THE BURNING QUESTION : Did the Founding Fathers Really Intend to Guarantee Our Right to Smoke?
The Founding Fathers sure started something with all their talk about rights. Earlier, life was simple. You had duties, maybe also food. If you were really lucky, you had privileges. The idea of rights, liberating as it’s been, has forced us to hack our way through thick jungles of thought without benefit of machete.
The fine folks who grow and process America’s tobacco, for instance, want us to think that there are such things as smokers’ rights. I’m on the mailing list for many of the industry’s publications, and they spend most of their ink exhorting cigarette buyers to protest any move that would prevent them from lighting up whenever and wherever they please. As in the distinguished and mysterious Ninth Amendment, these rights are not enumerated. But the people who put out Philip Morris Magazine and Smokers’ Advocate have clearly studied up on the writings of other activists for other rights. They regularly come up with stuff that would do Stokely Carmichael proud. Coming soon: The tobacco industry joins with the anti-abortion movement to promote a fetus’s right to smoke.
Rights entered the vocabulary of Tobaccoville (there really is such a place; it’s the world’s largest cigarette factory) when Congress stared down some of its largest contributors and banned cigarette advertising from any box with a picture tube and/or speakers. To do so, it had to disregard the argument that this ban trampled on the tobacco industry’s First Amendment rights to spend hundreds of mllions of dollars a year making a lethal habit look good.
Well, of course, everyone has a right to lie. It may be the most robustly exercised of all our freedoms. And not just people have rights. The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations, under the 14th Amendment, enjoy some of the same rights that people do. Not all the rights: Like fetuses, corporations can’t vote--yet. But corporations do have First Amendment rights, and another court ruling said those include the right to advertise.
Driven off the air, the tobacco industry exercises that right with a vengeance on ground and at sea. The most punishing example is the vehicular billboard, a truck that carries a two-sided sign and adds to traffic congestion for the sole purpose of encouraging us to kill ourselves. It is a tribute to the basic goodness of people that drivers seething in some inexplicable tangle of cars don’t start ramming these trucks on sight. In a town strangling on its circulatory system, a traveling cigarette ad is both the last straw and the camel’s back.
After nonsmokers, tired of their hair and clothes smelling like yesterday’s Merits, started to organize, the smoke peddlers switched their concern from their own rights to those of their patron-victims. The issue has become secondhand smoke. A smoker has the right to off himself, but does he have the right to take me along? Recent research figures suggest that passive smokers--the language keeps getting richer--are being killed. The urgent newsletters and slick magazines from Tobacco Road now spew outrage and brittle sarcasm at every example they unearth of smokers’ rights being squeezed.
While rights are being minted and defended up in the thin air of the rhetorical heights, down here where the lungs are, tobacco still manages to retain its status as something other than a lethal drug (the British warning label says “cigarette smoking kills”). The Kroger Co., a nationwide supermarket chain, recently changed its policy on the sale of cigarette papers after a Dick Gregory-led group of activists threatened a boycott. Gregory, the former comedian who now oscillates between anti-drug activism and the promotion of interesting diets, announced that such papers are sometimes used to smoke marijuana. So Kroger has decided, as company policy, to require anybody who wants to purchase rolling papers to buy some tobacco.
The anti-drug activists may not like it, but marijuana has not been found to be nearly as deadly as tobacco. In fact, it serves some medicinal purposes, or it would if judges didn’t intervene. An appeals court ruled recently that a seriously ill man’s right to the ameliorative effects of the hemp plant was outweighed by the government’s right to wage war on drugs.
Talk about rights may make us feel noble, but, like that court, we end up having to make hard choices. The people at Kroger probably wouldn’t force tobacco on you if you told them you were buying the papers for your fetus.
