The Rare Government Program That Worked

This is the year of the 50th year anniversary of one government program that was actually needed and has worked (a rarity in today's world of un necessary government intervention and intrusion into the lives of citizens), the campaign to discourage people from killing themselves by smoking cigarettes. In 1964 the US Surgeon General (the President's appointed "head doctor" of the country) released a report that said smoking causes illness and death and that, the government should do something about stopping the killing. In the years that followed, warning labels were put on cigarette packs, cigarette commercials were banned, taxes were raised and new restrictions were placed on where people could light up.

The sum total of the warning campaign has been to drop smoking rates in the United States from 42% in 1964 to just 18% today, and to make smokers near pariahs. And smoking rates continue to decline. That's a miraculous decrease, given that smoking cigarettes was the norm in the days before that report was released and shocked smokers. After the report was publicized smoking was seen as both dangerous and socially unacceptable. I remember as a kid the horrid smell of smoke everywhere. In homes, restaurants, even in hospitals, and yet we all thought it was normal. Celebrities glamorized smoking in films and commercials glorified the "manly" person who puffed on those instruments of death.

The committee of eminent medical researchers and physicians who investigated and issued the report said that cigarette smoking clearly did cause lung cancer (prior to that cigarette companies hired propaganda sources to promote smoking as a harmless, even healthy habit), and that smoking was responsible for the nation's huge mostly male (since women who smoked were looked upon as less than ideal) cancer death rate. It also said there was no valid evidence that filters were reducing the danger. Cigarette companies had been promoting their filters are purifiers, tough there was no evidence that they were. The committee also said that the government should address the problem with policies that discouraged smoking and made it more expensive to buy cigarettes. It did, and millions of lives have been saved because of it.

I remember the the days before the report and anti smoking campaigns as a boy riding with my dad in his car to buy cigarettes from the endless cigarette machines that ended them everywhere. A pack of cigarettes then cost so little that a smoker could buy 4 packs for about a dollar. In 1996 my dad died from throat cancer caused by his smoking, about 25 years after he stopped smoking. When he was dying I asked him about why his smoking as he said, "It was what most people did even though we always knew it was unhealthy to smoke".

By the 1970s the government enacted laws to protect non-smokers from second hand cigarette smoke, with nonsmoking sections on airplanes, in restaurants and in other places. Those eventually gave way to complete smoking bans. Cigarette machines disappeared, cigarette taxes rose, and restrictions on the sale of cigarettes to minors got tougher. And lawsuits against tobacco companies became common. As smoking rates declined dramatically, in order to maintain profits from sales, the cigarette companies shifted their marketing and sales abroad, particularly in Asia, which has a huge smoking rate today. It's shameful, yet capitalism in its purest form.

I never smoked nor wanted to smoke cigarettes but realize my luckily being a product of the age in which cigarettes were exposed as killers is probably the reason why I never did smoke.  For that I must say a rare "Well Done" to the U.S. government.  Oh, uh.... but let's not light up to celebrate.