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We Don’t Need Government to Remind Us that Smoking Kills
National Review ^ | Dec 27, 2017 | George Will

Posted on 12/27/2017 10:22:24 PM PST by Oshkalaboomboom

Pointing out that smoking is dumb and unattractive is more effective.

Preaching morality while practicing cupidity can be tricky, but various American governments have done it for years regarding smoking. This mental contortion now has a new chapter. The four largest American tobacco companies (Altria, R. J. Reynolds, Lorillard, Philip Morris) are, under government compulsion, funding newspaper and television ads to tell — actually, to remind — people that their products are sickening:

“Smoking kills, on average, 1,200 Americans. Every day. More people die every year from smoking than from murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes, and alcohol, combined.” “Cigarette companies intentionally designed cigarettes with enough nicotine to create and sustain addiction.” Etc.

Please. Tell us something everyone hasn’t known for decades. In 1988, the surgeon general declared tobacco addictive. Since 1966, there have been increasingly severe health warnings on cigarette packs. In 1964, the surgeon general declared tobacco carcinogenic. In 1906, a character in an O. Henry story used a common slang phrase: “Say, sport, have you got a coffin nail on you?” In 1604, England’s King James I called smoking “harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs.”

Eight years later, a colony named for him, Jamestown, in a place, Virginia, named for his immediate predecessor (Elizabeth I, “the virgin queen”), became an enriching source of tobacco — until a tobacco farmer named Washington disrupted things. The strange, meandering path of tobacco — a legal commodity that is harmful when used as intended — to the present began in contradictions. They are crowned by this one: Many state governments are addicted to revenue from tobacco taxes. The federal tax on a pack is $1. The lowest state tax is Missouri’s 17 cents; the highest, Connecticut and New York’s $4.35; the average, $1.72. So, many governments have huge stakes in a steady supply of new smokers to replace those killed by smoking.

Hence these governments cannot afford for their anti-smoking efforts to be too successful. Furthermore, if every smoker quit tomorrow, Social Security’s slow-motion crisis would accelerate and many public and private pension systems would be staggered by having to revise downward their actuarial assumptions about the number of persons who will die before collecting many or any benefits.

In 1998, 46 states, in a mutually lucrative collaboration with trial lawyers (some of their $13 billion in fees amounted to tens of thousands of dollars an hour), sued the tobacco companies. The companies agreed to — if they will pardon the expression — cough up $246 billion over many years. The theory, more successful than plausible, was that health care for smoking-related illnesses makes smoking a huge net cost to the states. Actually, smoking might be a net financial gain for government: Cigarettes are the most heavily taxed consumer product and, again, many smokers’ premature deaths limit their receipt of entitlement benefits for the elderly — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, nursing homes, etc.

The lawyers also argued that tobacco is so addictive that quitting requires heroic willpower that few can manage. Even then, however, there were about as many ex-smokers as smokers. In 1845, former president John Quincy Adams wrote, “In my early youth, I was addicted to tobacco.” Its addictiveness was known and surmountable long ago

Much of America’s health-care expenses (from lung cancer, coronary artery disease, AIDS, Type 2 diabetes brought on by obesity, violence, vehicular accidents) result from known-to-be-risky behaviors involving eating, drinking, smoking, driving, and sex. The most cost-efficient thing government does is dispense health information about smoking, cholesterol, automobile seat belts, sunscreen use, etc. This is why only a sixth of adults, compared to nearly half 50 years ago, are smokers.

But the anti-smoking message that government is now coercing from the tobacco companies — Trust us, we are untrustworthy — merely confirms common sense: Filling one’s lungs with smoke from a burning plant is dumb. Smoking is increasingly concentrated among downscale, low-information Americans. (Hence tobacco taxes are regressive.) It has lost the cachet that once made it a marker of sophistication. Ninety percent of smokers begin by age 18 and vanishingly few after 21. So, the way to extinguish smoking is not by belaboring the health issue (smoking is the leading preventable cause of death, it has killed many more than all of America’s war deaths, etc.) but with the sort of broadcast ads California used years ago to cut smoking 17 percent: “I tried it once and I, ah, got all red in the face and I couldn’t inhale and I felt like a jerk and, ah, never tried it again, which is the same as what happened to me with sex.”


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Notice George has nothing to say about Donald Trump. At least he's smart enough to realize how badly he screwed up and seems to be avoiding any more confrontation.
1 posted on 12/27/2017 10:22:25 PM PST by Oshkalaboomboom
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To: Oshkalaboomboom

The “Surgeon General’s Report” was the first post-war experiment to determine if the government could alter widespread human behavior. Others, with various degrees of success — and none of them even remotely constitutional — have followed.


2 posted on 12/27/2017 10:30:36 PM PST by JennysCool
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To: Oshkalaboomboom
Article states...."Smoking is increasingly concentrated among downscale, low-information Americans"......

HAHAHA! So then what would be the drug of choice for the elites! We know they love getting high....

3 posted on 12/27/2017 10:32:04 PM PST by caww (freeen)
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To: Oshkalaboomboom
It has lost the cachet that once made it a marker of sophistication.

If people want to smoke, I have nothing against them for doing so. Well over 50 years ago as a teenager, a girl was interested in me and started hanging around me. She happened to smoke, was 16 years old. So she gets me in a private place with her and says "You can kiss me now!". So I did, and it was the worst experience because I felt like I was licking an ash tray. That was the end of being around her, and I vowed to never let a smoking girl become a girlfriend of mine. The gal I married at a young age is a non-smoker, and I'm happy she never smoked. If young girls are reading this, don't start smoking, is certainly is not sophisticated!

4 posted on 12/27/2017 10:37:52 PM PST by roadcat
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To: Oshkalaboomboom

cripes...the number of people in the U.S. that smoke is down. The % of the population that smokes decreases every year, yet the number of yearly smoking related deaths, 480000 (includes 2nd hand), remains the same for the last 30 years ?


5 posted on 12/27/2017 10:38:51 PM PST by stylin19a (Best.Election.of.All-Times.Ever.In.The.History.Of.Ever)
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To: Oshkalaboomboom
While a bit dated, the following well written article sums it up nicely...

The Phony Tobacco War
6 posted on 12/27/2017 10:46:04 PM PST by SpaceBar
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To: SpaceBar

My mother smoked when she was pregnant and if I get so much as a hangnail I blame it on her. Fortunately, I’ve been extremely healthy all my life. That doesn’t matter, though, I still remind her of how she ruined my life by smoking anyway.


7 posted on 12/27/2017 10:49:52 PM PST by Oshkalaboomboom
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To: Oshkalaboomboom

>> Notice George has nothing to say about Donald Trump.

LOL, yes I did...


8 posted on 12/27/2017 10:58:00 PM PST by Gene Eric (Don't be a statist!)
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To: roadcat

Had a similar experience in college with a gal who smoked and had physical attributes that stirred my hormones. One weekend with her set me on the same path to marry a non-smoker and here we are over 40 years later as children of smokers yet neither of us fell for the “appeal” of tobacco.


9 posted on 12/27/2017 11:00:18 PM PST by T-Bird45 (It feels like the seventies, and it shouldn't.)
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To: roadcat
So she gets me in a private place with her and says "You can kiss me now!

"I'm sorry I ruined your New Year's Eve party, Lieutenant Dan. She tasted like cigarettes."

10 posted on 12/27/2017 11:01:11 PM PST by bagster (Even bad men love their mamas.)
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To: Oshkalaboomboom

Reminds me of a Bob Newhart comedy album cut that I used to hear played on the radio (1950s?). It pretended that phones existed during the time of the Colonies. Sir Walter Raleigh called the King and told him about the great discovery...tobacco, and explained how to set the leaves afire and inhale the smoke; adding that he was sending a shipload back to England.

The Colonists were also harvesting and exporting hemp and I’m betting they were smoking that too!

The do-gooders always have liked to add a “sin” tax on things that don’t like, under the guise of trying to eliminate those things. .....However, the Federal, State and Local governments love those taxes and just continue to raise them.

Oh... BTW... George Will is full of crap!


11 posted on 12/27/2017 11:14:04 PM PST by octex
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To: stylin19a; Oshkalaboomboom
the number of people in the U.S. that smoke is down. The % of the population that smokes decreases every year, yet the number of yearly smoking related deaths, 480000 (includes 2nd hand), remains the same for the last 30 years ?

Here is another interesting fact - obesity rates have risen in tandem, as well as the number of obesity-related deaths.

In fact, I read that obesity takes 13 years off your life, vs 10 years for smoking.

Maybe we'd have been better off not demonizing tobacco?

12 posted on 12/27/2017 11:20:22 PM PST by DoodleBob
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To: Oshkalaboomboom

Adolph Hitler was a nonsmoker and a vegetarian.


13 posted on 12/27/2017 11:26:45 PM PST by CivilWarBrewing (Get off my back for my usage of CAPS, especially you snowflake males! MAN UP!)
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To: stylin19a

(includes 2nd hand)
**********************************
Another long-cited meme like AGW, for which no scientific proof has been presented.

I understand that some people don’t like the smell of tobacco smoke and the fact that it lingers on clothes/furnishings and in autos. That doesn’t mean it kills people; just as AGW doesn’t cause climate changes.


14 posted on 12/27/2017 11:33:47 PM PST by octex
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To: octex

that don’t like

Should be ...THEY don’t like


15 posted on 12/27/2017 11:37:17 PM PST by octex
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To: Oshkalaboomboom

So .. smoking is bad ?


16 posted on 12/27/2017 11:42:11 PM PST by A strike (Television is almost as racist as Madison Ave.)
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To: CivilWarBrewing

Yeah but, at then end of his life he suffered from a life ending hole in his head...


17 posted on 12/27/2017 11:42:41 PM PST by Vendome (I've Gotta Be Me - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH-pk2vZG2M)
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To: Oshkalaboomboom
I blame my Mom for stunting my growth by smoking when she was pregnant with me. I’m only 6’-3” and white. Never tall enough to be an NBA center and earn millions while getting dozens of unknown women pregnant.

Ed

18 posted on 12/27/2017 11:42:52 PM PST by husky ed (FOX NEWS ALERT "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead" THIS HAS BEEN A FOX NEWS ALERT)
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To: Oshkalaboomboom

Does smoking Weed cause Health Issues?

Liberals hate Big Tobacco, but the love Big Weed.

My Mother Smoked like a Chimney and my Father Drank like a Fish. Neither habit killed them. My Mother lived to age 79 and my Father to age 93.

My Brother and I neither drink or smoke.

(Well, I do like a Beer now and then, but I never drink a second one in one sitting.) I’m a cheap date. LOL


19 posted on 12/27/2017 11:52:19 PM PST by Kickass Conservative ( Tweet softly, but carry a big stick.)
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To: Oshkalaboomboom

He didn’t get smart. He’s just off on a personal rant


20 posted on 12/28/2017 1:45:20 AM PST by Nifster (I see puppy dogs in the clouds)
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