Tobacco Documents Online

C TtT~. LONDON, TT?ES March 24, 1962 " Lc>`athsome " " A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and'i in the blackstinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit ti~at is bottomless ": thus KING JAMESt and VI in a vain attempt to cure his subjects of' the habit of smoking. His was a rhetorical statement of fact. Smoking has been proved, by all the. standards of commonsense, to be a factor. injurious to health. Smokers, althoughthey will indignantly deny it, are public nuisances: But KING JAMts-sharing Lt?RD HAILSHAM'S certitude invested with rather more authority, and lacking the apparatus of a modern state-signally failed, with his tracts and his taxes, to win his way. Will a twentieth-century have any better success :' Various lines of action are being upon the Government, only one of which they have so far committed to follow. This is to publicize the facts and the interpretation put on them by the Royal College of Physicians, and to work on the minds of schoolchildren. This policy accords both with the strength of the evidence and with popular notions of the func tion of government: all~ the same, care is necessary in the choice of methods. Taxation, differential or heavier, is one proposal. Taxes serve many purposes besides their primary one of raising revenue, but the discouragement of the sale of'~ an injurious article is not a particularly appropriate purpose. Th4 method is uncertain and uneven in, it effects. t'he consumption of harmful drugs is not„ with good r~:ason: contrc;led bti taxation, but by regula tion, If tobacco is tu oc ciassed' w~itiilaudaniim and heroin it is better to prucecd by reeulation, I he prohibition •of sniuking in places uf public resort is also being a~ivocatedL Theic is much to be said for this, though little that is to health. In so far as the prohibition evinced official disapprovat smoking it might influence those who are impressed by that kind of thing. Its direct effect on the consumptuon of tobacco might be negligible. Prohibition or restriction of tobaceo edvertising is another possibility. It ia on ernment the face of it absurd' that the Gov- should be embarking, from the highest motives and on the best advice, on a campaign of publicity and educa- ti on, while tobacco manufacturers .simultaneously spend an annual sum of 'f Jlm. on publicity which pulls in the opposite direction. The matter, however, 'is not quite sosimple. Even though the hypokhesis of a direct causal rela- tionship from smoking to cancer is accepted as being well eaough estab- lishul for all practical purposes (an assumption the Government are pre- pared to make) it does not follow that everyone or anyone should be obliged' to conform. A government should be exceedingly ngly cautious before it declares olosed, by prohibitive measures, a previously iously open scientific question. It is also necessary to take account of the less ess obvious implications of any prahibi- tion as well as of its expected benefits. In the present case the degree of risk in . cigarette smoking is directiy related to the number of cigarettes smoked. For the moderate or intermittent smoker the hazard is not of an order that seems to caLl for official intervention-and less than one-fifth of men smokers, and only 5 per cent of women smokers, habitually smoke more than twenty cigarettes a day. To prohibit cigarebte advertisements would imply acceptance of' the principle tflat the Government have a duty' to stop the advertisement of certain classes things because of the injury they do of when ind~l;ed ' in to excess-and where restrictions to stop ? Cigar- then are anc certainly not thz only thiags eties would falt under that ban. Some- that thing like a censorship of advertise - ments -always in the public interest " -would be within sight, and it is not~ fan from there to a censorshi I}` always " in the public interest "-of iess commercial means s of persuasion. How far the state should move in that direction rection (and the first steps, taken a long time ago, have full public approval) is always open to dispute. The answer returned depends on the extent' to which one's conception of the function of government is coloured either by paternalism or by a belief that~ people should be left to look after their private affairs themselves. Ar' •.< `isIi; ~~3;=:.~4- ` 4i' ~~'< r`:-~