorial pages get into the act, and why shouldn’t they? The anti-tobacco editorial practically writes itself: Establish that ‘everyone knows’ smoking is bad for you, acknowledge the ‘progress’ in reducing smoking rates yet point out that current regulations and programs are clearly ‘not enough,’ call for people to kick their addiction and/or some government body to do something about it, and if you’re really on a roll, shame the great unwashed who still do smoke despite mountains of evidence proving the habit’s deadliness. Check out a few examples from smaller newspapers.
But an especially offensive editorial in a big Chicago newspaper? Isn’t Chicago the city of fat waistlines, bratwurst sausage, beer and a team of fictional smoking, suds-guzzling ‘Superfans’? Indeed, the Chicago Sun-Times on Wednesday decried the historically low smoking rate as not low enough, called for the mother of all ‘do somethings’ — federal regulation — then expressed annoyance that people would even choose to smoke at all, calling them ‘fooled’:
Smoking is very, very bad for you. After more than 40 years of surgeon generals’ warnings, reams of research and scores of public awareness campaigns, you’d think we wouldn’t have to state the obvious. But just before Thursday’s ‘Great American Smokeout’ — the annual effort to get smokers to quit — along comes discouraging news that the message still isn’t getting through ... The Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing Tuesday on the issue, part of larger congressional efforts that would for the first time allow federal regulation of cigarettes. It can’t happen soon enough. It’s amazing smokers still are fooled by light cigarettes. Then again, it’s amazing people still smoke, given all we know about the health risks.
Up the coast, the Ventura County Star contributed its own anti-smoking editorial, and though it doesn’t call for more regulation (we have more than enough of that in California), it expresses a bewildered sentiment similar to the Sun-Times’:
Today is the Great American Smokeout, sponsored by the American Cancer Society. It has only one goal: to show smokers the benefits of quitting. The only question to ask, then, is why haven’t all smokers quit? ... The effort to prevent smoking deaths comes down to those who smoke — they must want to stop. Yet, despite all the warnings, some 63 million people, or 21 percent of the population, in the United States still smoke. In 1965, a year after the first surgeon general’s warning, 81 million people, 42 percent of the population, smoked. Good progress, but not enough.
Particularly striking was that neither the Star nor the Sun-Times made any mention of second-hand smoke, the great menace to which anti-tobacco activists often point to justify government intervention. Instead, both editorials were most annoyed by the very fact that people who smoke have made that choice. At that point, the anti-smoking argument becomes one of personal preference, not of public safety and policy.
I used the occasion today to assess the sad state of smokers’ rights and remind you that, yes, you still have a choice whether to smoke. Read the Opinion Daily here.