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Richard Kluger: Ashes to Ashes
interviewed by Emma Taylor on 23 April, 1996
" I think the practice is likely to go away before we find the need to outlaw smoking."
Richard Kluger is a veteran journalist and the author of "Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris." He talked with Tripod about the need to stop pointing the finger of blame, and start making a deal with the tobacco companies.
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Tripod: What drove you to write this book -- was it moral outrage, curiosity?
RK: Well, I think it was two things. In part, it was the realization, after a bit of time, that no human activity, beside making war, took more lives in the course of the twentieth century than smoking. Then I found that no previous book had attempted to tell the whole cigarette story. That is, in all its aspects -- the agricultural, the financial, the medical, the legal the political, the psychological, if you will.
My thought was to try to do this in a dispassionate way, because this is a very emotional subject. It can be such an irrational, intimate thing, and the whole point was to try to control myself before reaching judgments. That was what I set out to do, and hope I have done.
Tripod: Did you ever smoke? You write like a smoker?
RK: Like the president, I never really inhaled. I puffed at cigarettes for ten or fifteen years, and I did enjoy cigars until I started writing this book, when I started to get psychosomatic symptoms. I think they were psychosomatic. I even tried to keep a pipe lit for a number of years. But I wasn't an addicted smoker in the sense that most serious cigarette smokers are. When I quit, it was no problem for me, because I hadn't inhaled. Inhaling is the key, of course, to the danger of smoking.
Tripod: I tried quitting a week ago, and after reading the preface to your book, I had to go out and buy a pack.
RK: Sorry about that.
Tripod: That's okay. Philip Morris seems to be your main villain, but you also seem to say that people have known for nearly a century that tobacco was bad for them. Does that mean that you are against people suing tobacco companies?
"If the cigarette manufacturers' behavior was unconscionable, the rest of us have stood by and let them run a pretty nasty business."
RK: I think it's a fruitless effort. The problem is, to blame the cigarette companies for knowingly poisoning their customers, when the customers themselves knew or have known that they're being poisoned slowly but surely is self-defeating. Up til now, no jury has convicted the industry for this. We call it assumption of risk -- that's the legal term.
The way to get back at the companies is not to try to sue them, or throw their officials into jail for denying what we all know to be true, but to regulate them. That's what we haven't done, that's the real requirement. If the cigarette manufacturers' behavior was unconscionable, the rest of us have stood by and let them run a pretty nasty business, without imposing any real restraints on them for the whole course of the twentieth century. That's got to stop.
Tripod: One step that has been taken is the warning labels placed on cigarette packets. But you talk in you book about how cognitive dissonance explains why people still smoke. Do you think that if those warnings had always been on cigarette packs, that smoking would have taken off in the same way? Do you think we can brush off the warnings because they haven't always been there?
RK: The warning labels are an irony in the sense that what they have succeeded in doing most of all is shielding the tobacco companies from suits along the lines I just mentioned. Since they went on the packs, in 1966, the industry has been able to point to them and say, "Listen, everybody has been warned." If the warnings had been on earlier -- and of course, the companies could have put them on, they didn't have to wait for congress to do it, and that was one of their sins, in my view -- if the warnings had been more specific, if they had been larger in type, if they had said that smoking eventually kills one in four users, if they had listed the ingredients. None of the warnings list the toxic ingredients, even now. Almost every other product on the market lists the dangerous ingredients by law. Cigarettes have gotten away with it. And the labels don't say it's addictive.
"If you're up or you're down or you're lonely or you're overwhelmed at a party, or you're bored or whatever -- cigarettes are companionable, they're cheap, they're convenient, they give you instant gratification."
You can say, as I have, that we all know it's addictive, but nevertheless, if you read it all the time when you buy a pack, it would have a deterrent effect, I think. It wouldn't have changed the pattern notably, but everything contributes to a social habit like this. There's no way of telling what the effect would have been. I certainly think today, one of the things we ought to do is make the labels bigger and more explicit.
Tripod: One of the things you mention as being a boost for cigarettes was during the First World War, when smoked them in the trenches. Was the soothing effect of cigarettes real, or were they manipulated by the tobacco companies to believe that?
RK: Well, there's no doubt that users of cigarettes perceive them to be a great aid, especially in times of stress. There is no real evidence that they relieve stress -- if anything, they are a stimulant. They are both a stimulant, though, and a sedative, or they are so perceived. Which is really peculiar -- there is no other product or substance that I'm aware of that seems to have those opposite effects. Because it's so protean, because users like them for so many different times -- if you're up or you're down or you're lonely or you're overwhelmed at a party, or you're bored or whatever -- cigarettes are companionable, they're cheap, they're convenient, they give you instant gratification, or so they're perceived.
Especially if your life is hanging on the line and you could be blown up at any minute in warfare, there's a nothing to lose view of the thing. That's why I think that people at the edges, people who are under great stress in life I think find smoking some kind of relief.
Tripod: At the end of your book you suggest a remedy: to exempt tobacco companies from lawsuits in exchange for eight measures -- could you explain that a little more?
RK: Well, I said earlier that I thought the lawsuits, for the most part, they're expensive, they go on forever and they're fatally flawed. In fact, the Supreme Court has upheld the view that you really can't sue these companies because it's general knowledge of just how hazardous smoking is. Rather than spinning wheels and pursuing this kind of thing, which of course costs the industry a great deal of money and has a depressing effect on their stock prices and so forth, I would be willing to get them to the bargaining table by giving them immunity from these kinds of suits, which I think are pointless, and unwinnable, if they are willing to accept very serious regulations by the government.
"This is an historic moment in terms of whether this very dangerous product is going to be controlled in any serious way."
To make cigarettes less lethal, less addicting and less seductive to young people. We don't have anything in the books to do that. And for the first time, we have an anti-smoking president, and those initiatives are now on the table, and this year will be played out. We'll see -- this is an historic moment in terms of whether this very dangerous product is going to be controlled in any serious way.
Tripod: Do you think your remedy would lead to the end of smoking in the United States?
RK: I don't think it would end it, and I'm not a prohibitionist, and certainly the FDA people are realistic about that. But it certainly would have a deterrent effect, it would make it harder for younger people to get hold of the product. But more to the point, one of the regulations the FDA could put there, and I think it would be essential, even though it wouldn't be the first thing they would do, would be to put an absolute ceiling on how strong cigarettes can be. And then lower that ceiling -- that is the tars, nicotines, carbon monoxide, and all the other dangerous ingredients that we know are there -- they could be brought down, over a period of ten or fifteen years, to something like forty percent of their current level.
That would almost certainly, based on what we know so far about the cause and relationship between smoking and disease, that would make smoking less dangerous. It certainly wouldn't make it safe, it certainly wouldn't make it non-addicting, but it would make it significantly less so, and that's a major public health gain, in my view.
Tripod: One of the regulations you mention is advertising. I remember hearing once that cigarette companies would be delighted if advertising were banned, because it would save them so much money -- as they have their customers hooked, so they don't need the advertising. What do you think about that?
RK: Well it was certainly the argument they made when they banned television and radio advertising of cigarettes. They took the money, essentially, and put a bit into buying other kinds of companies, but they also put it very heavily into promotion and price-cutting. I think the loss of advertising would hurt the legitimacy of the product somewhat. It's out there, the advertising does suggest, if nothing else, that smoking is all pleasure, and of course no pain. That's why it's essentially a deceptive practice.
I think if you took away all advertising -- and I think that's improper in terms of the first amendment, it's a legal product -- but I do think you can make it less seductive. I suggest that in the book -- if you have what they call tombstone advertising. That would help. But I don't think it would make the practice go away.
Tripod: Do you think cigarettes will ever be illegal?
RK: It's hard to say. I think the practice is likely to go away before we find the need to outlaw them. Of course you have only one quarter of the population smoking now; it used to be half, forty years ago, of the adult population. I just think it's going to be with us for the foreseeable future, until we get some other kind of stress relieving material. I guess "soma" was what Huxley had in mind in "Brave New World." I'm afraid we're going to have some kind of substance with us for some time.
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