AMERICANS ADDICTED TO HYPOCRISY

Hugo Gurdon in Washington reports on the pop-eyed hysteria that has gripped
the chatterati on a simple question of choice - smoking

"Welcome to killing Field", says a cheery billboard to motorists driving
into Tampa, Florida. If you had regarded the Sunshine State as a place
where the only dangers were heat-stroke and an overdose of Disney, think
again. The billboard bears two death tolls side by side. The first - 43,363
Americans wiped out annually in car crashes - is dwarfed by the second -
430,700 innocents putatively extinguished by cigarette smoke.

Florida takes this very seriously. Or rather, it is so outraged about
smoking that it has passed clean through seriousness and emerged on the
other side of pop-eyed hysteria.

Having sued Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man and won 6.5 billion in damages
because of smokers' extra health care burdens, the government is using 130
million to pay for propaganda to persuade children not to smoke. Among its
many Maoist features, the campaign will provide children with little red
books about the evils of smoking. They are to be herded to state-organised
anti-tobacco rallies. Police will write smoking tickets, like parking
fines, for teenagers caught surreptitiously puffing behind the bicycle
sheds. Television advertisements will attack cigarette makers with the
slogan "Their brand is lies. Our brand is truth", and a "Truth Train" will
trundle across the state proselytising for pink-lunged purity. A Ministry
of Truth will be set up in the capital, Tallahassee, to oversee it all.

I made up the bit about the new ministry, actually, but you can be forgiven
if you were fooled, because everything else is gospel. America's political
class has slipped the bonds of sanity and declined into foam-flecked rage
about smoking. Without cigarette-makers changing what they do, which is
to sell a legal product to willing users, the chatterati have come to regard
them as baby-killers.

More people smoke than voted for Bill Clinton, but politicians are in no
mood to let inconvenient facts deprive them of righteous anger. Cigarette
companies are easy targets, having concealed evidence about smoking and ill
health, and secretly marketing to children. But the real hypocrites are the
anti-smoking crusaders. A detailed analysis has shown that, far from
costing society money, smokers contribute 20p a pack to the general welfa
re
by dying young and not collecting their pensions, and a further 200 each
year in tobacco taxes. Neither Florida nor any other state has lost money
because of smoking. They have all gained.

The anti-smoking war is based on the falsehood that smokers were ignorant
of the risks of lighting up. It is 35 years since my parents first
attempted to bribe me not to start smoking. Cigarettes were known as
"gaspers" before the First World War; even James I condemned the noxious
"weed". No one alive today was born into a world ignorant of the risks.
Rebellious youth wants to take risks. My parents' bribery did not work.
Like many others on the cusp of adulthood, I started smoking because it was
a relatively harmless way in the short term of doing what my parents wished
me not to do.

The demonisation of smoking in America has increased teenage smoking,
probably, say psychologists, because children realise they can give their
parents conniptions without being so silly as to take hard drugs. They
smoke by choice and then, like me, they choose to give it up.

This is not as hard as some people pretend; there are fewer smokers than
ex-smokers. But choice is not something that Big Brother government is
inclined to give the ignorant serfs of the general public. When Congress
put together a whopping $400 billion tax increase on cigarettes, ostensibly
to stamp out teenage smoking, it was based on the false premise that
ordinary people do not have the gumption to make the decision themselves.
They had to be regarded as innocent cattle led to the slaughter by big,
bad, Machiavellian business.

Fortunately, conservatives woke up at the last minute and voted against the
legislation that they realised would not stop smoking, but would finance a
giant extension of an overweening, over-funded state. Left-liberals were
outraged by their defeat. "If this is a tax," frothed Senator John Kerry,
"this is the one tax in America that nobody has to pay - nobody - unless
you buy a pack of cigarettes."

Hey, what was that, Senator? Smokers are not in the grip of a cast-iron
addiction, not dupes of wily advertisers? How odd, then, that the
government needs to whip up hysteria and raise hundreds of billions in
taxes to stamp out a simple, pleasurable, personal choice.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski