Author: JANET WISCOMBE

Ashes to Ashes

Suppose America Just Said No to TobaccoWhat Then? Here's a Hypothetical
Look at the Probable Impact on Everyone and Everything From Smokers and
Farmers to Tax Coffers and the Tobacco Companies Themselves.

Linda Nuckolls, a likable middleaged woman who looks her age,
unapologetically lights a generic cigarette. From her perch on a bar stool
at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, she contemplates the awful scenario: a
nation without tobacco.

The smile fades. A look of horror pierces the smoky blue cloud. "Ugly," she
surmises. "It would be real ugly. It would be war between the smokers and
the 'You're Bad and I'm Good' people. There would be a huge underworld.
There would be fighting in the streets."

The most massive legal settlement in the nation's history has concluded,
for now. Big Tobacco has been punished, though some say not enough. As
Congress debates the $368.5billion payout and physicians and attorneys
general inhale the prestige, edgy tobaccophiles ponder their fate and slink
back to their endangered hiding places for a smoke.

But wait. What if there weren't any tobacco at all? Poof. Gone. Finis. What
would a world without tobacco look like?

About 400 miles up the coast, in San Francisco, Stanton Glantz is not
smoking. He dwells in the smokefree chambers of California politics and
health. He is one of the nation's most outspoken antismoking crusaders and
the state's recently appointed tobacco czar. It's his job to advise the
Department of Health Services how to spend its $100 million annual budget
for antitobacco ads, education and research.

"Smoking will eventually become a private, socially unsanctioned behavior,
involving only a few sleazy people," he declares.

Others, even those who have been allies in the raging tobacco wars,
visualize very different consequences.

Walker Merryman, tobacco lobbyist: "A million jobs and billions of dollars
would be lost."

Kenneth Warner, medical economist: "We can live handsomely without tobacco."

Lester Breslow, publichealth professor: "There would be a considerable,
measurable increase in longevity."

Peter Berger, sociologist: "The antismoking thing is a Protestant business."

William McCarthy, psychologist: "People would eat more fruit."

Mark Twain, writer: "If I cannot smoke in heaven, then I shall not go."
* * *
To visualize a nation in which tobacco is banned, a concept no one is
seriously advancingincluding former U.S. Surgeon Generals David Kessler
and C. Everett Koopone must begin in the rural South, where tobacco is
the gilded leaf, nature's most prodigious gift.

North Carolina produces 52% of all domestically grown tobacco. Keith
Beavers raises cattle and corn, soybeans and sweet potatoes on his
1,000acre spread in Mount Olive. But tobacco is the cash cow, the crop
that delivers the farm's most stable profits. Here in Duplin County, the
ubiquitous weed has built the libraries, the parks, the operas, the
museums, the schools, the churches. For five generations, members of the
Beavers family have planted and harvested tobacco.

"Tobacco is my lifeblood," Beavers says. "Always has been. Always will be."
If tobacco were suddenly outlawed, he predicts many farmers in the South
would be wiped out. But not him. "It would be a matter of making a few
adjustments," he says. "I'd just grow it for export."

In California, where about 18% of the adult population smokes, it's easy to
visualize a tobaccofree society (in Davis, you can be arrested for smoking
in outdoor restaurants). But in the Southeast, hundreds of communities
haven't gotten around to banning smoking in elevators. No surprise, then,
that Beavers finds the concept of a nation without tobacco preposterous and
unfathomable.

But the elder of his two daughters, Jeanette Creech, does not. She broke
with tradition and left the family tobacco fields for a smokefree office.
Now 30, she works for the North Carolina Farm Credit Assn., which provides
financing to farmers. Creech senses that the region's thrall with tobacco
may be at an end. "I'd say something serious is going to happen by the time
I'm 50," she says. "I don't know if it's going to happen in five years or
20 years, but I definitely see change."

Adds Larry Wooten, a spokesman for the North Carolina Farm Bureau, "A
country without tobacco is not a pretty thought. It's the lawyers who would
gain. It's the farmers and retail merchants who would be devastated."

As politicians and lawyers ponder payoffs of multibilliondollar
settlements, Don Richardson is talking to tobacco farmers about
diversifying into crops like cabbage and tomatoes. The director of the
Agricultural Experiment Station at the University of Tennessee, Richardson
works with agronomists and food scientists to help farmers make a better
living. Small tobacco farmers, many of whom have already been gobbled up by
larger growers, are learning new ways of growing vegetables and fruits, new
methods of pest control and new harvest technology. There are plenty of
ways for farmers to make a living besides growing tobacco, Richardson
insists. "It's already happening."
* * *
Despite incendiary political wars and conclusive evidence that smoking
kills, the tobacco business still generates astonishing profits. Philip
Morris, maker of about half of all cigarettes sold in the United States,
earned $6.3 billion in profits last year, the third most profitable
business in the country after Exxon and General Electric. (The figure
includes nontobacco Philip Morris products such as Miracle Whip, Velveeta
cheese, KoolAid and Miller beer.) PM's tobacco division last year took in
$12.5 billion in the United States; if its sales were broken out, the
Marlboro brand alone would rank as about the 100thbiggest corporation in
the country.

In the United States, about 25% of the adult population smokes, nearly half
as many as in the 1950s. That's still 50 million people, more than voted
for President Clinton in the last election. And the number of smokers is
increasing dramatically in developing countries in South America, Asia and
Eastern Europe. While China is the largest tobacco grower, producing 40% of
the world's supply, the top three multinational companiesPhilip Morris,
R.J. Reynolds and British American Tobaccoaccount for a full third of the
5.5 trillion cigarettes sold annually worldwide. Regardless of what happens
in Washington, the universal desire for the prized American leaf persists
from the cafes of Copenhagen to the temples of Angkor Wat.

Nevertheless, the Tobacco Institute, the industry's key lobbyist, estimates
that California would lose 17,000 jobs directly, 12,000 indirectly, if
tobacco were banned; nationally there would be 662,000 fewer jobs and $15
billion less in paychecks.

Kenneth Warner, an economist at the University of Michigan who is
considered the country's most astute public health researcher, has devoted
a considerable chunk of his career to analyzing how the absence of tobacco
would affect the nation's economy. His conclusion: "I'd bet my bottom
dollar that if tobacco consumption declines, it will actually increase
employment in at least 40 of the 50 states." If spending was reallocated
from tobacco purchases to other items, most states would gain jobs because
tobacco dollars would remain within the local state economy. The
economichardship issue is genuine for some states in the South, Warner
says, but has been grotesquely exaggerated by the tobacco industry. The
industry, he argues, has been largely responsible for the drop in
employment in tobaccorelated fields because of mechanization and the
buying of tobacco overseas. "Health, not money, motivates the call for a
tobaccofree society," Warner says, adding that cigarette smoking causes
more premature deaths than those from AIDS, cocaine, heroin and alcohol
abuse, fire, automobile accidents, homicide and suicide combined.
Ultimately, the economic repercussions of a tobaccofree society are
neither as dire as the tobacco industry implies nor as "profitable" as some
members of the antitobacco community believe. If there were a ban, lost
jobs would be made up elsewhere in the economy. "The tobacco industry
implies that if there were a prohibition, tobacco money would disappear,"
Warner says. "What everyone fails to mention is that the money would be
spent on other things."

It's the kind of conclusion that angers and confuses those dependent on
tobacco money. The tobaccowithdrawal industrythose who make nicotine
patches and gum, for examplewould eventually be sunk. Other possible
losers would be magazines like Rolling Stone and Details, which rely
heavily on cigarette ads for income, and retail stores that sell tobacco
products.

Without cigarettes, chewing tobacco, cigars and pipe tobacco, the
neighborhood 7Eleven would be a markedly different place. To say that
convenience stores aren't dependent on tobacco is like saying smoking
doesn't tar the teeth or blacken the lungs. For sheer volume of tobacco
sales, the minimart is king. Cigarettes account for onequarter of
merchandise sales at the nation's 95,000 convenience stores, the National
Assn. of Convenience Stores estimates. But last year, for the first time,
income from cigarette sales in convenience stores declined, partly because
small, lowcost tobacco shops like Cigarettes Cheaper! are growing like,
well, weeds. Since its first store opened in California in October 1994,
the chain has sprouted into a $250millionayear bonanza, with 393
branches in eight states.

Convenience stores are by no means frozen in their tracks waiting for the
hatchet to fall. Millions of Americans may have quit smoking, but their
addiction to fast food appears insatiable. "Americans shop for lunch and
dinner," points out Lindsay Hutter of the convenience store association.
"They don't shop for food anymore. We are not walking away from the tobacco
customer. But we have to reach out to new consumer bases."
* * *
The beautiful blond in the long, vampy black satin dress puffs on a
cigarette and inhales with slow, rapturous sensuality. A dapper gentleman,
brandy snifter in one hand, cigar in the other, holds court at an
oakpaneled bar, reeking confidence and charm.

The scenes are increasingly common. Entire Web sites, magazines,
newsletters and videos devoted to the pleasures and erotic delights of
smoking are flourishing. As the mainstream smokes less, smoking is entering
a nether realm of cultural seduction.

Social scientists couldn't be less surprised. Withhold tobacco and people
would lust for cigarettes like never before. Smokeasies would thrive.

"The more tobacco is a taboo, the more it is eroticized," says Richard
Klein, a professor of Romance studies at Cornell University and author of
"Cigarettes Are Sublime." He argues that the more you interdict cigarettes,
the more people will enjoy the danger of transgressingparticularly young
people (smoking has increased among high school students for the past five
years). Before it is possible to visualize a smokefree society or even
help smokers quit, Klein says, we should pay attention to why people smoke
in the first place. For all their lethal properties, cigarettes also
mitigate anxiety, cut appetite, promote camaraderie and provide
consolation. "The most precious quality is the beauty they bring," says
Klein, who wrote his ode to cigarettes as a way of quitting, which he did.
"Fire, cinder and smoke have always struck people as powerfully beautiful."

Adds Peter Berger, a sociologist at Boston University: "In France there was
an attempt to regulate smoking and the French people said, 'Go to hell.'
France is an individualist culture. We think we are, but we aren't. This is
a conformist culture. The antismoking thing is related to the American
puritan antipleasure ethos."

For many, particularly health advocates, it's enough to say that without
tobacco everyone would be happier and healthier. End of story. But humans
are complex creatures, and smoking is a complex social behavior. In his
book, Klein raises the question: If tobacco were banished, would anything
be lost? Smoking is a pleasure that is democratic, popular and universal,
he says. "There is nowhere in the world where people do not smoke if they
are allowed to." A nation without tobacco might indeed become a more
repressed, intolerant and regimented place, Klein says. No society has
succeeded in getting along without smoking tobacco, he adds, which suggests
that the practice will outlive the current wave of intolerance. "Without
tobacco, people will seek substitutes. Maybe we'll get back to hemp."

Norman Sharp, president of the Cigar Assn. of America, a tobacco industry
trade group, says smoking is one of the great pleasures of living. A cigar
after a fine meal creates a bond, a fellowship between men and women.
Without tobacco, people would be more uptightand selfish. The popularity
of cigars is, in part, an antidote to the culture's competitiveness and
aggression, its obsession with youth and health, with living right, eating
right, exercising right, he says. "In this country, the first crime is
getting old. The second is to die. The antitobacco people are puritans
searching for the fountain of youth."

From his crystalline, tobaccofree office at the Pritikin Longevity Center
in Santa Monica, health psychologist William McCarthy is surrounded by an
exclusive world of fitness, where people shell out $7,000 for a twoweek
health camp. Apart from citing the obvious physical benefits, McCarthy can
come up with plenty of examples of how society would benefit without
tobacco. Among them: cleaner walls and ceilings, fewer holes in clothes,
fewer fires, lower insurance rates, less smoker guilt, "a better olfactory
environment."

"People who smoke smell," he says flatly.

McCarthy is a health nut who will probably live to be 120. He predicts the
day will come when the government will play a larger role in public health,
urging better diets and more exercise, and "the huge societal importance of
understanding the dangers of too much salt and fat." He knows there are
those who fear governmental regulations on tobacco could be just the
beginning. Next could come a crackdown on caffeine, alcohol, even potato
chips. "There's some truth to the fear," he says. It's the kind of
statement that makes tobacco lobbyist Walker Merryman go ballistic. "These
are the people I call society's shower adjusters. If you didn't lock your
bathroom door, they would be in there setting the temperature of your bath
water because they know what's best for you. The connotations are
frightening."
* * *
Entire careers in medicine and health care are devoted to the impact of
tobaccofrom the instructor who teaches the smokecessation class to the
doctor who treats emphysema, the bureaucrat who doles out grants to the
researcher who studies the relationship between teenagers and Joe Camel.

An estimated 420,000 American smokers die prematurely every year from
smoking. The World Health Organization reports the global figure is 3
million. Dorothy Rice, an economist at UC San Francisco and a pioneer in
the study of the economic impact of smoking, says the direct cost of
smoking in Californiafor physician services, medications, hospital and
nursing home expendituresis $3.6 billion a year. Add the indirect costs,
largely from lost productivity in the workplace due to smokingrelated
illnesses, and the total is $10 billion. Nationally, Rice says, smokers
cost the country $50 billion a year in direct costs.

Yet others argue that smokers are an economic boon. Since they die
prematurely, they aren't around long enough to collect retirement benefits
or linger in nursing homes. Stanford University tobacco researcher John
Shoven, now dean of humanities and sciences, estimates that male smokers
lose about $40,000 and female smokers $20,000 in future Social Security
benefits, and he disputes research that claims smokers are such an enormous
drain on the economy. If people were healthier and lived longer, major
adjustments would have to be made to Social Security, he says. "People
would simply have to work longer."

Ruth Roemer, a UCLA professor who specializes in laws relating to public
health, studies the impact of smoking on health worldwide. In a report she
conducted for the World Health Organization on international substance
abuse and tobacco control legislation, Roemer argues for an international
treaty to control tobacco"the largest single cause of preventable,
premature death and disease." By the year 2025, she says, 10 million people
will die each year from smokingparticularly in developing countries where
tobacco companies are concentrating their attention. "A fierce tobacco
epidemic is taking place all over the world," Roemer says. "The problem is
staggering." If poor countries were freed from addressing smokingrelated
illnesses, she adds, they could address other urgent personal and
environmental health issues ranging from childhood disease to sanitation
and pollution. Further, if families were not spending money on tobacco,
they would have more money for food.

Lester Breslow, a professor and dean emeritus at the UCLA School of Public
Health and leading antismoking advocate, predicts that without tobacco
there would be a shift in the kinds of diseases doctors treat and a
subsequent shift in the medical specialties doctors pursue. If people live
longer and healthier lives, Breslow says, there'd probably be more need,
say, for gerontologists. The medical establishment would have far fewer
patients. More attention could be paid to maintaining health throughout a
person's life, into and through old age. "It would bring the population
closer to whatever the human life span really is," says the 82yearold
physician. "A mouse lives about two years. An elephant, 80. If there's no
accident or disease, the human life span is probably between 85 and 100."

Dr. Michael Steinberg, an oncologist at the Santa Monica Cancer Treatment
Center, isn't planning any career moves. "Cancer is a disease of aging, as
well as carcinogens," he says. In the past 40 years, he points out, the
availability of pap smears has significantly decreased the number of
advanced cervical cancer cases. On the other hand, more women are now being
treated for breast cancer because they are living longer with the disease.
What is certain, Steinberg says, is that in a tobaccofree society there
would be much less illness and much better health. It wouldn't happen
overnight. When smokers quit, health risks associated with smoking
gradually decline. After seven years, the risks drop dramatically but don't
completely disappear until many years later.

Smokers often say halfjokingly that without tobacco, they might be
healthier physically but basket cases emotionally. Enoch Ludlow, spokesman
for FORCES (Fight Ordinances and Restrictions to Control and Eliminate
Smoking), says Americans already are stressed to the max. "People don't
hang out and talk anymore. They drive like maniacs," Ludlow says. "Without
tobacco, things would be worse than they already are. The decline in
civility is directly related to the decline in smoking."

Indeed, the medicinal value of nicotine has been well known to physicians
and religious leaders for centuries, says Murray Jarvik, a psychiatrist at
the UCLA School of Medicine and inventor of the nicotine patch. Nicotine,
he says, is probably used as a way of selfmedicating. He cites a
University of Colorado School of Medicine study that found that people with
mental illnesses were much more likely to smoke than the general
population, and that from 70% to 90% of schizophrenics smoke. Without
tobacco, Jarvik predicts, mentally ill and depressed people might worsen
and seek something else to modulate their mood: "Maybe there would be more
antidepressant drug use."

Adds the Pritikin center's William McCarthy, "Without tobacco, suicide
rates would go up."

Jarvik notes that one of the main virtues of nicotine is that it makes
people feel good, a fact nonsmokers and members of the publichealth
community tend to discount. The notion that a drug might be used for
pleasure is anathema to many in our society, Jarvik says. "If an average
person finds a drug that will make him happier, brighter, thinner and
richer, it would be hard to resist even if his doctor would not prescribe
it," he says. "Nicotine might be just such a drug."
* * *
There is no sector of society more hooked on tobacco than the government.
Tobacco is America's most profitable cash crop, one of its most popular
exports, a source of huge tax revenues and the American politician's most
generous benefactor.

At the state level, tax revenues on tobacco are manna from heaven.
Americans pay an average 34 cents in state tax every time they buy a pack
of cigarettes, the product that constitutes 93% of tobacco sales.
Washington state imposes the highest tax82.5 cents a packVirginia the
least at 2.5 cents a pack, but it allows cities and towns to levy their own
taxes. Californians pay 37 cents a pack. When levies on other tobacco
products such as cigars, chewing tobacco, pipe tobacco and snuff are added,
smokers have contributed $646 million so far this year to California's
coffers. (Taxes on alcohol reaped $264 million.) Without tobacco tax
revenues, the state would have a lot less money to spend on state services
ranging from housing prisoners to educating children, says Sean Walsh, Gov.
Pete Wilson's spokesman.

Walsh is reluctant to speculate how California, which grows no tobacco,
would fare economically without it. "The question is complex, to put it
mildly," he says. Susanne HildebrandZanki is less equivocal. "California
would be vastly better off," she maintains. "The net benefits would far
outweigh what we'd give up in taxes." HildebrandZanki is head of the
Tobacco Related Disease Research Program at the University of California
system, which decides which researchers at private and public California
institutions get funding to study the health and economic tolls of tobacco.
The state's budget for tobacco research programs has fluctuated wildly
since Gov. Pete Wilson began diverting tobacco tax money to other state
programs. HildebrandZanki's budget, for example, has plummeted from $25
million to $4 million. In any event, she says, "from the very beginning, we
realized that if the program was successful, we would be out of a job."

Patrick Reynolds, grandson of tobacco tycoon R.J. Reynolds, broke rank with
his family and testified in 1986 against the tobacco industry before a
congressional committee. He now devotes most of his energies to his Beverly
Hillsbased Foundation for a Smokefree America. Political reform would be
much more likely, Reynolds says, without the "shameful, filthy alliance Big
Tobacco has with politicians." Though he doesn't advocate a tobacco ban, he
believes a lot of smokers might actually like to see cigarettes snuffed
out; it would force them to quit. Referring to the toll of tobaccorelated
deaths worldwide, he says: "It's the greatest crime of the 20th century, by
far."
* * *
In the United States, tobacco has created unfiltered chasms between people.
Even if it were banished, no one close to the bruising debate suggests it
would vanish. With cigarettes on the verge of becoming a regulated drug,
they could eventually become so nontoxic and respectable they'd just
disappear, or so hot they'd be smuggled in from as far as Brazil and
Zimbabwe. Smoking would become all the more alluring, says the Tobacco
Institute's Merryman, who compares the antismoking zealots of today with
"the pursedlipped moralists" from the turn of the last century, the
architects of Prohibition. Then, as now, there was a freefloating social
intolerance, a suspicion fostered by religious leaders that pleasure is
immoral and the world a scary place. "If there wasn't any tobacco, there
would be no end to the social engineering," Merryman says. "It would do
great damage to the entire notion of what freedom means. Where do you draw
the line?"

While President Clinton and Congress consider landmark tobacco legislation
in the coming months, Denny Manning will be selling a full line of tobacco
products at Cigarettes Cheaper! in Long Beach, a job that pays $6 an hour.

Manning is 50. He says smoking is the only vice he's got left. He's a
loquacious fellow who makes the customers stopping by the smokefriendly
island feel a little less dysfunctional. A big, ugly ashtray beside the
cash register overflows with butts; a 6'5" Marlboro Man lights a cigarette
from a display sign near the doorway.

Manning doesn't pay much attention to national tobacco talk. He doesn't
know whom to believe anymore. He does wish people on both sides of the
tobacco war would lighten, if not light, up. From his spot behind the
counter, he takes a long drag from a Marlboro and greets a regular customer
as if he were a brother from the trenches. Then he issues this warning from
behind a haze of smoke: "Drive careful, young man. There's maniacs out
there."

Janet Wiscombe, a Long Beachbased Writer and Former Smoker, Is a Frequent
Contributor to The Times

Copyright Los Angeles Times