Huff and puff in smoking battle

Press, 23 February 1978, Page 17

Huff and puff in smoking battle

The most aggressive anti-smoking campaign unleashed on the United States really began when an 11-year-old boy asked his father to stop smoking — as a birthday present.

His father, a 60-a-day smoker, agreed and put himself on a "Smokender” programme. Now, three years later, the father, Joseph Califano, is President Carter’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.

Launching his national crusade recently, Califano denied he was doing it because he was an anti* smoking zealot. But be acts now not only like a man who has proved his will-power to himself, but also with the passion of the converted.

Smoking, according to Califano, is a major factor in 220,000 deaths in the United States each year from heart disease, 78,000 from lung cancer and 22,000 from other cancers. But quite apart from the health hazard statistics he also has logic on his side.

If it is the task of a Government to pay for the medical bills of millions, and 10 per cent of the nation’s health care bills are caused by diseases attributed to or aggravated by cigarette smoking, it should also be a government’s duty, he believes, to help reduce smoking.

By

HENRY BRANDON,

“Sunday Times,” London

Logic, however has tripped up the Carter administration before, as Jody Powell, the President’s press spokesman, recently admitted. I was in the office of a White House aide when a call came through that appeared to test his patience.

After he hung up tie told me the caller was Califano. Since one at the aide’s tasks is to lubricate White House relations with state governors, he now had to pacify eight of them — naturally from to-bacco-growing states — who bitterly resent the anti-smoking campaign. The legislature of Kentucky has even called for Califano’s resignation.

Last year the nation's 600,000 tobacco growers got $6O million in government loans and grants, and White House aides have had to reassure the tobacco state politicians that the President does not intend to cancel growers’ subsidies — the Secretary of Agriculture made sure of that.

But the perils of logic are infinite. Last year, Dr Peter Bourne, the Britishborn presidential adviser on health and drugs, persuaded President Carter to define the use of drugs as a health problem rather than a criminal one, and to make marijuana smoking no longer a crime. But on cigarette smoking, the President is moving in the opposite direction. The problem of civil rights and liberties also intrudes. Califano advocates the banning of smoking in public places and on public vehicles except in designated areas. He has proposed to all state governors a “clean indoor air” law. with fines of $2O for transgressors.

He also wants to extend the ban on cigar and pipesmoking on commercial airliners to cigarettes; to raise taxes on cigarettes with high tar and nicotine contents; and to induce insurance companies to

offer premium discounts to non-smokers (some already do).

Dr Bourne is highly sceptical of all this, however. He thinks that to brand a section of the population in this way will not help. “Those of us in the health fields should have learned that a great problem in the treatment of alcohol and drug abuse is the attached social opprobium, especially since there is not much evidence that a government is effective in changing people’s behaviour.”

Carter, when asked at a press conference about the Califano crusade and the heavy smoking by his own aides, seemed to agree

with Bourne: “It’s not his responsibility to tell a particular American citizen if he can or cannot smoke." Dr Bourne believes it is a fundamental philosophical issue, and that all a government should do is to finance research for safer cigarettes and to provide information on the hazards to enable people to make an informed choice. In the state of Minnesota, however, a law makes it illegal to smoke in a public place apart from designated areas. The tobacco industry, not surprisingly, finds Bourne's position more congenial than Califano's. The president of Phillip Morris, Ross R. Millhiser, in his contribution to a tobacco debate in the New York “Times.” quotes from the United States surgeon-general’s report "the psychological and physical benefits” of cigarettes in the area of mental health and the search for contentment. Actually, that famous report published in 1964 was the first government attempt to scare people off smoking. But it did not work. Cigarette smoking declined briefly, but today consumption in the United States has gone up to 620.000 M cigarettes a vear, compared with 516.000 M in 1963. (The trend is similar throughout the world.) What disturbs Califano is that three out of four smokers begin before they are 20 years old. The most dramatic increase is among young women between 13 and 19. Among men, half smoked in 1964; today only 39 per cent do. Among women, however, smoking is increasing. It sounds encouraging that, according to a gallup poll last November, antismoking feelings in the United States are growing. Califano’s clarion call has revived the great tobacco debate and stirred a lot of potential dust. So far, though, it has had no effect on cigarette company shares — probably because most people believe it is hopeless to try to save people from what Califano calls “slowmotion suicide."