Seeing Through the Smoke

Products produced by the tobacco industry have helped kill more Americans in the last two years alone--about 600,000, the U.S. surgeon general says--than all the battles fought in all the wars in the nation’s history. In the face of now-irrefutable evidence about tobacco’s health perils and mounting public distaste for smoking, the tobacco industry nonetheless fights on, determined to keep its addictive grip on smokers ‘til death do them part.It was for this reason that the industry spent an incredible $18 million in California over the last few months trying to defeat Proposition 99, the initiative to raise the state cigarette tax by 25 cents a pack. That effort, happily, failed.

It did so despite a campaign that was shameless in its disregard for relevance and honesty. The campaign ranged from libertarian indignation--smokers have “ made a personal decision to smoke, and that’s what this country is all about--the freedom to choose “--to the most exploitative fear-mongering--” if Proposition 99 passes, Californians could face an explosion in gang-related violence “--since higher taxes would allegedly encourage cigarette smuggling. Gov. George Deukmejian was one who embraced this campaign. A majority of voters saw through it for the nonsense that it was.

Come Jan. 1, then, the state tax on cigarettes will go to 35 cents a pack, with similar boosts in taxes levied on other tobacco products. In time this will produce $600 million a year to finance indigent health care, fund education programs to discourage smoking and drug abuse, provide health research grants and pay for park improvements. The tobacco industry’s great worry is that a higher tax will discourage smoking; health professionals hope that this fear proves right. A federal study has placed the social costs of smoking--medical expenses, lost workdays and the like--at $65 billion a year. The industry’s constant retort is that people smoke because they “enjoy” it. To describe a practice that regularly contributes to 300,000 premature deaths a year as enjoyable is simply grotesque. People smoke, as the tobacco industry knows to its profit, because they have become addicted to smoking. Proposition 99 should help some people shun or shed that harmful dependency.