Philip Morris
All Fired Up Over Smoking. New Laws and Attitudes Spark A War
Fields
- Author
- Gibbs, N.R.
- Seufert, N.
- Smilgis, M.
- Seufert, N.
- Type
- COMP, COMPUTER PRINTOUT
- MAGA, MAGAZINE ARTICLE
- Area
- PARRISH,STEVE/OFFICE
- Litigation
- Okag/Privilege Withdrawn
- Okag/Produced
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- EXTR, EXTRA
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- Americans for Nonsmokers Rights
- Athletes Against Tobacco
- Charleston Daily Mail
- Cnn
- Congress
- Joe Allen + Orso
- Le Cirque
- Ma State Welfare Office
- Methodist Hospital
- Nas, Natl Academy of Sciences
- Natl Inst on Drug Abuse
- Northern Life Insurance
- Northwest Airlines
- Ny Supreme Court
- Pioneer High School
- Schick Shadel Hospital
- Smoking Policy Inst
- Southern Il Univ
- TI, Tobacco Inst
- Time
- Turner Broadcasting
- Usg Interiors
- Addiction Research Center
- American Cancer Society
- American Lung Assn
- Athletes Against Tobacco
- Author (Organization)
- Lexis Nexis
- Mead Data Central
- Time
- Mead Data Central
- Named Person
- Bogart, H.
- Bowyer, J.
- Bradley, A.B.
- Bradley, W.
- Burstein, B.
- Cahoon, R.
- Carabillo, T.
- Caron, J.
- Chafee, J.
- Close, G.
- Collins, J.
- Columbus, C.
- Corkery, P.
- Cronauer, R.
- Davis, B.
- Dietrich, M.
- Ferguson, C.
- Fischer, S.
- Frawley, J.
- Garner, D.
- Gary, S.
- Gittler, M.
- Gran, J.
- Gran, R.
- Greeley, H.
- Healy, R.
- Hillsinger, A.
- Holmes, O.W.
- Jaffe, J.
- Johnson, D.
- Kahn, M.
- Keppler, A.
- King, L.
- Koch, E.
- Koop, C.E.
- Kundert, G.
- Lazarus, M.
- Maccioni, S.
- Michael, K.
- Migdal, P.
- Murrow, E.R.
- Panek, L.
- Paroni, A.
- Pertschuk, M.
- Rosner, R.
- Roth, A.
- Sheen, M.
- Trump, D.
- Turner, L.
- Washington, G.
- Bowyer, J.
- Master ID
- 2022875166/5504
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- Date Loaded
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- UCSF Legacy ID
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Document Images
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LEVEL 1 - 22 OF 55 STORIES
Copyright (c) 1988 Time Inc. All Rights Reserved;
Time
April 18, 1988, U.S. Edition
PAGE 71
SECTION: LIVING; Pg. 64
LENGTH: 4488 words
HEADLINE: All Fired Up over Smoking;
New laws and attitudes spark a war
BYLINE: By Nancy R. Gibbs. Reported by Nancy Seufert/Los Angeles and Martha
Smilgis/New York, with other bureaus
BODY:
Sirio Maccioni, owner of Manhattan's elegant Le Cirque, is in a state. A
suave restaurateur who prides himself on his ability to solve any crisis with
aplomb, Maccioni caters to high-profile customers who think nothing of dropping
$100 for lunch. For him, no whim is too outrageous to be cosseted, no ego too
blatant to be stroked. But last week Maccioni faced an uproar that rattled evenn
his finesse. Some of his most faithful customers were annoyed. His reservation
book was a jumble. Phone callers adopted a threatening tone. The problem: New
York City's new Clean Indoor Air Act had come to Le Cirque, and for the
restaurant's denizens, as for millions of other New Yorkers, life would never be
the same again.
The new law requires that half the tables in restaurants with more than 50
seats be reserved for nonsmokers. Maccioni was already agonizing over the
nightmares that lay ahead. "One of my regular customers comes i~n and says, 'Why
can't I have my table? I have had that table.for 15 years.' I reply that he and
his guests are smokers and their table is now in the nonsmoking section." Or
worse: "I give Donald Trump his table in the nonsmoking section, and one of his
guests lights up. Those at the next table jump up and say, 'If you don't make
him stop, I'll call the police.' "
The new legislation also restricts smoking in stores, theaters, hospitals,
off;ices,.museums, banks and virtually all other enclosed public places. It is a
pitiless law, leaving many s&okers few havens except for parking lots and the
airless privacy of their own apartment. No sooner had it taken effect than
reports began circulating of two commuters pummeling a recalcitrant smoker at a
train station, of a business executive trying self-hypnosis to make it throug h
the day at work, of mass defiance at the city's smoke-filled 0fftrack Betting
offices. Yet, predicts New York Mayor Ed Koch., the city will scarcely have to
enforce the ban; New Yorkers will take care of that themselves. "This is going
to be one of the best self=enforced laws in the country," says Koch, who has not
smoked since 1952. "There is no one more enraged than a nonsmoker forced to take
In secondhand smoke." Unfortunatelyt that rage inevitably clashes with the rage
of the smoker determined to enjoy firsthand smoke. All in all, the law promises
to play further havoc in a city not known for the civility of its communal life.
New York thus becomes the latest battlefield in a war that has been raging in
the U.S. for some time. All across the country, in large towns and small, in the
skies the offices, the courts, in every cranny of common space Americans are
fightlng over where, when and whether a smoker may smoke. Even In their homes,
U~m
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where new laws do not apply, new attitudes do: children threaten to withhold
good-ni':ght kisses from smoky parents, spouses are exiled to the garage. fumes
Ray Cahoon, 53, a computer specialist in Woodlawn, Md.: "It's gotten to the
point where the smoker has no rights at all."
Some 26% of American adults now smoke, down from 38% thirty years ago. But if
smokers are becoming a minority, they are an increasingly belligerent one. Even
those who would like very much to quit want to do so in their own sweet time --
not under a legal gun. They are sick of having glasses of water dumped on their
ashtrays or ashtrays dumped on their beds. "'The antismoking movement has to:do
with power lust," argues Paul Corkery, a New York free-lance journalist partial
to cigars. "It is a movement that brings out the worst in the worst sort of
people."
The worst sort of people in this case inciudes the UI.S. Surgeon General,
Congress, hundreds of municipalities, most of the nation's corpora tions and
millions of newly militant nonsmokers who have joined in a campaign to clear the
air. Forty-two states have passed' laws restricting smoking in public places.
Maine has removed cigarette-vending machines from sites where teenagers might
have easy access. Utah forbids cigarette ads on billboards, while California has
banned smoking on trains, buses and planes traveling within the state.
The new rules are sparking:explosive confrontations on all fronts. The mos t
combustible atmosphere of all is the workplace, where smokers and nonsmokers
have grated on each other for years. Signs on office walls that used to smile
THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING now growl IF YOU' SMOKE, DON'T EXHALE. As more and more
firms impose tough regulations, millions of smokers are being forced' to choos e
among quitting, hiding, and moving their desk to the rest room. More than half
of America's companies have now restricted smoking:at work. Some ban.it
altogether; others, such as Turner Broadcasting in!Atlanta and Northern Life
Insurance in Seattle, simply refuse to hire smokers. Most require that common
areas -- opemoffice space, hallways, lounges, conference rooms and rest rooms
-- be smoke free.
Employees in the ceiling-products division of Chicago~'s USG Interiors have
been told they may not smoke at home either. Such broad restraints strike some
as intrusive: "If you want to regulate my life for 24 hours," observes Chicago
Labor Lawyer Marvin Gittler, "pay me for the 24 hours or get the hell out of my
life."
W
Some smokers must go to extremes to indulge their habit while keeping their N
job.. At Methodist Hospital In suburban Minneapolis, a worker stepped out onto a 0
N
second-floor balcony to smoke, despite the frigid temperature. When the door
accidentally locked behind her, she jumped to the ground, broke a foot in two N
places and fractured a wrist. On that very day, the first of a smoking ban, the ~
employees" union had filed a grievance against the hospital for not providing a ~
smoking lounge for workers. ~
In many companies, the battle lines are drawn between the factory floor and the ~
executive suite. Though workers In open areas must abide by the new rules, Q
anyone with an office door to shut may puff away to his heart's content -- ~
though, ironically, relatively few high-ranking professionals do so. Accordin g
to Donald Garner, an expert In liability law at Southern Illinois University,
only 25% of white-collar workers smoke, compared with 50% of blue-collar
workers. "This, in a sense, has put over on the nonsmokers' side an enormous
reservoir of talent and social presti e that was not there 25 years ago," he
says. "Now that the chairman and the ~EO aren't smokers, they've become
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(c) 1988.Time Inc., Time, April 18, 1988
instigators of the nonsmoking workplace."
Company officials responsible for enforcing~the restrictions d'o not relish
the task. "Nobody thanks you for putting in a smoking ban," says John Bowyer, a
personnel director in Charleston, W. Va. When Bowyer learned that smokers at his
company were sneaking off into nearby offices, "I went over with a fire
extinguisher and dropped a rather strong hint." If all else fails, employers may
be forced to take stronger measures. Judy Caron, a social worker at the state
welfare department office in Attleboro, Mass., was dismissed in February for
Insubordination after a five-year battle over her smoking, during which her
legal fees were paid by the Tobacco Institute, an industry group. "I neve r
smoked with clients," she insists, "and I could no longer enjoy a cigarette at
my desk." She resented having to give up her private office and smoke in the
company kitchen when the department ran out of space. Now at.home in Easton,
Mass., she has hired new lawyers to fight for reinstatement.
In many cases, of course, the response has been much less rancorous. Some
workers welcome the added incentive to quit smoking and feel that employers a re
taking a reasoned and sympathetic approach to their plight. Many companies pay
all or part of the costs of cessation programs, hypnosis therapy, special
classes and self-help kits. Most of them have discovered that they have a lot to
gain from helping employees kick the habit. "They will be healthier, their
attendance will be better, and this will keep medical costs down," says Arthur
Hilsinger, owner of a 100-worker optical-accessories company in Plainville,
Mass.
Even while getting to and from work, smokers increasingly find no relief. On
the Golden Gate ferries, which carry thousands of commuters across San Francis co
Bay each rush hour, passengers who used to be allowed to smoke on one side of
the bar area now duck outside to the windswept decks when ferry personnel loo k
the other way.
That option, however, is not available to nervous flyers who need to smoke to
calm their nerves. Beginning next week, a federal ban will prohibit smoking on
scheduled flights lasting two hours or less. At the same time, Northwest
Airlines will become the first major U.S. carrier to keep its NO SMOKING signs
permanently lighted on all domestic flights of whatever duration. A survey of
hundreds of its frequent flyers showed that 90% prefer a no-smoking seat.
Passengers argue that after being aboard an airliner for a few hours everyone in N
effect is seated in the smoking section; even passengers seated far forward Q
sometimes complain of headaches and watery eyes and blame the limited air 1U
N
circulation in airline cabins.
Having long been segregated on scheduled flights, smokers are indignant about ~
the outright ban. "I think it"s discrimi'natory," says John Collins a Los N
Angeles telecommunications contractor and frequent flyer. "irst t6y put all us A,
smokers way in the back of the plane. We took that O.K. But now they tell us 0
that we can't smoke at all. The whole thing has been aggravating as hell, ~
especially when I can remember when you used to get on a plane and the
stewardesses were handing out five-packs of ci'garettes."
As for the countless other public battlegrounds -- store lines clogged with
puffing shoppers, taxicabs, hotel lobbies, hospitals and sports arenas -- the
friction level depends largely on how vigorously and graciously people go abou t
policing their fellow citiZens. Employers, after all, have far more leverage
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over their workers, and airlines over their passengers, than citizens do over
one another. Who is really going to enforce the regulations, apart from those
who have always been willing to pipe up and demand that a smoker crush out a
cigarette? "Usually it's older women who are more aggressive," jokes South
Dakota State Representative Gust Kundert, 74, who smokes a pack a day. "They get
a little sarcastic with me. They figure I can't pop them one."
On the other hand, officials i'n some of the hundreds of cities that have
passed antismoking ordinances of various descriptions have been surprised at the
calmness of the citizen response. "I anticipated more argumentative
confrontations among people in lines at banks and supermarket check-out
counters," says City Manager Robert Healy of Cambridge, Mass., where smoking
restrictions went into effect a year ago, "but so far we have had very little
quarreling.° And this without an official show of force. "We don't have police
cruisers going around with water pistols trying to shoot out people's
cigarettes."
But in other cities where nerves are still raw, the worst may be yet to come. As
last week's events at Le Cirque proved, no turf is touchier than a restaurant
table. Some people can no more dine out without smoking than eat without
chewing, and for them any restaurant restrictions are excruciating. Most laws
call for separate smoking and nonsmoking sections in all restaurants, though not
in bars. "I'm constantly changing seats to enjoy a cigarette after dinner," says
Graphic Designer Toni Carabillo of Los Angeles, whose friends insist that she
remain downwind. "It's hell to be a smoker these days, because we all have to be
so sensitive to nonsmokers." Nothing is more embarrassi'ng to Journalist Corkery
than "when someone in my party walks over and tells other people to stop smoki'ng
or spends most of the dinner conversation fussing about whether to go and badger
smokers to stop."
Last spring, when Beverly Hills attempted to outlaw all restaurant smoking,
some irate owners reported a 30% drop in business. The city council finally
agreed that if restaurants installed special ventilation, they could set aside a
smoking section. Yet some owners in other cities declare they would prefer an
outright ban to arbitrating disputes among patrons. "Then I wouldn't have to be
an enforcer," says Ray Cronauer, manager of Joe Allen and'Orso in New York's
theater district. Cronauer would not think of calling the police if someone
lighted up in the wrong section: "Can you imagine them coming in here and
hand,cuffing a smoker and'then taking him out past the heroin addicts shooting up
in the street?"
Enforcement may actually be a bit more effective within the privacy of
people's homes, where so many ingenious weapons are available to ruthless
antismokers. Inspired by the change of mood all around them, many Americans who
once refrained from pressing loved ones to quit have laid down some laws of
their own. Rosemarie Gran, a museum, receptionist in Seattle, has banished her
husband John to the back patio for his morning coffee and'cigarette. When he
comes back inside, the burly, 6-ft. shipyard foreman washes his hands, runs a
Baby Wipe across his mustache and only then gives Rosemarie a: good-morning kiss.
Gran admits he would rather smoke at the dining-room table, but he knows the
law: the patio is the only designated smoking area in his household. "It's
really tough, and it irks me sometimes," he says. "But I've realized that as a
smoker, I'm low on the totem pole right now. So I'm the one doing the
accommodating."
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Children of smokers often make the most relentless adversaries. Packs of
cigarettes disappear mysteriously, and candy ones appear in their place. "My
kids have been on my case for years," says Lawyer Paul Migdal of Marina del Rey,
Calif. When his daughters were six and four years old, they presented him wit h a
shadow box: scattered among the compartments were a cigarette, a skull and
crossbones, and a little Superman figure with the caption "You're a super dad i'f
you don't smoke." It still took hSigdal more than a decade to quit, with his
daughters -- by then living away from home -- cheering him on through daily
cards and long-distance telephone calls. "I quit because I was tired of being an
outsider, of being in this new minority group," Migdal says. "But the reason I
know I won'tt start again is that I'd be afraid to have to tell my kids that I
had another cigarette."
Among friends and lovers too, the peer pressure to quit smoking is heating
up. Sharon Gary, 29, a nurse from Marina del Rey, finds the men she dates less
tolerant than before. "If I go out to dinner with someone, I always ask if it's
O.K. to smoke, and I've learned to expect that the answer will be no."
Companions on a sailing trip threatened to throw her cigarettes overboard.
"Eventually you've been insulted so much that you just stop caring about being
polite," she says. "People make you feel like you've got some filthy habit."
That attitude certainly reigns in some precincts of the singles scene,
particularly those frequented by sweet-breathed, clear-eyed yuppies who jog at
dawn to keep their lungs pink. "When I go to bars with a group of girls, we
sneak out to the parking lot to have a cigarette because we don't want guys to
see us smoking," says Cynthia Ferguson, 26, a newspaper-advertising executive
from Pasadena, Calif. "It's got to the point that whether someone will go out
with you can depend on whether or not you smoke." Some have even made willpower
a precondition for matrimony. Laurie Panek, a former probation officer who lives
in Atlanta, fell in love with an adamant nonsmoker. "He told me the day I quit
would be the day we would be together," she says. "He didn't want to see me ruin
my health. I was more or less humiliated into it."
High school and junior high students are the most susceptible of all to the
lure of cigarettes, which seem to them an emblem of adulthood. Most smokers
start before age 19, 60% by 14. But while more than a quarter of all high school
seniors smoked a decade ago, the figure is now around 18% and falling. "The
whol.e thing is turning around," maintains Anne Keppler, 42, a secretary at
Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor, Mich. "When we were growing up, anyone who was
anybody smoked. Now the nonsmoking kids, who are the vast majority, look down on
the kids who do. They're the outsiders. They're the burnouts."
Though the odds are running against them, embattled smokers retain some
powerful allies. Tobacco companies continue to fight back through well-funded
promotional campaigns, congressional lobbyi'ng and in the courts, where they have
yet to lose a liability case. Civil libertarians are taking up the fight against
antismoking laws, which they see as an infringement of personal freedom. As more
and more people are forced to take sides, the rhetoric tends to become more
dYvisive. "It won't just be smoker vs. nonsmoker," predicts Law Professor
Garner. "If the tobacco Industry is successful, it will be along class lines,
white vs. black, majority vs. minority."
Some people who have managed to quit are standing by their former fell ow
puffers. Sharon Fischer controller of a medical-journal publishi'ng company in
New York City, smoked t4ree packs a day for 30 years until she gave it up two
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years ago. But she was stubborn about her rights then and is stubborn now. "When
I smoked, I wouldn't put my cigarette out," she says. "If I was in a restaurant
where people would fake a cough if I lit up, I would blow the smoke at them."
Fischer has no patience with the antismokers. "I think people have the right to
smoke. First, society hooked you -- it was very acceptable to smoke when I was
eleven -- and then society changed its mind."
There are those who argue, of course, that smoking around nonsmokers was
always rude. It was just not illegal. But in a sense, Fischer has a point. Even
a few years ago, the present revolution in thinking and manners would have been
unimaginable. America has always -- always -- smoked. In 1492 Christopher
Columbus discovered tobacco, among other things, when he became acquainted with
the nati'ves who "drank smoke." Many Southern colonists grew rich when Europe got
hooked. It even helped finance their freedom. "If you can't send money," George
Washington told the home front, "send tobacco."
For two centuries, tobacco remained a staple of American life. Cigarettes'
Image of sophistication curled through popular culture, especially the movies,
which taught viewers that they could look like Lana Turner or Marlene Dietrich
or Humphrey Bogart by lighting up. Edward R. Murrow interviewed guests throug h a
cloud; tycoons fueled deals with cigars. Without smoking, it seemed, great
detectives could not detect, writers could not write, lovers coul6not languish,
heroes were deflated and vamps declawed.
Consider how the image has changed. One of the last smoking TV heroes was Don
Johnson's ice-cool cop, Sonny Crockett, on Miami Vice, and they -- actor and
character -- have conspicuously quit. One of the latest movie sirens to light up
was Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction: the cigarette seemed a beacon of'her
madness. "For a long time, we saw Bette Davis' sitting at the bar smoking a
cigarette as sexy," observes Robert Rosner of the Smoking Policy Institute in
Seattle. "But then, as a society, we got close enough to smell her breath, and
we realized it wasn't sexy at all."
For society to have changed its mind so extensively, so quickly, marks the
triumph of a crusade that actually began generations ago. As long as there ha ve
been smokers, there have been those who would snuff out the habit. A cigar, said
Editor Horace Greeley more than a century ago, is a"fire at one end and'a fool
at the other." Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes passed along some memorable
ammunition to i9th century schoolchildren:
Tobacco is a filthy weed,
That from the devil does proceed;
It drains your purse, it burns your clothes,
And makes a chimney of your nose.
Concerns about health were always at the heart of the antismoking movement.
Victorian women were warned that they would become sterile, grow a mustache o r
come down with tuberculosis if they,dared to light up. Yet it was not until the
Surgeon General's 1964 report linking cigarettes to cancer that health officials
won their point. Warning labels appeared on packages after 1965, ads were pulled
from television and radio in 1971, and four years later, Minnesota passed the
first com rehensive clean-indoor-ai'r law. Smoking continued to taper off
througfiou~. the 1970s. Even then, however, people were content to live and let
m m
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smoke: the public spirit of laissez-faire survived every attempt by health.
officials to reclassify cigarettes as a hazard rather than a nuisance.
All that changed with Surgeon General C. Everett Koop's explosive report on
the effects of passive, or involuntary, smoking, released in 1986. Koop's
review, which coincided'with a study by the National Academy of Sciences,
reported that pregnant women who snnkP are more likely to miscarry, while
children of smokers suffer more bronchitis, pneumonia and other respiratory
illnesses. The NAS study found that nonsmoking spouses of smokers face a 25%
greater risk of contracting lung cancer than do spouses of nonsmokers. "it
pulled together all that we had known for decades," says Mark Pertschuk of
Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights, 'and changed the question from Do we have
enough evidence to take action? to Why aren't we doing more?"
Koop°s report galvanized antismokers, who until then had limited their
weaponry to burlesque winces and conspicuous coughs. "After having had smoke
blown in their faces for years when smokers ruled," says Rosner, "the asthmatics
are finally having their day."'And not only asthmatics. Opera Singer Marjorie
Kahn was married to a smoker and "hated it. I screamed all the time. I'm
divorced from him now." Kahn's attitude toward smokers remains unyielding. "If
they want to kill themselves, they should do it in private and not pull down
someone else with them."
I
Smokers know, of course, that it is not quite that simple. "You can't blame
people for not wanting to breathe smoke," says Kay Michael, a reporter for the
Charleston (W. Va.) Daily Mail, "but I wish the antismokers would try to
understand that there is a physical addiction here. They seem to think we smoke
just to mess up their air or something." Next month Surgeon General Koop will
release a major report on nicotine that will detail the nature and seriousness
of the physical addiction. Most experts now agree that cigarettes are every bit
as addictive as drugs or alcohol. "Smoking a cigarette is like free-basing
nicotine," says Dr. Joseph Frawley, chief of staff at Schick Shadel Hospital in
Santa Barbara, Calif. "And for some people, it is virtually Impossible to quit."
The new findings help explain behavior among smokers that would otherwise
defy all reason. "If you tell cocaine users that if they don't stop, their leg
will be cut off, most will stop," observes Dr. Jerome Jaffe, director of the
Addiction Research Center at the National Insti'tute on Drug Abuse. "After
smokers have a lung operation, bypass surgery or a heart attack, about half
continue smoking." A. Burton Bradley, who runs a stop-smoking clinic in Atlan ta,
has seen his share of hard-core addicts. "You would be amazed at the people who
have had their larynx removed," he says, "and who put cigarettes in the
tracheotomy hole in the hospital."
CNN Talk-Show Host Larry King, 54, smoked two packs a day from the age of 18.
In February 1987 he had what he calls his "lucky" heart attack. He smoked on the
way to the hospital. But after three days In intensive care, he says, he made a
pact. "I said to myself, 'If you survive, you will never smoke again.' " He too
is amazed at others who react differently. "When Martin Sheen visited me, he was
smoking again after his heart attack, and I asked why. He said, 'It Is my friend
it is always there and doesn't pass judgment.' I said, 'Your friend is going to
kill you.' "
Since nearly all smokers have tried and failed to give up their habit, they are
well aware of the pain of withdrawal. Quitting is estimated to be a $100
million-a-year industry, and yet very few smokers succeed on the first try, or
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even the second or third. The relapse rate is comparable to that of heroin; most
do not last even a year. All across the country, as deadlines for still more
laws approach, there are households full of people drinking lots of water,
gnawing licorice, knitting feverishly, gripping pencils, breathing deeply, or
gift-wrapping their cigarettes to make smoking as inconvenient as possible. Last
week in New York City, calls to the American Lung Association from smokers
asking about quitting techniques doubled.
Many would-be quitters discover that they cannot concentrate without their
cigarettes; others get depressed, gain weight, or acquire a new addiction --
such as nicotine gum. "I know a guy who started chewing Nicorettes," says
Cartoonist Mell Lazarus, "and now he smokes and' chews Nicorettes." Beatrice
Burstein, a justice of the New York Supreme Court, was a three-pack-a-day smoker
for 50 years.. She quit three years ago, though now she is hooked on the gum. "I
can't sit on the bench and chew, so I chew in my chambers," she says. "I'
ashamed of the habit, so I tell lawyers I tnust chew because I just quit smoking.
I even swim laps with a Nicorette in my mouth."
The in centive to quit is bound to grow over the next year. Signs that the
antismoking momentum is building are everywhere. A bill is pending before
Congress that would ban all print ads for tobacco products, an ambitious
proposal in light of the fact that even in the absence of radio and television
commercials, cigarettes are among the most heavily marketed consumer products.
Senator JohniChafee of Rhode Island proposes doubling the federal excise tax on
a pack of cigarettes, to 32 cents. New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, a founder of
Athletes Against Tobacco, wants to end:cigarette companies' eligibility to clain
advertising costs as a tax-deductible business expense.
In time, as the laws and the public pressure become overpowering, some
holdout smokers may finally find the willpower to lay down their packs for good.
How many remains to be seen. "There Is one school of thought that says we are
now down to the hard-core smokers -- the mild smokers have dropped off," says
Adele Paroni of the American Cancer Society. "But there is another school of
thought that says the percentage will just continue to decline to nearly zero."
In the meantime, the war goes on. And since even wars have rules, the best
short-term hope is that sanctimonious nonsmokers will learn sympathy, and
adamant smokers will learn courtesy, and an air of understanding will ease the
discomfort on both sides.
GRAPHIC: Picture 1, NO CAPTION, Illustrations for TIME by Arnold Roth; Picture
2, NO CAPTION, Illustrations for TIME by Arnold Roth; Picture 3, NO CAPTION,
Illustrations for TIME by Arnold Roth; Picture 4, NO CAPTION, Illustrations for
TIME by Arnold Roth; Picture 5, NO CAPTION, Illustrations for TIME by Arnold
Roth
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