A reader alerted me to a poignant "confessional" from arch conservative William F. Buckley (hat tip Cathie). Buckley, the founder and long time editor (now retired) of the very conservative National Review is devoted to the Free Market, devoted as in religoius adoration. But it seems that even he has his limits:
My own story is that I am the founder of a doughty magazine which, if space was solicited tomorrow by a tobacco company, would agree to sell the space. We would come up with serious arguments featuring personal independence and pain/pleasure correlations to justify selling the space, but I would need to weep just a little bit on the inside over the simple existence of tobacco.Again, the personal story. My wife began smoking (furtively) when 15, which is about when I also began. When we were both 27, on the morning after a high-pitched night on the town for New Year's Eve, we resolved on mortification of the flesh to make up for our excesses:
We both gave up smoking.
The next morning, we decided to divorce - nothing less than that would distract us from the pain we were suffering. We came to, and flipped a coin ? the winner could resume smoking. I lost, and for deluded years thought myself the real loser, deprived of cigarettes.
Half a year ago my wife died, technically from an infection, but manifestly, at least in part, from a body weakened by 60 years of nonstop smoking. I stayed off the cigarettes but went to the idiocy of cigars inhaled, and suffer now from emphysema, which seems determined to outpace heart disease as a human killer.
Stick me in a confessional and ask the question: Sir, if you had the authority, would you forbid smoking in America? You'd get a solemn and contrite, Yes. Solemn because I would be violating my secular commitment to the free marketplace. Contrite, because my relative indifference to tobacco poison for so many years puts me in something of the position of the Zyklon B defendants after World War II. (New York Sun)
Comparing tobacco merchants with those who made the gas for Hitler's hcambers may strike some as hyperbole, but none of us who have seen the ravages of tobacco would think so. I don't agree with William Buckley on hardly anything. But I'll make an exception for this:
These folk manufactured the special gas used in the death camps to genocidal ends. They pleaded, of course, that as far as they were concerned, they were simply technicians, putting together chemicals needed in wartime for fumigation. Some got away with that defense; others, not.
Those who fail to protest the free passage of tobacco smoke in the air come close to the Zyklon defendants in pleading ignorance
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Revere, do you agree with him that America should "forbid smoking"?
I guess this would mean something like adding tobacco to the list of illegal drugs and jailing offenders. That in particular sounds like a horrible idea to me.
Edmund: I'm not much in the way of forbidding people. I am much in the way of making it difficult and unprofitable to sell cigarettes and inconvenient to smoke them anywhere except in one's own house.
"Comparing tobacco merchants with those who made the gas for Hitler's chambers may strike some as hyperbole, but none of us who have seen the ravages of tobacco would think so."
I've thought for a while that "tobacco-days" or "tobacco-years" (as in number of smoking-related deaths per day or year) could be used as a unit of measure for disasters, crimes against humanity, and that sort of thing. At the top, you'd have things like Hitler's Holocaust, the Ukraine famine of the early 30s, China's Great Leap Forward coming in around 15-20 tobacco-years, Pol Pot's killing fields around 5 or 6, and 9/11/01 weighing in at 3 or 4 tobacco-days. I think that would give the proper perspective on the cost of the tobacco industry.
The wartime makers of Zyklon B knew they were making it for killing humans. The prewar version, made for killing insects and rodents, had an odorant added to warn people it was poison, just as odorants are added to natural gas to alert people to gas leaks.
The people manufacturing smoking tobacco know they are adding chemicals which make the natural product even worse for human consumption, so the degree of difference between the wartime weapons and the peacetime poisons is not so great as it might first appear.
My father died of congestive heart failure at 72, after 4 heart attacks and many cycles of failing systems. His parents both lived into their mid 80's.
One day I did a calculation using rough figures for the number of cigarettes he smoked in a lifetime (varying from 40 a day in his 20's to about 10 in later years) and a few bouts of abstention.
Subtracting the length of his life from the average of his parents' lives and dividing by the approximate number of fags he smoked, I got so near to 15 minutes off his life per cigarette that it startled me.
A mate of mine works for Swiss Re as a medical adviser and I asked him about the effects of new treatments on lifespan. His reply was that there is nothing, but nothing, that governments could do to extend human lifespans that could come close to banning cigarettes. No medical advance in the last 50 years would be as effective, or as cost effective, as simply ditching cigarettes.
Alfred Nobel had a life changing event happen to him. As an important and public figure, newspapers had canned obituaries written in advance, ready to run on notice of an important person's death. Word of his death was mistakenly sent out, and he got to read one of those canned obituaries. What he saw shocked him, and changed his life. The obituary was titled "the merchant of death is dead" (in French).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Nobel
If tobacco company executives were characterized (accurately) as merchants of death, perhaps they might reconsider their life's work too.