Tobacco Ads Come 20 Years Late

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Filip Palda

Health Canada has a television ad campaign against smoking that shows the government has finally understood what has been common knowledge on the street for some time: smoking is uncool. The Health Canada ads do not preach against smoking. They just show a smoker talking while puffing through a tracheostomy necessitated by throat cancer that has presumably been caused by smoking. Anyone who saw the 1991 movie Dead Again will be familiar with this sort of unpleasantness. Viewers must make up their own minds about the glamour of smoking. Now Ottawa is thinking of reinforcing these ads by considering proposals to put pictures of cancerous lungs on cigarette packages.

This refreshing government approach to public health comes a bit late and is more than a bit misplaced.

Long before governments started cracking down on tobacco, friends, family, conscience, and economics were weighing on smokers to give up their habit. The grassroots movement against smoking started over 30 years ago. Back in 1965, 49.5 percent of Canadians smoked. According to Health Canada's estimate, by 1997 only 29 percent were lighting up. The country has changed since those hazy days when the professor would pull on a stogie while students reached for a Lucky to help focus on Shakespeare's use of the subjunctive in Titus Andronicus. Today, smoking has the same cachet as certain unhealthy practices of hillbillies.

Ever since the US Surgeon General's Report of 1964 on the ills of tobacco, non-smokers have believed that smoking was self-abuse; a dangerous nihilism to be stomped out. A man who does not care about himself will not care about others. By the 1980s non-smokers were pushing these nihilists to the fringes of society. Restaurants segregated and even banned smokers from their premises. In 1986, Air Canada announced it would limit or ban smoking on all its flights. In 1987, non-smoking lobby groups convinced the five major newspapers in Canada to refuse tobacco advertisements. In 1991, over 6,000 US companies refused to hire smokers, and 30 US states had to pass laws to protect smokers from job discrimination.

With social disapproval of smokers raining from the air like shrapnel, you would think governments could relax. They had helped to raise health concerns in the 1960s, and society was finishing the job. Instead, just as smoking was at a low ebb in the 1980s, governments joined the mother of all battles on smoking. Municipalities started to ban smoking from public places and restaurants. Ottawa banned smoking on airlines, banned all forms of tobacco advertising, and sent tobacco taxes skywards. The military analogy for this delayed burst of regulation would be the Allies dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima 20 years after the end of World War II. Recent federal advertisements against tobacco are just one weapon in a more widespread government attack on smoking that has been intensifying throughout the 1990s.

But surely a government that cared about public health in an intelligent, balanced manner would not be so particular in its choice of which dangerous habits to tax, regulate, and vituperate. Renowned Oxford epidemiologists Sir Richard Doll and Richard Peto found that diet, and in particular fat abuse, contributed more to deaths from cancer than did tobacco. A government impressed by Doll and Peto's findings would not make tobacco its main target. It would impose a two dollar fat-tax on peanut butter cups. Labels on McDonald's Happy Meals would warn children of the dangers of junk-food- induced coronaries. The law would ban McCains from advertising frozen pizzas at 2 in the morning when rumbling bellies offer no resistance.

Government policy towards tobacco is not consistent with its policy towards other causes of cancer because smokers are wimpy kids on the political block. Government shames smokers with regulations and advertising campaigns. This shame humbles smokers and unites anti-smokers in a campaign to tax tobacco. A feel for the cynicism of this exercise comes from noting that if tobacco revenues were a sign of who owns the industry, government would be the biggest shareholder.

If those who abused fats, in the form of fries, poutine, cupcakes, M&M's, and other delightful varieties, were in the minority, we would no doubt see lipid lovers shamed and taxed. But because obesity is on the rise we see a celebration of "persons of size." As Clint Eastwood said to a defenceless Gene Hackman from behind his gunsights in the movie Unforgiven, "deserve's got nothin' to do with it."

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