Fifty years ago, U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry issued a
landmark report describing the health risks of cigarette smoking. Tobacco prohibitionists are using the
anniversary to promote onerous measures aimed at the tobacco industry and consumers
(here).
American Heart Association president Dr. Mariell Jessup
claims that “taxes, strong smoke-free laws and fully funding state tobacco
prevention programs… can reduce the number of adult smokers to less than 10
percent of the population in 10 years.”
Similarly unfounded assertions have been made for decades.
In 1984, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop declared that the U.S. could be
smoke-free by the year 2000 (here).
NBC reported that “raising the legal age to buy tobacco
products to 21 would go a long way to stopping kids from ever getting addicted
in the first place,” and it cites the American Heart Association, American Lung
Association, American Cancer Society and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids for
support. Unable to obtain an outright
tobacco ban, these groups hope to impose rules similar to those for alcohol.
Dr. Michael Fiore of the University of Wisconsin’s Center
for Tobacco Research and Intervention, says tougher tobacco age restrictions
make sense: “We do it with booze yet we don’t do it with cigarettes, when
cigarettes kill about 10 times more people than alcohol does.” That argument disguises the fact that alcohol
has proven far more deadly for teenagers.
The current age requirement for cigarette purchase is 18
years, and the smoking prevalence for high school seniors is 16%. In contrast, the requirement for alcohol purchase
is 21 years; 39% of high school seniors currently drink and 26% have been drunk
recently (here).
Dr. Fiore bemoans the lack of physician engagement with
smokers; he thinks they should be nagged: “I would never dream of letting a
patient with high blood pressure leave my office without treating it. But every day in America, millions of
Americans go in and out of a physician’s office and their smoking is not
treated.”
The past 50 years have witnessed an increasingly aggressive
tobacco control movement, with declining returns. Tobacco control may have contributed, as the
media suggests, to the saving of eight million smokers lives (abstract here), but tobacco prohibitionists also share responsibility for the 17.7 million
smokers who died prematurely because they were denied factual information about
safer smoke-free tobacco products.
Instead of exploiting the 50th anniversary, all
public health groups should endorse rational, science-based tobacco harm
reduction. America’s 45 million smokers
deserve nothing less.