A rchive Date
[ 15-08-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[Joe Camel was innocent
By GEORGE JONAS -- Toronto Sun
August 10, 2000
A friend wrote me a letter the other day, taking me to task for mocking a Florida jury in an newspaper article for awarding $145 billion in punitive damages against four cigarette manufacturers.
My friend thought I shouldn't have used a flippant tone. Cigarette makers have hooked, misled and damaged people. My correspondent felt they hooked and misled him at a vulnerable age. They deserve to be punished.
"You and I seem to have had different experiences as smokers," I wrote in reply. "Far from being hooked by advertising, I started smoking in Communist Eastern Europe when advertising, or even packaging, was non-existent. I bought my unfiltered cigarettes from state stores in plain boxes that sported only a brand name - 'Worker' or 'Five Year Plan' - in simple block letters. Yet my contemporaries and I were smoking our heads off, more even than the supposedly beguiled youngsters in the West.
"Far from encouraging us, our parents and teachers considered smoking for young people both unmannerly and unhealthy. Smoking in school was strictly forbidden. For a teenager to smoke in public was regarded as boorish and disrespectful.
"No one seduced my generation into smoking in Budapest (or Prague or Moscow). We smoked in spite of social strictures, not because of social inducements.
"Nor did I find Canada very different in this regard. When I arrived in 1956, among the first English colloquialisms I picked up were 'cancer sticks' and 'coffin nails' for cigarettes. They were used by taxi drivers, not doctors. The words indicated a widespread awareness of the health hazards of smoking.
"For anyone who ever used the expression 'coffin nails' when buying cigarettes, suing tobacco companies is the height of hypocrisy.
"What difference does it make what Big Tobacco said or failed to say in their ads? No one in his right mind consulted cigarette manufacturers for medical advice. People asked their doctors.
"Every doctor I ever had advised me against cigarettes. One even said he wouldn't treat me (I had a chest complaint) if I continued to smoke. So I switched doctors, and continued smoking my two packs a day.
"No one twisted my arm. I was a smoker long before I ever saw the Marlboro Man. And for the last 25 years as a smoker, the very cigarette packages I purchased carried explicit health warnings against smoking.
"When I decided to quit (about 21/2 years ago) I simply quit. I diagnosed myself as having a heart attack - accurately, as it turned out - went to the parking lot of a hospital, lit a cigarette, and said to my companion that one way or the other it was going to be my last one. I have not lit another cigarette since.
"Was it hard to stop? Not really. Not harder than many other things I had to do in my life. I needed no hypnosis and no nicotine patches. I didn't even need friends to stop smoking in my presence.
"True, a heart attack is a good inducement, but in the last two decades nearly 35 million people stopped smoking in North America. They didn't all suffer heart attacks. Most simply decided to stop smoking, and they did. If nicotine were truly addictive - i.e., not just habit forming, but addictive in the way of heroin or even alcohol - smokers wouldn't have been reduced from more than 40% of the population to less than 25% in the U.S. in a couple of decades.
"Nicotine shortens life without a doubt. So do many of our other choices. Nicotine has probably shortened my life, but that's my fault, not Joe Camel's. We will all die one day, but we won't all die as snivelling, petty, resentful cowards, trying to blame others for our own mistakes.
"People who refuse to take responsibility for their decisions, who try to make others pick up the tab for their errors of judgment or lack of will power, are a greater menace to society than nicotine. Their attitude is the kind that stifles individual liberty and breeds acceptance of the interventionist state.
"Some always try invoking public measures against private weaknesses. 'Ban candy and punish the candy-maker,' they whimper, 'because I can't stay away from candy.' I simply show such people in what I consider their true light, as pitiful and hypocritical. It's doing my bit to elevate the level of moral discourse in the 21st century."
So there.
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com. Jonas, author and producer, appears Thursdays
 World Fact Book (CIA))]
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