SMOKING IS AN INFORMED, PLEASURABLE CHOICE

HAVING just about completed its No. 1 legislative task of the year
- -providing nearly $200 billion to the states in a pork-greased
transportation bill -- Congress is now ready to tackle task No. 2: the
tobacco settlement.

Watch out. Politicians see the $368.5 billion deal as a huge pile of cash
for new spending projects. But far worse is the idea on which the
settlement is founded: that individuals aren't responsible for their own
actions. They are too stupid or crazed or manipulated to realize that
smoking is dangerous.

This view, so satisfying to elitists of all political stripes, is flat-out
wrong. Americans know that smoking kills, as Kip Viscusi of Harvard
meticulously shows in his book, ``Smoking: Making the Risky Decision.'' In
fact, they think that smoking is worse than it really is.

Lifetime risks of getting lung cancer through smoking are roughly 1 in 10,
but smokers see them as 3.7 in 10, Viscusi found. The risk of dying
prematurely from smoking is between 18 percent and 36 percent, but survey
respondents put it at 54 percent. Also, he writes, ``There is certainly no
evidence of greater neglect of smoking risks by the very young. Indeed, the
opposite is the case.''

Viscusi has also found that, far from costing the rest of us money,
``smokers save society 32 cents a pack,'' mainly through reduced nursing
home and Social Security costs (since they die earlier), plus another 53
cents in taxes.

But for anti-smoking zealots, it's not enough. President Clinton put the
case perfectly and chillingly last September: ``This is about changing the
behavior of the United States
the behavior of the American people.''

Fully informed for many years that smoking can kill, about one-fourth of
Americans smoke, anyway. Are they nuts? No, they are making what they
believe is a reasonable decision -- the pleasures of smoking outweigh its
dangers.

We make decisions all the time that seek to balance pleasure with the risk
of harm -- having another piece of pecan pie even though it will raise
cholesterol and perhaps kill us quicker, skipping exercise to watch a TV
show, drinking more coffee or alcohol than we should.

Speaking of drink, the Centers for Disease Control calculates that alcohol,
since it kills people in their prime, deprives Americans of 1.5 million
years of life before age 65, compared with 1.2 million years for smoking.
Worse, drinking kills and injures other people.

Smoking, like drinking, can be addictive, and some people have a hard time
quitting. But people do it. There are now as many ex-smokers as active
smokers. It seems to be easier to stop smoking than to lose weight and keep
it off.

There is not the slightest doubt that, after they have finished with
smokers, the health police will proceed to drinkers, chubbies,
sport-utility drivers and on and on.

Sure, there's a role for government in protecting the public health, but as
the Economist said Dec. 20, ``Smoking is not like tuberculosis or air
pollution or drunken driving; it is not, strictly speaking, a public-health
or public-safety problem at all. Rather, like motorcycling or overeating or
skiing, it is a private health problem.''

In his superb new book ``For Your Own Good,'' Jacob Sullum writes: ``The
true nature of the crusade for a smoke-free society is an attempt by one
group of people to impose their tastes and preferences on another.'' No
matter what Congress decides, he writes, the crusade will continue
``because it is aimed at the behavior of individuals, not the behavior of
corporations.''

Exactly. I have no sympathy for the companies. First they lied; now they're
acting in a cowardly fashion. Rather than standing up for the principle of
individual choice and responsibility, they are leaping to pay a finite
penalty, however huge, so they can boost their languishing stock prices.

Meanwhile, the anti-smoking hysteria is laying waste to basic protections
and principles. For example, juries for decades denied claims against
tobacco companies, since smokers knew what they were doing was risky. So
the states, led by Florida, simply changed the rules.

``In a stroke,'' writes Sullum, ``the (Florida) law eliminated the
industry's most effective defenses. The state did not have to prove that a
single case of illness was actually caused by a defendant's product, and
the tobacco companies could not point out that people voluntarily choose to
smoke.'' Maryland is pushing similar changes.

But where's the outrage? Every business in America is threatened by the
precedent of the tobacco settlement. Every individual is threatened, too,
as the liberal ideals on which this country was founded -- freedom of
choice, personal accountability, limited government -- are trampled in a
stampede by some to get others to behave the way they want.

Let's kill the settlement and end the hysteria now.

James K. Glassman is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He
wrote this article for the Washington Post.