Planning for prohibition

Monday August 15, 2011

The anti-tobacco lobby is developing plans to prohibit smoking altogether. Chris Snowden exposes a covert strategy and its flawed thinking.

Prohibition doesn’t work, most people will agree, so it’s no wonder that anti-smoking campaigners resent being called neo-prohibitionists. For many years, even the most sober observers found it difficult to believe that a campaign that began with health warnings would end with people going to jail for the possession of tobacco.

In Richard Kluger’s classic Ashes to Ashes, the tobacco industry lobbyist William F Dwyer is quoted as saying that “a widespread anti-tobacco industry is out to harass 60 million Americans who smoke and to prohibit the manufacture and use of tobacco products”. Appalled by this hyperbole, Kluger asks in exasperation: “What ‘widespread anti-tobacco industry’ was that? Who was trying to prohibit the manufacture of tobacco products?” When Ashes to Ashes was published in 1996, such an idea seemed ludicrous.

Skip forward 15 years and a widespread anti-tobacco industry is indeed out to prohibit the manufacture of tobacco products. A recent paper in BMC Public Health has suggested ways of going about it. The study – entitled ‘Daring to Dream’ – puts forward three different methods by which prohibition could be introduced.

They don’t call it prohibition, naturally. They call it the ‘endgame’, to be achieved through the use of ‘supply-side endgame strategies’. Nor do the authors question whether prohibition is desirable or morally justifiable. It is simply assumed to be the natural and righteous conclusion to their work. The stink from the failed War on Drugs and America’s disastrous attempts to suppress alcohol in the 1920s hangs over the whole exercise, but, as prohibitionists always tell themselves, this time will be different!

The three ‘endgame strategies’ under consideration, and their flaws, are as follows:

1. Incrementally reduce the number of cigarettes produced each year until it reaches zero in ten to 15 years – Basic economics tells us that reducing supply will increase price and stimulate the black market. In other words, it will bring about all the problems associated with prohibition but will give smugglers and organised criminals a few years to practice before full prohibition brings the situation to a head.

2. Make a law to force the tobacco industry to reduce smoking prevalence (punishable by fines) – This was tried in the United States as part of the Master Settlement Agreement in the late 1990s. The thinking was that the tobacco industry can wave its wand and stop people buying its product. It can’t, and the American system became just another way of extracting money from the tobacco industry, which is to say extracting money from smokers.

3. Change the law to make it easier for individuals to sue the tobacco industry, thus bankrupting it – Because nothing says ‘free and fair society’ like changing the law to target one particular individual or industry! This, too, has been tried before. The State of Florida changed the law to allow class actions against industry based on any harm from a product, even if the risks were well-known. This opened the flood-gates to all sorts of bone-headed legal claims against a range of industries and the law was later ruled unconstitutional.

Notice that all these strategies embrace the prohibitionists’ fallacy of assuming that industry is the root of the problem. It is a constant trait of those endowed with the certainty of the zealot to believe that people desire products because industry produces them, and not – as is the reality – that industry supplies products because people desire them.

It was the sincere belief of America’s Anti-Saloon League that people only drank because the villainous liquor trade lured them into it. Modern temperance groups such as Alcohol Concern likewise portray themselves as being at war with the drinks industry and the anti-smoking movement has always been obsessed with the tobacco industry.

Of course, industries are capable of boosting demand to some extent by advertising, but the tobacco industry can no longer do that. It must be discombobulating for anti-tobacco’s true believers to see people taking up the habit years after cigarette advertisements were banned. Perhaps this explains why they clutch at straws like smoking in the movies and retail displays – anything to confirm their belief that somehow the industry is manipulating our fragile little minds. After all, people couldn’t possibly smoke because they like it, could they?

This kind of mindset inevitably leads to prohibition, just as William F Dwyer said it would.

Another recently published study shows how it ends. Published in International Drug Policy, ‘History of Bhutan’s prohibition of cigarettes: Implications for neo-prohibitionists’ takes a look at how the tiny kingdom of Bhutan has been getting on after seven years of tobacco prohibition.

There is, says its author, “a thriving black market and significant and increasing tobacco smuggling… 23.7% of students had used any tobacco products (not limited to cigarettes) in the last 30 days… tobacco use for adults has not ended or is even close to ending… cigarette prohibition is instrumental in encouraging smuggling and black markets… The results of this study provide an important lesson learned for health practitioners and advocates considering or advocating, albeit gradual, but total cigarette ban as a public policy.”

That’s right. Prohibition still doesn’t work.

Chris Snowdon is a writer and blogger