The World Health Assembly has just adopted unanimously the first public health measure which will have a global reach. This measure does not however concern itself with the universal availability and quality of drinking water, nor with the control of toxic emissions from auto exhausts and industrial smoke stacks, nor with a coordinated effort to recognize and combat the scourge of AIDS. For this epoch-making agreement, the members of the WHO have targeted tobacco and those who smoke it.
Every one of the WHO’s 192 member states have committed themselves to introducing strict curbs on the advertising, marketing and sale of tobacco products within five years. Unfortunately this unanimity is unlikely to be shared by many millions of people around the world, by no means all of whom are themselves smokers.
The arguments for and against smoking are hugely charged and polarized between the big-buck battalions of the tobacco giants and the medical establishment backed by the cohorts of the politically correct. Only a fool or a liar (and the tobacco industry has certainly been the latter) would pretend that sucking great drafts of smoke into your lungs on a daily basis is going to do you no harm.
Cigarettes in particular have been marketed with a wide range of nonsensical notions, suggesting at various times that they confer sophistication, chic and good taste and at others ruggedness, toughness and determination. Such promotions have certainly had an effect upon young people, for whom the first cigarette remains something of a rite of passage.
Yet the anti-smoking brigades have, in their turn, been no less full of rubbish, accusing smokers of being mass murderers, via passive smoking. They also speak of the massive cost of smoking-related conditions for health services and employers.
At the base of the smoking debate lurks an issue which the tobacco lobby uses only cynically and the anti-smokers choose to ignore altogether. That issue is personal choice. Someone who through overeating endangers his heart or who courts danger by taking part in risky sports activities can represent as much a cost to both health service and employer. Are such people to be next in the sights of the politically correct establishment who would, it seems, have everyone lead a life which they have decided is safe and sensible?
Inherent in the thinking that has produced the vociferous and influential anti-smoking movement is an idea that there is a golden mean of health which everyone can achieve, if only they are sensible. And such a deeply fictional healthy society slots into the predominantly US paranoia about mortality, which has turned the country’s medical establishment from easers of suffering into preventers of death.
In pursuit of this risk-averse, death-dodging world, its proponents are prepared to override individual rights and browbeat governments and international bodies into creating the world’s first public health measure. The pity is that the WHO’s action was about smoking and not AIDS or the nutritional value of food, because when you are facing a lingering death from AIDS or starvation, the odd deadly cigarette might well provide some passing comfort.
