CLARK'S WAR ON TOBACCO

The NDP government of British Columbia may not be good for much, but it
does provide a useful rule of thumb: If Glen Clark likes a policy, there
must be something wrong with it.

The "Glen Clark rule" comes in quite handy on tobacco issues. Mr. Clark's
government has embraced the idea that tobacco companies inflict net
financial costs on society by putting legions of sick smokers into
hospitals, where they must be cared for on the public tab. Make Big Tobacco
pay, goes the chant.

Accordingly, B.C. plans to charge tobacco companies a "licensing fee" of
$20 million, close to half the industry's annual yearly profit in B.C. But
that's just the appetizer. The government is also suing the companies to
recover the costs of treating people with smoking-related health problems.

Mr. Clark's crusade is a facsimile of American efforts -- first by a
collection of states, then by Washington -- to "recover the social costs"
of smoking. For the moment, the American movement has foundered on the
shoals of Congressional party politics.

Sadly for Mr. Clark and his U.S. counterparts, there is a wee problem with
the crusade: It's wrong. Not just morally, for trampling on people's
rights. It's also empirically wrong. In fact, because smokers tend to die
younger, the costs of treating tobacco-related diseases are mitigated by
the savings to society in health care not taken up in old age and pensions
not cashed in. When you add in the revenues it generates, tobacco actually
doesn't cost the public. If anything, it's a net contributor to government
coffers.

Actuary John Woolsey makes this point in some detail on page A11. Although
most studies on the issue are American, their conclusions likely apply here
as well, since our cigarette taxes are much higher. By one estimate, the
cost of tobacco-related disease to health care in B.C., about $400 million
annually, is outweighed by cigarette taxes alone, at $483 million. As the
saying goes, governments are the worst tobacco addicts of all.

A more interesting question is why the focus of activists and governments
has shifted toward hitting tobacco companies, not for the harm they do to
smokers but for the "social costs" they supposedly inflict. The answer, we
suspect, is most people's stubborn insistence that they should be free to
make their own choices about their lives and health. Leaving aside the
secondary question of how to keep one's noxious gases out of other people's
faces, for most of the public, smoking is a matter of individual choice. If
someone wishes to trade health for the pleasures of smoke, he should puff
to his heart's discontent. Others may find the choice irrational, but what
is freedom if not the right to do stupid things?

The "social costs" argument allows governments and the activists that goad
them a way around the average person's cussedness. Rather than admit that
they want to veto people's destructive choices, they can say they only want
to recover what's paid out by taxpayers. Superficially, individual choice
is respected.

The result, though, and it's intended, is a massive levy on tobacco
companies, which forces up prices. Higher prices cause reduced consumption
precisely because they interfere with people's ability to finance their
(admittedly bad) choices. The same end is achieved, but only the big, bad
tobacco companies feel government's whip directly.

Just how disingenuous the concern about "social costs" is can be seen by
what governments and activists are not doing (not yet, at least). They are
not going after all the other products that result in public health costs.
No one has suggested auto makers pay the hospital bills of crash victims.
Nor are makers of potato chips sued for the health costs of their clients'
obesity. Alcohol, hang gliders, rock-climbing ropes, red meat, motorcycles:
The list of things that put people in need of health care is very long.

No matter what the rhetoric, the anti-smoking crusade wants people not to
smoke. If it does so by persuasion, fine. But taxes, penalties, censorship
and other coercive means have no place in a society that respects free choice.

Copyright 1998 The Ottawa Citizen

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski