I'll shed no tears for fate of Joe Camel
| Friday, Jun 26 2009 09:35 AM
Last Updated Friday, Jun 26 2009 09:35 AM
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The president and I have a few things in common: a vastly underappreciated game of basketball (long abandoned, in my case), a wife who looks capable of winning arm-wrestling matches (and has, in my wife's case -- just not, ahem, against me), and a history with tobacco we'd both like to forget.
Barack Obama's issues with coffin nails are well documented. He's the country's most prominent anti-smoking smoker, so bent on permanently mashing our collective butts into the ashtray of national wellness that barely five months into his presidency he has placed the regulatory task of managing tobacco into the hands of the federal Food and Drug Administration. And yet he admits to lighting up now and then -- a blatantly broken campaign promise, if you want to be picky. But truth be known, the cigarette-sneaking promise-breakers of this country probably number in the millions.
Don't tell my children, but I smoked cigarettes in my early 20s, back when I was invincible. Rare was occasion when I smoked more than three or four in a day, though, which is probably why I don't remember quitting being all that difficult. What's the problem, Barry? I know, I know: I didn't fall deep enough into that abyss for addiction to truly take hold. But I puffed long enough to comprehend how the stuff can kill a person.
And cigarettes kill very effectively -- an estimated 400,000 people a year in the U.S., plus 50,000 more from second-hand smoke.
With time, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which the president signed into law last week, ought to cut into those numbers. The law will force tobacco companies into unprecedented openness about the ingredients in their products, and it will aggressively constrain their power to hook children with glamour- or tough-guy marketing, appealing-sounding flavors and all-but-meaningless terms that falsely conjure benign effects, like "light" and "low tar." Scams, all of them.
The government, through the FDA, will have some control over the amount of nicotine cigarettes can deliver -- a long overdue regulatory power, given the addictiveness of the drug. If you've ever known someone who was utterly powerless to stop smoking, even when the only clear alternative was death, you grasp the way this drug can control lives. For me, it was my mother-in-law, who died a decade ago from emphysema (or possibly lung cancer -- she had them both and we never bothered to find out which deserved the immediate blame). Then there was a step-cousin, struck down by the second-hand smoke of a pack-a-day husband who was haunted ever after by the irony of his own relative health and her absolute guiltlessness. I've got more examples, but you've got plenty of your own.
As you might gather, I'm not especially Libertarian on the issue. Granting tobacco companies the power to enslave customers with the tools of addiction -- behavioral, through advertising, and physical, with nicotine -- does not suggest any worthwhile Libertarian ideal.
In fact, it's just the opposite. The right to not be "put upon" should be just as respected as the right to "put." But we live in a world )and that includes even tobacco-hostile California) that defaults on this matter of "freedom" toward the smoker, rather than the poor sucker trying to breath over at the next cafe patio table.
No matter what you might think about Obama's health care efforts, it's tough to deny one overarching philosophy: A wellness strategy will ultimately deliver better results than the reactive, ultra-expensive fix-'em-when-they-start-bleeding approach we have now. The government's move to regulate tobacco products like the drugs they are is an important step in that direction.
Obama's not going to take your cigarettes, but he eventually might cause you to want them a little less urgently. Complain about ever-expanding federal government, if that's the way you feel about it, but don't confuse that issue with this. Celebrate the fact that we're finally treating tobacco companies with all the apprehension, fear and mistrust they so richly deserve.
E-mail Robert Price at rprice@bakersfield.com. Also: www.stubblebuzz.com and twitter.com/stubblebuzz.
