TOBACCO MAKES LESS SENSE THAN HEROIN

My stepfather, the late A.J. Ayer, told me that he'd started smoking as a
boy "to keep the midges away", as it was suggested to him by his mother, on
hot summer picnics.

He also told me that in his youth it was believed that smoking could help
alleviate asthma.

I think he must have been well into his sixties by the time he gave up
smoking, long after the less useful or benign effects of cigarettes became
known, and probably about 10 years before a death indirectly caused by smoking.

He had, of course, every professional reason to be philosophical about the
evident dangers of smoking.

How could someone who believed so expressly in free will seek to blame
others for an illness that was as a result of a personal choice?

When he'd started smoking no one knew the dangers, but he'd certainly
continued smoking long after they were proved beyond contention. Most
people alive now who smoke have, perversely, started in full knowledge of
the harmful effects of cigarettes. Who doesn't know? It would be impossible
not to believe the evidence, even if one believes that the lung cancers,
the heart diseases, the emphysemas are what happen only to other people,
until, that is, it happens to you.

But this week a Florida court did something strange.

It found against the big tobacco companies.

The jury - according to the Reuters report - pronounced that 'smoking is
addictive and causes lung cancer, heart disease and a wide range of other
maladies.' Well, this is certainly true, but not news to any of us who have
ever smoked or indeed chosen not to. "The six-member panel," the report
continued, "also determined that cigarette makers sell a defective product
and conspired to hide its dangers from the public. They should pay
unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, the jury ruled."

I am hardly coming out in favour of the tobacco companies.

It has been known for some time how much they tried to cover up and, once
the cover was blown, how many scientists - and this for me is the real
shock - were persuaded to disprove any evidence that they didn't want us to
believe.

I don't know how much punishment is sufficient here. American lawyers think
that the damages could be between $200 billion and $500 billion;
chillingly, they also think the tobacco companies will be able to bear
this. Smokers will always be able to pay for their habit, no matter what's
known or what the price is, it's reckoned.

So while it would be unjust for such iniquitous behaviour to go unpunished,
is it appropriate to blame the tobacco companies for our continuing to
smoke against all reason?

Yes, smoking is addictive, but we are not passive victims here. We do have
a choice.

And I don't merely refer to the new drug, Zyban, that's been formulated to
help people resist nicotine addiction. No matter what the chemistry is,
there is always a psychological element to addiction.

And I don't mean that some of us have addictive personalities and are
therefore unable to protect ourselves against abusive substances or
unhelpful behaviour patterns, I mean that some part of our psyche is
choosing to be destructive. That's the part we, privately and individually,
have to address and for which we have to take responsibility.

The conflict between rationality and the forces of unreason is a hard one,
though, I do admit.

I am married to someone whose terminal illness, and so much suffering and
surgical torture, is, I don't doubt, as a result of smoking: of course I
feel rage against the tobacco industry.

What I can't see, however, is that smoking can, on the one hand, be legal
and, on the other, that the makers of cigarettes be found criminally culpable.

It would be impossible to outlaw smoking - and certainly there are not any
votes in it - but I think it is important to stress that the dangers of
smoking are hardly side-effects. That's to say, smoking doesn't do anything
except maybe make you ill or kill you. In fact, smoking makes considerably
less sense than taking heroin: at least with that there's a hit, an escape,
a trade-off somewhere.

And this is the odd thing really (and I write as an ex-smoker, admittedly
never a very committed one, though I still sometimes hanker after a puff):
not why we allow people to sell cigarettes and other people to smoke them,
but why we should ever choose to.