Cigarettes, not bombs, are deadliest artifacts of civilization
- By Peter Singer
0 Comment(s)
Print
E-mail
Shanghai Daily, November 17, 2011
That tragic discovery is already responsible for about 150 million deaths, with many times that toll still to come, unless something drastic is done. The FDA should therefore require that cigarette smoke be more alkaline, which would make it less easily inhaled, and so make it harder for cigarette smoke to reach the lungs.
Much of Proctor's book, which will be published in January, is based on a vast archive of tobacco-industry documents, released during litigation. More than 70 million pages of industry documents are now available online.
Denial
The documents show that, as early as the 1940s, the industry had evidence suggesting that smoking causes cancer. In 1953, however, a meeting of the chief executives of major American tobacco companies took a joint decision to deny that cigarettes are harmful.
As Proctor says, cigarettes, not guns or bombs, are the deadliest artifacts in the history of civilization.
If we want to save lives and improve health, nothing else that is readily achievable would be as effective as an international ban on the sale of cigarettes. (Eliminating extreme poverty worldwide is about the only strategy that might save more lives, but it would be far more difficult to accomplish.)
For those who recognize the state's right to ban recreational drugs like marijuana and ecstasy, a ban on cigarettes should be easy to accept. Tobacco kills far more people than these drugs.
Some argue that as long as a drug harms only those who choose to use it, the state should let individuals make their own decisions, limiting its role to ensuring that users are informed of the risks that they are running.
But tobacco is not such a drug, given the dangers posed by secondhand smoke.
Even setting aside the harm that smokers inflict on nonsmokers, the free-to-choose argument is unconvincing with a drug as highly addictive as tobacco, and it becomes even more dubious when we consider that most smokers take up the habit as teenagers and later want to quit.
Reducing the amount of nicotine in cigarette smoke to a level that was not addictive might meet this objection.
The other argument for the status quo is that a ban on tobacco might result in the same kind of fiasco as occurred during Prohibition in the US. That is, like the effort to ban alcohol, prohibiting the sale of tobacco would funnel billions of dollars into organized crime and fuel corruption in law enforcement agencies, while doing little to reduce smoking.
But that may well be a false comparison. After all, many smokers would actually like to see cigarettes banned because, like Obama, they want to quit.
Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.www.project-syndicate.org. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
Go to Forum >>0 Comment(s)