A major weapon in the contemporary anti-tobacco movement’s arsenal is ‘health communication,’ often taking the form of publicly-funded advertising campaigns ostensibly aimed at educating the public and thereby allowing people to make more informed and ‘empowered’ choices. At first glance, this might seem like a kinder, gentler alternative to coercive excise taxes and regulation of the tobacco industry. Who could object to providing mere information?
Much anti-tobacco advertising, though, aims more at stigmatizing smokers than informing people of health effects. The public health movement’s objective of informing people of the risks of smoking has already been thoroughly achieved: given the anti-tobacco propaganda we have been exposed to in recent decades, it would be quite impossible for anyone to remain ignorant of these risks. In fact, there seems to be a tendency for both smokers and non-smokers to overestimate the health risks of smoking. When public health experts see well-informed people continue to make the wrong decision – which they define as anything which departs from their own Spartan commitment to maximizing lifespan – they take this as evidence of a need for more aggressive action.
Tobacco control advocates are often quite candid about their intentions. The California Department of Health Services in 1998 described its tobacco control strategy as an attempt ‘to push tobacco use out of the charmed circle of normal, desirable practice to being an abnormal practice; in short, to denormalize smoking and other tobacco use.’ Other examples of public health authorities seeking to deglamorize or denormalize smoking are not difficult to find. Government has extended its reach beyond human behavior and into the human mind itself, with conscious attempts to sway the public’s perception of smoking and smokers – to regulate social meaning.
A current government-funded advertising campaign in New Zealand is a particularly striking example of this tendency. The youth-focused Not Our Future campaign, which has aired on New Zealand television since 2007 (the ads are viewable at the campaign’s website), is completely devoid of any information regarding the dangers of smoking, and instead features actors and musicians expressing strong, and often quite intolerant, anti-tobacco sentiments. Some of their statements mention the fact that smoking is unhealthy and therefore foolish, while most express pure contempt. ‘Smoking,’ according to one celebrity, ‘is so 1997.’ Another is ‘always, like, a little bit disappointed when [he hears] that someone is a smoker.’
The games on the Not Our Future website are even more overt in their disdain for smokers. Butthead Bash is a fighting game in which players are asked to ‘bash’ Barry Butthead, apparently a tobacco company representative guilty of ‘stealing our money and our lives.’ The objective of another game, Kiss Off, is to ‘find the hotty to kiss by avoiding all the disgusting, annoying smokers.’ Should the player make contact with a smoker – easily identified by their gray skin, blackened eyes, and stink-lines – they are told in no uncertain terms what to do: ‘Damn! You don’t want to be seen with a smoker. They have really stinky breath. Yuck! Quickly try to get away.’
The stinky breath message – which surely has more social than medical relevance – is also communicated on the graphic health warnings now required on all tobacco packaging in New Zealand. One of these warnings features the image of a severely rotted mouth with the message ‘smoking causes foul and offensive breath.’ It is difficult to view this warning as the impartial communication of an objective health risk.
The cumulative effect of such campaigns is to stigmatize smokers: in the words of Sociologist Erving Goffman, to reduce them in our minds ‘from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one.’ This approach does nothing to inform or educate, but discourages smoking by artificially increasing its social and psychological costs; that is, by deliberately making smoking more harmful. The intentional stigmatization of smokers is not only inherently illiberal, it also increases the palatability of more coercive policy measures by rendering smokers’ preferences irrelevant in the minds of the non-smoking public.
Public health experts have treated their own value judgements as universally valid and binding. Smokers are forced to contribute to campaigns which treat them as objects of scorn and disgust, while creating a culture in which their liberty can be sacrificed upon the altar of public health. The perception of the smoker as incapable of choice – as an incompetent and passive victim requiring rescue from the malevolent grip of Big Tobacco – has become orthodoxy, with dissent becoming increasingly difficult. This epistemic monopoly of the collectivist public health agenda over the smoking debate allows defenders of smokers’ rights to be dismissed as denialists or shills for the tobacco industry. If the battle for freedom is fought in the hearts and minds of the public, the coercive healthists are winning decisively.
The same healthist logic has always been applied to illegal drugs and alcohol, and the war on obesity has made unhealthy food the next target. To mourn the loss of our freedoms or to discuss means of resistance, join the Just Say ‘No!’ to Healthism group at Fr33agents Social.
Brad Taylor is a graduate student in Political Science at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He blogs at 
I actually used your Live a Little, You Molly-Coddled Pantywaist blog post in talking to a couple Mormon missionaries fellas today. My daughter is trying to get me to quit smoking, so after she and I had steered the discussion towards anarchism, it became relevant. They actually agreed with what you had to say.
Heh. Every Mormon I’ve met has been a lovely person, but quite puritanical when it comes to drugs and alcohol. I’m surprised.
They were a couple of 19-year-olds who acted pretty hip but they both seemed interested in my atheist teenage daughter and may have just been acting. One of them used to chew tobacco and use nasal snuff, though. The other one has sinned a bit, too, it seems.
I have noticed a lot of the American ‘Truth’ ads lately have aimed to demonize the Tobacco industry, and thus demonize smokers by association. It appears to be working, too. On a few occasions I have heard smokers asked how they can give their money to such “evil” companies. More often than not, the smokers were embarrassed or shamed, but not enough to quit smoking.
Thanks for a well written, thoughtful article.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7Fek_rIIo0
It’s a pretty good response.
Although obviously both smoking isn’t a particularly good thing, nor should it be regulated by government to any extent, it seems most of the advertising I’ve seen in the U.S. is directed towards the tobacco company bastards themselves, and not the unfortunate smokers.
Smokers should be stigmatised – but not by government (although oddly enough, government in this rare instance is actually doing a theoretically-defensible thing… probably by accident though).
Leaving aside the (massively overstated) deleterious health effects from second-hand smoke, there is the matter of STENCH – and thereby, externality.
Society frowns on people who fart in theatres or restaurants, because the resultant stench is a bit off-putting… but since it is water-based and doesn’t contain volatile oils, fart stench does not cling to the hair and clothes of non-farters and force them to shower before they can sleep. Also, I never heard of a fart causing an asthmatic to have an attack (and I’ve experienced some absolute BELTERS of farts, both as victim and as perpetrator).
If I walked around with a dilute solution of my own shit in a spray bottle, and sprayed it on anyone who walked past, I would be considered a menace and be the rightful object of retaliation. And my shit smells better than cigarette smoke (well, that’s just my opinion – but it’s not out of whack with that of the majority of the 60% of the population who weren’t insecure enough as teens to force themselves to become addicted).
Sadly, smokers were NEVER going to respect others’ rights to freedom from unwanted stench without a campaign that discouraged them. So they behaved in the most anti-social of ways – covering the world in a pall of stench, using the ground as an ashtray, and so forth.
Even now, you cannot walk four metres in any urban centre without finding a cigarette butt (or other smoker detritus); another externality. Walk past a building where addicts are satisfying their craving, and you stink for the rest of the day.
I am the most anti-government dude you will find ‘in the open’, but rules forcing smokers to behave like civilised people are a good thing: it is one of the VERY few instances where government intervention actually did something in line with a public choice view of the role of government (ameliorating externalities).
And because the ‘rules’ are seeking to reduce ‘violence’ (making others stink is an invasion of their right to be left alone), it represents the use of coercion against aggressors: for once government did a good thing.
I’m not a puritan – I am anti-prohibition in all its forms. But those who use coke/meth/acid/peyote (almost said heroin, but he whole ‘discarded needles on the beach’ thing irks me) do me no harm whatsoever (absent their requirement to steal DUE TO prohibition’s effects on prices) whereas smokers behave as if all your air is belong to them.
Cheerio
GT
(you guessed it – I am only addicted to caffeine and sugar, and have never so much as touched a cigarette: I don’t even like stepping on them in the street… I have a strong natural aversion to anything that smells worse than my shit)
I can buy that social norms against smoking inside or in crowded places are a good thing, but current stigmatization efforts go far beyond that, and treat smokers as irrational, stupid people incapable of choice. The externality of smoking outside, in your own home, or with other smokers seems entirely aesthetic and certainly not Pareto relevant.
True enough – people should absolutely be free to smoke tobacco (or snort coke, or inject heroin, or listen to Rush Limp-baugh podcasts, or read editorials by Paul ‘Ferengi’ Wolfowitz) in their own home.
But once they do stuff that imposes costs on others (say, reading out a Bill Kristol NYTimes column aloud, on a train) the Coase ‘nuisance amelioraton’ applies – bribes or threats – but only if you’re comparing utils with utils.
If you start with the RIGHT to go about unmolested on a street, the utilitarian argument leaks like a sieve.
I have a really hard time sympathising with the ‘plight’ of smokers: if we are all brutally honest, people start smoking (despite VERY strong suggestions from their own bodies that they stop) to try to belong… usually at the age of 13-16. If you’re not addicted at 16, the chance that you go on to be an adult smoker is TINY.
Children make all sorts of stupid choices – it’s why we are silly enough to try to use a ‘bright line, one size fits all’ age rule for things like drinking, driving and sex (although there are 15 year olds who are more ‘together’ in all three of those, than most 40-somethings). But taking up smoking is a VERY ‘long tailed’ decision (its tail is arguably as long as the decision to have a child, and with a worse ex-ante expectaion of gain).
In sum: the overwhelming mass of smokers become same in a teenage-angst driven desire to belong to some or other clique. They make the decision when they are children, and OBVIOUSLY do not ‘process’ the long-term ramifications (“Sure, I might get emphysema when I’m fifty, but Mindy McTavish might think I’m cool THIS WEEK if I can just stop coughing”).
And from there of course , it’s “I CHOOSE to smoke… I can give up anytime I want”.
As someone who can’t even give up sugar in coffee, I see that for what it is.
Smoking is like speeding – it has an ex ante negative expected net gain, unless there is a VERY high discount factor, even if the act itself yields utility.
In the presence of addiction, each cigarette WILL yield utility, since it staves off the pain of withdrawal. But that is due to the excessive discounting of high-probability negative long-term consequences.
I’m always reminded of the US olympic athletes who were asked “Would you use a pill that would guarantee you a gold medal, but where you would die a week later – with probability = 1?”.
Answer: Yes (60-odd percent). 60-odd percent had time preferences that I would consider irrational (but I plan to live forever).
You have to recognise that a smoker’s decision to continue to smoke is NOT an unconstrained choice – it is conditioned upon the addiction. How many smokers would quit if they could do so instantly, with ZERO withdrawal?
Plus, it’s still smelly, and ladies end up with mouths that look like a cat’s bum.
Cheers
GT
To all smokers out there I’d just like to say: Try ecigarettes and get rid of your dirty habit, I did it and I was able to stop smoking.