More Fair Warnings

Smoking remains the primary preventable cause of death for Americans, as U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop has again reminded the country. For most people, smoking is a far greater danger to health than are pollutants in the workplace. Those who hold jobs in what are recognizably hazardous industries and who also smoke put themselves at vastly increased risk. For example, smokers who do not work in the asbestos industry have a lung-cancer rate 10 times that of non-smokers who do work with asbestos. But asbestos-industry workers who also smoke have 50 times the lung-cancer rate of non-smokers outside the industry.

The AFL-CIO has criticized the surgeon general’s report for allegedly misrepresenting occupational hazards. It sees the report as suggesting that elimination of smoking would eliminate the risk of occupational disease. That is unfair. The report is quite clear about the toxic dangers facing those who work with such materials as asbestos, coal and cotton. It is also clear that, for a majority of Americans, smoking is responsible for more death and disability than the workplace environment.

The costs of smoking are enormous. Smokers require as much as 50% more medical attention and care than do non-smokers. A worker who smokes costs his employer up to $500 a year in higher insurance costs, lost productivity, work-related accidents and disability payments. The social costs are no less appalling. Dr. Koop attributes 340,000 premature deaths each year to cigarette smoking.

What could be done to ease this frightful toll? Koop himself is a prohibitionist; he favors a ban on smoking, though he recognizes the impracticality of that idea. What should be done? The best approach, we think, is to dissuade people from ever starting to smoke, rather than try to deal with the addiction once it has developed. Higher cigarette taxes are one disincentive to smoking. Continued and expanded education about the dangers of smoking could be another. Few people are interested in deliberately harming themselves. Smoking is a self-inflicted and often fatal wound. Clearly it’s a lot easier to try to persuade people never to take up this dangerous weapon rather than trying to wrest it from their grasp after the harm has been done.