Public Policy Sources #40: Social forces against smoking

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By 1987, when Parliament was discussing measures against tobacco advertising (Bill C-51) and measures that restricted where people could smoke (Bill C-204), Gallup Polls reported that 67 percent of Canadians favoured a ban on advertising and 30 percent opposed a ban. The 1986 figure for smoking prevalence measured by Statistics Canada in its survey of the labour force found that smoking prevalence was 33 percent. This is remarkably close to the Gallup figures for those who opposed smoking regulation. It is hard to think that the move to regulate smoking was divorced from politics. In 1965, more than half of those eligible to vote smoked. By the mid-1980s, smokers were "wimpy kids" on the political block. They faced the opprobrium of non-smokers and of a large number of quitters. Over half of the people who have ever smoked have quit and detest tobacco with a zeal unmatched by that of those who have never smoked.

In a survey of a large number of attitude studies, psychology professor Bryan Gibson (1997) found that non-smokers tend to be scornful of smokers and feel that smokers are stupid, likely to fail in marriage and work, low in self-esteem, and even immoral. Disdain for smokers is a social snowball that grows as the numbers of smokers diminishes. In a 1997 study for which I am aware of no Canadian counterpart, Peter Jacobson and his colleagues uncovered that in the United States in the late nineteenth century, a crusade rose against smoking. Fourteen American states had anti-smoking bylaws and restrictions on tobacco advertising were widespread. It is no wonder that this should be so. Smokers and tobacco users were a minority. As smokers grew in number throughout the first half of the twentieth century, there was little impetus to enforce tobacco regulations. Regulatory questions of the 1940s dealt mainly with how to sustain the industry. Regulation of smoking only started to reappear in the 1970s, when smokers started falling into a minority. In the 1980s, when they make up only one-third of the population, anti-smoking laws take their full effect. It was only in 1986, for example, that the World Health Organization got on the bandwagon with its resolutions that encouraged governments to ban the advertising of smoking, put health warnings on packs of cigarettes, provide smokers with cessation programs, raise taxes on tobacco, protect against second-hand smoke with anti-smoking by-laws, and protect minors with laws against the sale of cigarettes to minors.

Why swing the sword so hard after the dragon was down? Franklin Zimring (1993) suggests that regulations often come after social norms have enforced compliance with the masses' views. Regulations do not break new ground. They simply make it a little easier for social norms to operate. Much of the regulation of the 1980s and 1990s may be no more than society putting the final stamp of disapproval on smoking. As Zimring (1993) writes:

There is no disputing that the tremendous upsurge of smoking in the first half of the twentieth century was a social phenomenon. But some observers may be tempted to assume a cause-and-effect relationship between government antismoking measures over the past two decades and the decline in smoking prevalence. Yet the broad international character of the decline and the temporal sequence of both the trends in smoking and most government countermeasures suggest that social change is the major explanation of changes to date in cigarette smoking in the United States.

Zimring found that regulations come with delay not just in the case of tobacco but also in the case of drugs and alcohol. Consumption of alcohol fell by 70 percent in the 30 years leading up to the first American prohibition of alcohol in the 1850s. Alcohol consumption fell in the years leading up to the great prohibition of 1919. Cocaine and opium remained legal only so long as they were popular fixes for melancholy, as Valium and Prozac are today.

In the case of cigarettes it seems, according to Robert Kagan and Jerome Skolnik (1993), that the decline in smoking was led by high-status people and there may have been a social "trickle-down effect:" bosses for example, stopped smoking, setting an example for their employees just as Louis XIV set an example of cleanliness for France when he discouraged nobles from relieving themselves over staircases and from palace balconies. Today, smoking has the same cachet as certain unhealthy practices of the hillbillies and is subject to a level of peer pressure that might have made even a Winston Churchill throw his cigar box in the Thames.

Saying that smoking started to decline because high-status people started showing an example does not explain why they modified their behaviour or why others found their example one worth following. The rise in income per capita after the Second World War and the rise in the anticipated life-span may have induced the decline in smoking. As with pollution, smoking seems to follow a hill-shaped path when tracked against national income. As income rises, people can afford more cigarettes, so people can smoke more than before the rise in income. As Viscusi (1992) documents, a rise in smoking driven by a rise in income seems to be the story from the start of the century until the early 1950s. But, there is an opposing effect. With rising incomes, one may wish to live longer: more income means that you have more to live for in retirement. If you combine advances in technology that allow people to buy advanced health care in their later years, the combination produces a tendency for smoking and income to march in opposite directions.

A story went about in my student days at the University of Chicago of a professor in the economics department who was expecting to win the Nobel Prize in about ten years. He was also a heavy smoker at the time and figured that to enjoy the fruits of his labours and the glory that came with the Nobel Prize he would quit smoking to increase his chances of living until he won the world's top honour. His gamble paid off, he took the prize, and now, many years later, is still alive and stroking his Swedish pendant. The calculations he made may have been the sort that millions of people made who felt that they wanted to be around to enjoy their future prosperity. What may have hastened their choice to butt out was also the growing evidence that smoking could hurt your health. The desire to live long to enjoy great income seems to be a concern of the second half of this century and may explain why smoking in the last 30 years has fallen as income has risen. We see today a tendency for smoking to fall among all citizens as their incomes rise. In consequence we also see that smoking is least prevalent among professions associated with upper incomes. Figure 3 shows that the lowest income group (quintile) has a 41.8 percent smoking prevalence while the highest income group has a 20.3 percent smoking prevalence.

Even though no one can be certain of what caused the decline in smoking, it seems that government was not the main cause of the decline. Smoking started to fall in the United States in the 1950s--before the Surgeon General's 1964 report. Smoking slowed in the mid-1950s when the Federal Trade Commission suppressed advertising about tar and nicotine contents of cigarettes. Government advertising against tobacco appeared in the 1960s and the informational efforts of government are widely seen as accelerating the decline in smoking. Given trends in the 1950s, it is legitimate to wonder how much faster smoking would have declined had a free market in cigarette advertising been allowed to thrive. The social forces ranged against tobacco started growing in the 1950s and, if there is one thing a free market is capable of, it is of sniffing out these forces and catering to them. Government's efforts to suppress private advertising and take on the role of information crusader can be looked upon as suspect. Even more suspect is the heightened campaign of regulation and taxation that followed government's information crusade. Not only did regulations come on the scene late, but one may question whether they had anything like the effect reformers intended them to have.

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