A Growing Tide Against Smoking : AMA urges tobacco be viewed as addictive drug

The American Medical Assn. has now added its influential voice to others that are calling on the federal government to regulate tobacco as an addictive drug. The AMA isn’t demanding a ban on cigarettes, only that the government have stronger authority to control their distribution.

The action of the AMA follows an appeal to Congress by Dr. David A. Kessler, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, for legislation that would more precisely spell out the federal agency’s powers to regulate tobacco as an addictive drug.

As the AMA recognizes, to try to ban cigarettes would probably be to invite consequences even more devastating than those produced starting in 1920 by the constitutional prohibition on the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” in the United States. Prohibition was essentially an attempt to stamp out what many at the time professed to regard as a vice. What it led to was rampant scofflawism, a murderous crime wave and widespread corruption.

But smoking isn’t as simple as just a vice. It is, as the AMA, the FDA and every current and former smoker knows, a demanding and pitiless addiction. A ban on tobacco that would separate tens of millions of addicts from their drug would no doubt, after considerable pain, forcibly convert millions of them to the status of relieved former smokers. What it would do to the nation’s social fabric at the same time is too grim to contemplate.

An addiction can’t be eliminated by fiat. The legal challenge for Congress is to devise new ways to cut consumer demand for the toxic chemicals in tobacco by means short of outright prohibition. Two related points of attack are obvious. One is to dissuade people, especially teen-agers, from ever starting to smoke. The other is to encourage smokers to join the millions of those who have kicked their addiction.

Higher taxes on cigarettes are a proven disincentive to smoking. Another approach is through unremitting education, using all the manipulative skills of contemporary advertising to drive home the profound truism that smoking sickens and it kills.

The tax-and-educate approach has helped in recent years to bring the smoking rate in California down. Nationally, though, the statistics are less encouraging.

Realistically, it will probably take at least a generation and maybe a lot longer to make the United States a society that’s more or less smoke-free. Meanwhile, smoking-related diseases will go on killing up to 500,000 Americans a year. Anything that can feasibly be done to reduce that appalling toll is well worth trying.