Smokenders.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Anti-smoking activists - Editorial

The paternalists come out of the closet.

IN 1990 I INTERVIEWED MAN NAMED Ahron Leichtman for a story about the anti-smoking movement. At the time he was president of Citizens Against Tobacco Smoke, which had successfully lobbied for a federal law banning smoking on airplanes. "We're not trying to protect the smoker from himself," he insisted. "We're trying to protect the non-smoker from the smoker." Since then Leichtman seems to have changed his tune. He is now executive director of Citizens for a Tobacco-Free Society.

The shift from Citizens Against Tobacco Smoke to Citizens for a Tobacco-Free Society is a sign of the times. Anti-smoking activists and their government allies have always been paternalists, but lately they seem to feel less of a need to pretend that they're not. This suggests that they do not anticipate much opposition to measures aimed at achieving "a tobacco-free society."

Leichtman is not the only anti-smoker to go public with his ambitions. In late February, David Kessler, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said that tobacco can be viewed as a drug, a revelation that earned him front-page coverage in major newspapers. If tobacco is a drug, he reasoned, maybe the FDA should have authority over cigarettes, in which case it would have to ban them as unacceptably hazardous.

Congress is not about to let the FDA ban cigarettes, although Rep. Mike Synar (D-Okla.) has introduced legislation that would allow the agency to regulate them. The point of Kessler's little charade, in which he was shocked--shocked--to discover that cigarettes contain nicotine, was to emphasize the addictive nature of tobacco and portray smokers as witless victims rather than independent moral agents. If smokers do not choose to smoke, but are instead chemically compelled to do so, the government is doing them a favor when it tries to stop them.

"Those smokers who are out there are addicted because of nicotine," Synar said on the March 10 Crossfire. "Tobacco is as addictive as heroin, and many Americans are hooked." Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) made a similar claim on the March 9 Nightline: "A large number of smokers would like to give it up, but they can't do it because this hook has been placed on them by the tobacco industry."

This is nonsense. It may be difficult to stop smoking, but it is certainly not impossible. About as many Americans have quit smoking as currently smoke, and more than 90 percent of them gave up the habit without...