Traits in the ashes
Alastair Mackie
Out of last week's Commons questions about the Government's new action against smoking _ grew a rambler rose of an answer. What Dr David Owen said wound itself round tobacco by classifying it along with the other addictive drugs; added cigarettes to other products impaled on the thorn of control it yourself or we'll do for you advertising; and spread its roots in a way that could split the launching pad, now in frenetic assembly, for the so-called safer cigarette.
The tobacco industry, caught up in a daunting entanglement, was understandably reticent and defensive. No, said the Tobacco Advisory Council, they had not contemplated the idea that cigarettes might be treated like drugs; that would be "several stages beyond what had happened so far." (It would indeed: how about, "Poison. This packet contains inflammable paper tubas filled with two noxious substaces which, on ignition, emit a third. Store in a safe place and keep away from children.") No, most emphatically, they would not support health education. The Health Education Council advertisements were thought by many people to be unethical, and anyway the industry did plenty of education of its own— on posters and packets and on the backs of gift coupons, for instance. As to cigarette advertising it wasn't a matter of increasing sales, said the chairman of Imperial Tobacco; the effect was only to cause brand-swapping. (Strange how that nostrum survives; the industry's market surveys must be just as good as those of the independent researchers who have shown it up for the rubbish it is.) The questions and their answers reflect and advance the development of public attitudes towards smoking. This particular step ?orward could hardly have come at a worse moment for the industry — and not just because of the tax and. price increases and the slump. The long-term portents are even worse. The much-vaunted increase in total consumption mainly comes from older smokers, women and the unskilled working class. The old, of course, are a declining market. Women (whose lung cancer rate, tragically, increases as their smoking catches up with men's) seem to be getting the message: recent Health Education Council campaigns for pregnant women showed how they can be persuaded to stop and can find out what cigarettes can do to children before birth and in their early years. The industry's main hope must lie with the unskilled workers, who go on smoking more and more. But even they, slow and difficult to get at as they are, usually follow the middle-class example in the end.
Recruitment of new smokers, to make matters worse, is failing even to replace proportionate losses. Half a million fewer smokers between 1961 and 1974, for instance, in a period when a two million population increase should have generated a million more. The young, again are the culprits: 40 per cent of under-nineteens, according to a Mintel survey, have never smoked, compared with only 10 per cent of the over-sixties — the classic pattern, as the survey puts it, of a declining market. True, there is always the export trade, but the home market is the basis of the business and there, as the figures show, the omens are awful.
What to do about sales (and presumably internecine competition for shares of a shrinking market is no basis for a long-term strategy) is not the industry's only dilemma. Tobacco politics has acquired an urgency which could nullify a hitherto unfailing tactic — SO prolonging discussions as to make them outlast the life of the Government. It is little over a year since all of us, Parliament included, were asked to accept that cigarette advertisements would not in future "greatly over-emphasise the pleasure to be obtained from' smoking; appeal to pride or general manliness" (whatever that may be); "use a fashionable social setting to support the impression that cigarette smoking is a go-ahead habit or an essential part of the pleasure and excitement of modern living"; or "strikingly present romantic situations and young people in love in such a way as to seem to link the pleasures of such situations with the pleasures of smoking."
Difficult as it must have been to breach the rickety circumlocution masquerading as a code from which these are extracts, the industry's advertising agents managed it. We have since been treated to the entanglement of long weekends with long cigarettes; the comparison, as 'Britain's Finest', of cigarettes with the Spitfire; and, long after the slogan that went with it has been laughed off the hoardings, to the picture of that fatuous mountain stream. No wonder Dr Owen, in what seemed a masterly understatement, "was not satisfied that this voluntary agreement had been strictly applied." And no wonder that the next stage came quickly.
It took the form, in April this year, of six requests to the industry and a six-fold 'No' that must have made their PR men wince. No voluntary contribution to health education; no stopping of advertis ing in cinemas, except during programmes so wet that even children often dislike them; no anonymous sponsorship; no printing of tar yields on packets; no restrictions on gift coupons; and no change in the health warning. (That final 'No' is not surprising: three Health Education Council studies indicated that the present health warning is at best almost useless and sometimes a positive incitement to smoke more.) Cigarettes are still some way from being put on prescription, peddled by pushers or smoked only by consenting adults in private. But public awareness has reached a point at which debate is needed, about some of the issues confronting those who make cigarettes and all that goes with smoking them, giving them up (which half of all smokers want to do), advertising, taxing and prohibiting publicity about them and preventing their effect; and about the importance to these issues of the very element reported to be sticking most tightly in the tobacco industry's gullet health education.
Almost since cigarettes first became worth taxing there has been a sense of guilt in our collective mind about whether the proceeds are not immoral and using them not unlike living off prostitution. The guilt is well founded as long as the smokers drift or are pushed into their habit without knowing the risks. And this, owing to the sparsity of objective information and the superfluity of meretricious advertising, is undoubtedly happening. But if all smokers formed their habit in full knowledge of the facts, society would be blameless. Smokers would simply be exercising the sixth freedom — that of self-destruction; the £36 million or so that it costs to treat their diseases and the 39 million or so days' work that chest illness costs the country every year being a fleabite compared with the £1.5 billion that the habit provides for the revenue. Tobacco would simply be something else to tax. What determines the moral issue is thus simply knowledge; and this health education offers.
As beneficiary of the tax, the state, it is often argued, should ensure that the decision whether to smoke is an informed one. The argument has defects. Taxes are not, as civil servants put it, hypothecated. Money is got in from wherever it may be available, and used as need dictates. Nor, on another count, can the state's general responsibility for our good be looked at so narrowly. Smoking is a dirty and dangerous habit but it is only a small part of a lifestyle which worries doctors, teachers and everybody else concerned with our life chances and those of our descendants. The state's duty — and even the tiny resources it provides for health education denote recognition — is broad-based and positive encouragement of better informed living.
The tobacco industry needs no such breadth of view. Its own
interest, and perhaps the only way out of its predicament is to restore the respectability that cigarettemaking enjoyed before the effects of smoking were perceived and the idea emerged that people, no less than the planet they live on, can be polluted. Everybody else's interest is that the industry should do as other polluters do towards preventing the damage and clearing up the mess. Obfuscation about health warnings, and objections to health education because it bites, are a poor substitute for helping to pay for the knowledge that they owe it to the public to provide.
Atastair Mackie is director general of the Health Education Council. His opinions are his own.
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