Logic: Up in Anti-Smoke

By George Will Copyright 1998 New York Post July 30, 1998

BEFORE the tobacco bill was blown to rags and atoms by its supporters' overreaching, they substituted reiteration for reasoning. But, then, for years now the debate about smoking has been distorted by vehement people who rarely suffer even temporary lapses into logic.

A new reason for skepticism about the evidence and motives of the anti-tobacco crusaders comes in a ruling by a federal judge in North Carolina concerning a 1993 report by the Environmental Protection Agency. EPA said second-hand smoke is a Class A carcinogen that causes 3,000 lung cancer deaths per year. The judge said:

"EPA publicly committed to a conclusion before research had begun; excluded industry by violating the (1986 Radon Gas and Indoor Air Quality Research) Act's procedural requirements; adjusted established procedure and scientific norms to validate the Agency's public conclusion; and aggressively utilized the Act's authority to disseminate findings to establish a de facto regulatory scheme intended to restrict Plaintiffs' products and to influence public opinion."

The judge charges EPA not just with bad science but with bad faith - with having "cherry-picked its data." Granted, this is just one judge's opinion; EPA demurs; the litigation, already five years old, will churn on. Still, what disinterested person considers the judge's conclusions implausible?

EPA's report came in 1993, when the infant Clinton administration was preparing to micromanage the nation's health, and hence its behavior. Furthermore, do not all bureaucracies tend to try to maximize their missions? EPA's mission is to reduce environmental hazards. What kind of people are apt to be attracted to work in EPA? Those prone to acute anxieties about hazards. Is an agency apt to get increased appropriations and media attention by moderate assessments of hazards? What is the evidentiary value of the EPA defenders' assertion, in response to the judge, that in California (where smoking has been banned even in bars) the state EPA agrees that second-hand smoke is a serious carcinogen?

The anti-tobacco crusade was a money grab by government which, had the grab succeeded, would have acquired a dependence on a continuous high level of smoking to fund programs paid for by exactions from a legal industry selling a legal product to free people making foolish choices. The crusade's rationale was three-fold: second-hand smoke is deadly to nonsmokers; people start smoking because they, poor things, are putty in the hands of advertisers; smokers cannot stop because nicotine is too addictive.

The last rationale is inconvenienced by the fact that there are almost as many American ex-smokers as smokers. The assertion of the irresistible power of advertising is so condescending toward the supposedly malleable masses (notice, the people who assert the power of advertising never include themselves among the susceptible), the anti-tobacco crusade had to become a children's crusade.

Hence the reiterated assertion that almost as many 6-year-olds - 90 percent of them - recognize Joe Camel as recognize Mickey Mouse. This assertion, akin to EPA's "science," was based entirely on interviews with 23 Atlanta preschoolers. There has been no demonstration that advertising by tobacco brands increases tobacco consumption (rather than particular brands' market shares).

One mechanism of the money grab was to be a tax increase of up to $1.50 per pack. However, John E. Calfee of The American Enterprise Institute, writing in The Weekly Standard, notes that in the late 1970s, when teen-age smoking declined nearly one-third, cigarette prices were declining about 15 percent. Given that teen-age smokers smoke an average of only eight cigarettes a day, adding even a dime per smoke ($2 per pack) would not deter them.

The 40 percent decline in smoking between 1975 and 1993 coincided with a public health campaign emphasizing individual responsibility for choices. Then came the Clinton administration, and the ascendancy of victimology: Wicked corporations preying upon helpless individuals are responsible for individuals' behavior. Calfee says per capita cigarette consumption has barely declined since 1993.

Also in The Weekly Standard, Dennis Prager, a theologian and talk-show host, notes that the full apparatus of the modern state has been mobilized for "the largest public relations campaign in history teaching Americans this: If you smoke, you are in no way responsible for what happens to you. You are entirely a victim."

This assault on the idea of personal responsibility, Prager writes, further pollutes "a country that regularly teaches its citizens to blame others - government, ads, parents, schools, movies, genes, sugar, tobacco, alcohol, sexism, racism - for their poor decisions and problems." This assault, a result of the politics produced by a culture of irresponsibility, is an emblematic fruit of Clintonism.

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