Authors: Richard Kluger
BY THE
closing years of the twentieth century, the nonsmoking majority of Americans was wasting little sympathy on the 25 to 30 percent of their countrymen who continued to puff away, even as the Centers for Disease Control were reporting that the habit stole twelve years of life from the average smoker taken by a tobacco-caused illness. Victims of smoking had been told, and told repeatedly, that their bodies might not withstand the systemic abuse that the indulgence inflicted upon them decade after decade. AIDS sufferers, by contrast, were widely mourned because most of them had not known of the peril when they contracted the disease, were stricken when young, and died long before their time.
If Rose Cipollone had had a choice, as the cigarette manufacturers argued, in exposing herself to the well-known potential hazards of smoking, the industry could not claim as much for those assaulted by other people’s smoke. However diluted it might be compared with active smoking and however inconclusive the scientific data thus far on its effects, secondhand smoke was coming to be widely viewed as an unacceptably antisocial imposition. Smokers almost everywhere were being reprimanded, restricted, and reviled as environmental polluters—assailants of innocent bystanders. A 1987 AMA survey found that 87 percent of nonsmokers and nearly half of smokers themselves believed that the former had the right to a smoke-free environment, even as smokers had the right to keep jeopardizing their own health in private. A poll that same year by the Centers for Disease Control showed that 75 percent of the respondents believed that environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) was harmful
to nonsmokers, and 70 percent said they were annoyed by other people’s smoke. And a Gallup poll disclosed that 84 percent of the adult population favored either separate smoking sections or a total ban on smoking in public areas; even two years earlier, according to a Gallup survey, 87 percent wanted smokers segregated at work sites—and four out of five smokers, probably guilt-ridden as much over the damage they might be doing to themselves as over what they might be inflicting on others, concurred. A U.S. government survey in 1987 found that 77 percent of smokers said they would like to quit—up from 66 percent a decade earlier.
“Human behavior responds to context,” remarked psychologist Ellen Gritz, a leading editor of the Surgeon General’s reports during the 1980s, and the social context by that decade’s end had turned smoking into deviant conduct. Smokers found themselves more and more under assault everywhere they turned—by their loved ones, their friends, their doctors, their employers and workmates, the schools and churches in their communities, the media, and the government. They were suddenly being interfered with anyplace they went outside their homes—on almost all forms of public transportation on their way to work, at the workplace itself, whenever they dined out or shopped, wherever they went for cultural stimulation, and even at sporting events in the open air.
Although the federal government, run by deregulators during the dozen years of the Reagan and Bush administrations, mostly kept its hands off the cigarette makers, state and local governments were now launching a broad-ranged assault on smoking. By 1989, after a decade-long battle with tobacco interests whose position was championed by conservative Republican lawmakers, the New York state legislature became the eleventh in the nation to pass a comprehensive clean air and smoking control act. Among the strongest in the U.S., the law confined smoking to set-aside areas in offices, restaurants, theaters, and transportation facilities and banned it in schools, hospitals, many retail stores, and indoor sports arenas. That same year, as a further disincentive to smoking, thirteen states raised their excise tax on cigarette sales.
The prime arena for the smoking control movement was the workplace. Here politicians were far more hesitant to tread, since for the most part it was private property, but by the end of the 1980s about half of all U.S. companies had established some sort of smoking rules on their premises. The old reasons, mostly to guard against fire and protect sensitive equipment, were now supplemented by health considerations, as more and more firms contemplated a total ban on smoking. One of the first large companies to take that step—Boeing, the Seattle aircraft manufacturer—phased in the prohibition for its 85,000 workers over several years after its chief executive remarked, “When we provide a better operating atmosphere for our high-tech machinery than for the people who operate [it], then it’s time to reassess policies.” Outright bans were believed to have the dual advantage of cutting maintenance and insurance
costs and improving productivity, since smokers in offices with set-aside areas were often found to be preoccupied by thoughts of their next cigarette break. Total bans ran into resistance, though, from unions and employee groups who objected to the loss of an activity they had long taken for granted. More enlightened companies seeking a smoke-free work environment offered smokers counseling and cessation programs. Pacific Northwest Bell, for example, 4,000 of whose 15,000 employees were smokers, found that 7.5 percent of them were off tobacco six months after availing themselves of the company-funded quitting clinics. Perhaps equally encouraging, smokers who continued the habit had cut their daily consumption from twenty-three cigarettes to seventeen.
This apparent fringe benefit was one of the chief, if rarely announced, purposes of the widening crusade against ETS. As the 1989 Surgeon General’s report acknowledged, smoking restrictions, while serving to reduce the health risks for those involuntarily exposed, “may have the side effect of discouraging tobacco use by reducing opportunities to smoke and changing public attitudes about the social acceptability of smoking.” Former OSH veteran officer Donald Shopland, by then coordinating smoking intervention programs for the National Cancer Institute, noted that one of the primary benefits of the new laws was to provide “a more supportive environment for people trying to quit.” ASH’s founder, John Banzhaf, added that if you were a smoker no longer surrounded by other smokers in a restricted workplace, “you’re not getting visual and oral cues to smoke,” and if every time you craved a cigarette, you had to get up, possibly ask permission, and take an inconvenient trek to a designated smoking area, you began to harbor serious doubts about the pleasures of your dependency.
For many smokers who did not want to quit, the social pressures to do so went well beyond inconvenience and discouragement. A reporter for the Long Island newspaper
Newsday
, part of a trade in which serious dragging on a cigarette was long a badge of hard-boiled grace under pressure, summed up the sentiment of all besieged smokers when the practice was banned in his city room: “This is a process of humiliation.” Throughout the country smokers felt the change. At social gatherings they slipped out onto balconies or into backyards to indulge rather than face possible abuse for befouling the indoor air. At restaurants, even when obeying the separate seating rules, they hid their cigarettes under the table and waved away the smoke to avoid the dirty looks of smoke-sensitive patrons. And at offices and plants, those desperate for a cigarette were disappearing into hallways, stairwells, and rest rooms, hovering outside building entrances, even hunching against outside walls to avoid the raw elements, and if allowed to indulge in a ghettoized quadrant within the cafeteria, some gulped down two or three cigarettes’ worth of smoke within the time normally allotted for one.
The Wall Street Journal
reported that some executives
were finding their path to career advancement impeded by their smoking affliction, which their superiors inclined to view as a symptom of deficient self-control or weak character. But at all levels, smokers sensed the growing animosity. Said one employee at a New York publishing company devoted to medical journals: “People make you feel like you’ve got some filthy habit.”
This perception was reinforced by a television commercial produced by the New York agency of Saatchi & Saatchi for Northwest Airlines. It showed a cabinful of passengers standing and cheering the voice-over announcement that the airline had gone entirely smoke-free. For this antic presentation, the admaker was promptly fired by another of its accounts, RJR Nabisco, even though the agency had been handling only food products for the big cigarette maker. Such vengeful acts, however, could not change the prime sociological fact of cigarette marketing a century after Buck Duke had introduced America to the joys of the little smokes: just as peer pressure had once worked to spread the cigarette habit across the land, and then the globe, now it was operating in reverse.
II
FEARFUL
for its livelihood, the tobacco industry counterattacked broadly by declaring smoking to be a civil and human right that the cigarette-haters were out to crush. In institutional advertisements that ignored the health issue, the industry called out for tolerance of their customers’ lifestyle preferences and “individual choice”—a thinly coded pitch to ally smokers with other abused minorities and casting smoking control advocates as bullies, not just busybodies and killjoys. If their foes prevailed, said the Tobacco Institute’s veteran spokesman Walker Merryman, “[w]e end up with a product that’s too expensive to buy, too inconvenient to use, and that you can’t tell anybody about. … [Y]ou might as well call that Prohibition.”
The strategic thrust of the cigarette manufacturers’ counterattack was to present themselves as accommodationists and to campaign for soft “clean indoor air” laws that set aside no-smoking zones in virtually all public places statewide and thus reestablished smoking as socially acceptable. What the smoking control movement was after, of course, was precisely the opposite arrangement: all indoor areas to be declared smoke-free unless otherwise specified. The industry-authored bills in their ideal form added a preemptive feature, whereby the statewide smoking regulations, however tepid, superseded all local measures, thus allowing the tobacco lobbyists to fight one battle at a time in any given state and not to have to scatter their resources combating brushfires in every municipal and county jurisdiction.
An instance of the industry’s strategy at its most effective was the contest
played out in the late ’Eighties in Pennsylvania, where Pittsburgh had led the way in antismoking regulations with a strong law limiting the practice in offices, restaurants, and other public places and requiring employers to provide sizable smoke-free areas. Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Erie, among other cities in the state, adopted versions of the Pittsburgh restrictions. But after the tobacco lobby pressured the legislators, Pennsylvania put on its books a statewide law preempting every municipal antismoking regulation except Pittsburgh’s and obliging only restaurants with seventy-five or more seats to set aside a no-smoking section and employers to set some sort of smoking policy, even if it amounted to minimal restrictions or none whatever. One Pennsylvania Democratic state senator who had fought for nine years for meaningful smoking controls called the industry-backed law “a marshmallow but better than nothing.” More farsighted antismoking advocates saw such compromises as surrender.
Whenever possible, the industry tried to tack on to the state clean indoor air laws—or to push separately for—statutorily guaranteed “smokers’ rights,” intended to prevent infrequent but disturbing instances of discrimination by employers who refused to hire smokers, even if they agreed to abide by company smoking rules while on the job, or fired them if they were discovered to smoke during non-working hours, even in their own homes. Such displays of intolerance, rationalized as economically prudent, provided the tobacco interests with a perfect opportunity to shove aside legitimate concerns about secondhand smoke and to plead instead for justice for victimized smokers. Nearly one-third of the states passed some form of “smokers’ rights” legislation, including New Jersey, where Philip Morris lobbyists wrote the law, which included barring insurance companies from charging higher premiums to smokers. One measure of the shrewdness of this industry tactic was the way it split elements within the smoking control movement. While the New Jersey chapter of the Coalition on Smoking or Health, made up of the three big health voluntaries in that state, and the vigorous GASP organization there strongly opposed the smokers’ rights bill as the legislature was considering it, others in the anti-smoking camp feared that the industry lobbyists might succeed in trapping health advocates by tarring them as biased militants. Over the Advocacy Institute’s electronic internet, for example, John Slade, a professor at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and a leader of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, warned his colleagues:
In conceding this issue to the tobacco industry, we give them what they otherwise have a hard time finding: a credible issue … . Sure, many people, including most news organizations, see their rhetoric as transparently emanating from 120 Park Avenue [Philip Morris’s New York headquarters], but that does not rob the issue of the kernel of truth that we advocate discrimination against
people who smoke simply because they smoke. … Why are we advocating less protection for people addicted to nicotine? Do we imagine that people are not really hooked? … There are important strategic, legal, humane, and public health reasons to shift gears and to advocate job protection for people who are handicapped by nicotine addiction.
Big tobacco did not hesitate to dig into its deep pockets to resist the social tide through the purchase and manipulation of the political process. Although some in the antismoking movement were in awe of the industry’s reputedly adroit lobbying operations, Congressman Henry Waxman’s legislative aide Ripley Forbes, who often crossed swords with the industry’s hired hands, remarked, “There’s no magic in it, it’s a very basic issue—their power and influence starts and ends with their money.”
Just how much money the industry spent in this connection can only be guessed at based on clues provided by the few disclosure rules imposed on the lobbying game. Probably the least of the expenditures were the campaign contributions through political action committees (PACs), intended to assure tobacco lobbyists of a hearing by, if not the votes of, their congressional recipients. While cigarette PACs contributed a reported $2.5 million to congressmen during the 1991–92 term, for the same period Philip Morris alone spent about half that much on its Washington-based federal lobbyists, and the Tobacco Institute, with a headquarters staff of around 75 and an additional 125 contract lobbyists in the states, cost the industry another $5 to $10 million a year. Its lobbying bill in the states, where antismoking forces were proving more active and successful than in Washington, was much higher cumulatively. In California alone during the 1989–90 term of the state legislature, the cigarette companies spent a reported $4 million on campaign gifts and fees to more than two dozen lobbyists working the statehouse in Sacramento. The $600,000 reportedly spent by the industry during the 1993 session of the New York state legislature amounted to more than any other industry or special interest group devoted to political persuasion in Albany. Bulging war chests were also provided to finance fights against challenges deemed critical to the industry, like the $3.3 million spent in 1994 on trying to stave off a tripling of the cigarette tax in Michigan and an estimated $12.5 million the same year in California to win an industry-initiated referendum for a statewide smoking control program that would have overridden all 300 or so local regulations. (The industry lost both fights.)