The Societal Harm of Smoking

Although it’s becoming less socially acceptable, smoking has been the most popular vice throughout history. In fact, smoking has been around in one form or another for thousands of years. 
Initially discovered thousands of years ago by Native Americans, tobacco was used in ritual as well as medical treatment. After being given to Columbus during his discovery of the New World, tobacco has been a smash hit, even being used as money at one point (Boston University Medical Center, 1999). The link to smoking and cancer was uncovered in the 1920’s and an astounding amount of research has been done since indicating how harmful the habit is. Though some argue the choice to smoke is an individual right, the sale and use of cigarettes should be banned in the US because of the health risks to the individual and others, their addictive nature, and the enormous financial burden on our nation. It’s time for the nation to kick the habit formally and make smoking a punishable offense, akin to drug use.

Lethality

Smoking is an extremely dangerous activity for both smokers and non smokers, and causes a significant amount of deaths each year. In fact, tobacco is the single greatest preventable cause of death in the world today, killing up to half the people who use it (World Health Organization [WHO], 2008). It has been preached to us that smoking is hazardous to our health since we were children, so it is not surprising that in addition to lung cancer, smoking causes many types of cancer, including cancers of the larynx, kidney, bladder, stomach, colon, mouth, and esophagus. Smoking is also to blame for leukemia, bronchitis, pulmonary disease, heart disease, stroke, miscarriage, infertility and birth defects (WHO, 2008).

In addition to harming the individual smoker, environmental smoke, or passive smoking, represents a significant health risk to anyone near someone smoking as well. Barbara Boughton explains that passive smokers have an increased chance of many health problems such as lung cancer and asthma, and in children, sudden infant death syndrome. (Boughton, 2006). Smoking is responsible for a significant number of deaths in the US, in fact according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention all Americans—smokers and nonsmokers—pay the price for smoking. Smoking is still the leading preventable cause of death in the United States, causing 443,000—or nearly 1 of every 5—deaths annually. These include 46,000 heart attack deaths and 3,400 lung cancer deaths among nonsmokers who are exposed to secondhand smoke (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2010). While the numbers are staggering, the fact that nearly 50,000 people that don’t even smoke die each year makes this an issue beyond just educating people that want to smoke or increasing taxes. Rather, this is an issue about a toxic substance endangering innocent people with no positive benefit to society. Recently, The FDA banned the drugs Darvon and Darvocet, both mild pain killers, because of harmful effects to the heart. If bans on harmful medical drugs are justified, then why are cigarettes deemed ok? Because cigarettes have been proven harmful to the heart by a stunning amount of research, the same logic for a ban applies. While banning a substance to save people from themselves is clearly justified, the health affects to non-smoking citizens deems such a ban mandatory.

Addiction

To make matters worse, cigarettes are not only harmful to people’s health, but extremely addictive. Those who have heard a smoker mention tomorrow is their quitting day know that for many, tomorrow never comes. Nicotine found in cigarettes actually causes changes in the brain that make people want to use it more and also causes unpleasant withdrawal symptoms (American Heart Association [AHA], 2010). For these two reasons, it is extremely difficult to quit smoking because nicotine is the active drug in tobacco, the main ingredient of a cigarette. People are no longer empowered to make their own decisions because of the chemical’s power over the brain. In fact, the Royal College of Physicians in Britain have gone so far as to say Nicotine is as addictive as heroin and cocaine, and cigarettes should be regarded as a nicotine-delivery systems comparable to a needle and syringe (Laurance, 2000). The addictive nature of smoking is part of why it is so dangerous; most people who smoke may never intend to smoke their entire lives. On top of that, once someone who smokes realizes the dangerous health effects or actually contracts a harmful disease from the act, they rarely are able to quit and get healthy. “Research on smoking shows that most smokers desire to quit. But smoking is so addictive that fewer than 20% of the people who try ever successfully kick the habit” (Boughton and Frey, 2005). Because quitting is not an option for many, fully banning the sale of cigarettes is necessary. In fact, The Comprehensive Drug Abuse and Control Act was created as a means to regulate addictive substances. Cocaine was used for medication throughout history and found to be highly addictive and thus was included in the act for regulation. If a substance such as cocaine, with its mild medical benefits, is found to be unfit for use due to its addictive nature, then smoking tobacco falls under the same logic, with one exception; smoking serves no medical purpose whatsoever.

Cost to Society

While almost everyone has heard about addiction and the toll smoking takes on a person’s health, most people don’t know is that they are paying for other people to smoke on many different levels. Smoking costs the US billions of dollars every year in health care costs, fire damage and deaths, and litter costs. These are things that everyone pays for regardless of their smoking preference. The increased burden on health affects the health insurance premiums for everyone to pay for that increased cost, not to mention publicly funded health care programs at the state and federal level that pay for health care of smoking caused disease. According to the Centers for Disease Control, each year, diseases caused by cigarette smoking result in $96 billion in health care costs, much of which is paid by taxpayers through publicly-funded health programs(CDC, 2010). That’s a significant amount of money, more than just a few pennies extra on your taxes. It’s certainly a large expense that in this economic era, would be justified in being cut.

In addition to adding a major health care burden, smoking also costs a significant amount of money and unnecessary deaths due to house fires. It was commonplace in the eighties to see ads warning against smoking in bed and to mind your cigarette butt, but it is still a massive problem today. Specifically, smoking is responsible for 2% of residential fires, adding up to 450 deaths, 1,025 injuries, and $303 million in property losses annually, and accounting for 17% of fire related deaths, making smoking the leading cause of death by fire (Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA], 2010). To complement this, the National Fire Protection Association states, “One out of four fatal victims of smoking-material fires is not the smoker whose cigarette started the fire”(National Fire Protection Association [NFPA], 2010). Effectively, 337 people die each year on average merely because of a preventable fire hazard, the cigarette. Not to mention the $303 million that everyone pays for in increased housing insurance premiums.

But even after the fire is out, a cigarette has a different effect on our nation, in the form of litter. It’s not a rare occurrence to be waiting at a stoplight and see an abundance of spent butts scattered around. Keep America Beautiful, an organization sponsored largely by Philip Morris, funded a study on litter and found that tobacco products comprise 37.7% of all US roadway litter. In that same study, they found that $11.5 billion is spent cleaning up roadside litter every year (Mid Atlantic Solid Waste Consultants, 2009). That’s $4.37 billion spent cleaning up cigarette butts off the side of the road, and unfortunately, we all pay for that service. Cost aside, cigarette butt litter is an eyesore and an environmental problem that affects everyone as well. With all the green initiatives today, smoking is a natural place to focus to improve the environment in a meaningful way. Whether it’s health care, accidental fires, or litter abatement, cigarettes are largely responsible for over $100 billion in costs incurred by everyone as well as a significant amount of deaths not caused by disease.

Individual Autonomy

Opponents of a ban on cigarettes claim smoking is an individual right and that such governmental paternalism is an infringement on freedoms. This defense is both untrue and based on unfounded logic. First and foremost, because smoking affects other people on multiple levels such as health, fire damage and death, litter, and massive monetary expenses related to all of these, the right of the individual is infringing upon the rights of the masses. Philosophy professor Michael Lavin explains that, because of the health impacts to non-smokers, children, and fetuses, there is no valid moral argument for individual liberty (Lavin and Slomka, 2004). Freedom is not the ability to do whatever you want, that is anarchy. Stein Ringen, professor of sociology and social policy at Oxford University explains, Freedom cannot in practice be unlimited and needs to be restrained at least to prevent harm to others (and the ultimate harm to oneself of abolishing one’s own liberty (Ringen, 2005). For example, because murder affects another person, people are not given the right to kill someone. While this may seem like an extreme example, because smoking has been proven to kill many non-smoking people, the argument is one and the same. The right to choose to smoke may only be valid in a vacuum, where no one else exists to be affected.

But smoking also harms the smoker, similar to suicide which is also illegal, and the government sets laws constantly to protect its citizens. Such laws as speed limits, seatbelt requirements, regulation of asbestos, and building codes are all everyday examples of how government protects people from danger through regulation. The argument for freedom of choice is also invalid for another reason, and that is the addictive nature of smoking. The World Health Organization explains that, Tobacco use is often – incorrectly – perceived to be solely a personal choice. This is belied by the fact that when fully aware of the health impact, most tobacco users want to quit but find it difficult to stop due to the addictiveness of nicotine (WHO, 2008). In fact, addiction completely reverses the argument on liberty, as cigarettes themselves infringe on personal choice because smokers can no longer make the choice to stop smoking.

Conclusion

Although bans on smoking in public places are becoming commonplace, this simply is not the proper solution. They fail to address the health concerns of the individual, as well as those in the home, such as children, not to mention the severe cost to society at large. Also a minimum smoking age and higher taxes don’t replace lives lost in a fire nor do they clean up the litter that we all see every day. These are issues easily solved by eliminating cigarettes, and the practice of smoking altogether. While there are many political factors in the way of a full smoking ban, the need is certainly evident. Because of lobbyists from the tobacco companies and civil rights groups such as the ACLU, in addition to tobacco’s engrained nature in society due to centuries of smoking, we may never see a full ban at all. It is ironic that even those who choose to smoke would agree that it is a dangerous habit, they still continue to light up on a regular basis.

References

American Heart Association. (2010). Nicotine addiction. Retrieved from American Heart Association website: http://www.americanheart.org

Boston University Medical Center. (1999). History of tobacco. Retrieved from http://academic.udayton.edu/health/syllabi/tobacco/history.htm#newworld

Boughton, B. (2006). Smoking. The Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine, 4, 3469-3474. Retrieved from Gale Database

Boughton, B. and Frey, R. (2005). Smoking. The Gale Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine, 4(2), 1881-1887. Retrieved from Gale Database

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2010, April 22). Tobacco control saves lives and money. Retrieved from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website: http://www.cdc.gov/Features/TobaccoControlData/

Federal Emergency Management Agency. (2010). Smoking-related fires in residential buildings. Topical Fire Report Series, 11(4), 1-12. Retrieved from http://www.usfa.dhs.gov/downloads/pdf/tfrs/v11i4.pdf

Lavin, M. and Slomka, J. (2004). Smoking. Encyclopedia of Bioethics, 4(3), 2449-2453. Retrieved from Gale Database

Laurance, J. (2000, Feb 9). Nicotine ‘is as addictive as cocaine and heroin’. The Independent. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk

Mid Atlantic Solid Waste Consultants. (2009, Sept 18). 2009 National visible litter survey and litter cost study. Retrieved from http://www.kab.org/site/DocServer/Final_KAB_Report_9-18-09.pdf?docID=4561

National Fire Protection Association. (2010). Smoking. Retrieved from National Fire Protection Association website: http://www.nfpa.org/categoryList.asp?categoryID=294&URL=Safety%20Information/For%20consumers/Causes/Smoking&cookie_test=1

Ringen, S. (2005). Liberty, freedom, and real freedom. Society, 42(3), 36-39. Retrieved from EBSCO Database

World Health Organization. (2008). MPOWER: a policy package to reverse the tobacco epidemic. Switzerland: WHO Press. Retrieved from World Health Organization website: http://www.who.int/tobacco/mpower/mpower_english.pdf