Two years ago, Silbaugh and her neighbor Anthony Ishak passed an ordinance banning anyone born after 1 January 2000 from ever buying cigarettes in their town. The measure took effect in September 2021. The idea was to curb youth smoking rates without yanking anything away from people already addicted, essentially grandfathering out tobacco. Every year, there’d be a smaller slice of the population that could buy cigarettes, until one day no one would be left. At least, that was the vision.
So it’s hard to imagine that a world without cigarettes would be a bad thing. Prohibition might fast-track it and help avoid needless suffering, as public health officials will remind you. But at what cost? There’s obviously no enumerated right to cigarettes, but there is a right to live our lives as we see fit, so long as we don’t infringe on others’ ability to do the same.
While the tobacco endgame – smoking rates below 5% – seems ultimately inevitable, getting the timeline right is the $1.85tn question. Should cigarettes die on their own, or at the hands of the state? (...)
Over time, though, nicotinic receptors become less responsive to the drug, so the brain starts to create more of them. And these multiplying receptors are like petulant baby birds, incessantly crying to be fed. Go too long without a cigarette, and withdrawal’s sure to follow – irritability, depression and cravings galore. Of course, there’s no gun to the head, but smoking another cigarette takes the pain away and offers an immediate sense of pleasure, if only for a short while.
The biology is interesting and all, says Carl Hart, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at Columbia University, but it alone can’t tell us what the boundaries of public health should be – whether prohibition is proper in the name of the collective good.
Known for his controversial views on drug use (he advocates for the legalization of all drugs and wrote a book in which he admits to having used heroin regularly for the past five years), Hart wears his hair in long dreadlocks, and his hands move prophetically, a beat or two ahead of his words. He gesticulates with indignation as he tells me that any vision of a tobacco endgame is that of sick or naive zealots.
“Our declaration of independence, the first founding principles of the country, says that we are free, and we have the right to these three birth rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Now they’re trying to overturn those basic principles,” Hart says. “Public health is all around us to enhance safety, but not to take away the activity.”
He’s not advocating for a world without regulation – he believes in age restrictions, banning cigarettes indoors and eliminating harmful additives – but one with free choice. “I don’t smoke tobacco cigarettes, but it’s not up to me to decide what benefit other people get from that product,” Hart says. “I am not the ruler and lord of their domain.”
He adds that history is teeming with failures of similar policies. Alcohol prohibition was meant to reduce domestic violence and poverty but instead fueled unimaginable violence and organized crime, with homicide rates increasing by 78%. The “war on drugs” was similarly disastrous, incarcerating millions of Black and Hispanic Americans without reducing the availability of illegal drugs. “Now if we think about tobacco in the same way,” Hart says, “the people who are gonna pay the price are the same people who pay the price – poor people.”
So one of birthdate bans’ selling points is equity, reducing high smoking rates in vulnerable communities, according to Silbaugh and Ishak, the Brookline town meeting members.
Hart dismisses that as a cruel joke. “This is what we do: we pretend to care about those communities and not really deal with the issues they face.” They need gainful employment, health insurance, and pensions, but public health exploits their deprivation to justify paternalistic bans instead.
“What the fuck,” Hart scowls. “It just blows my mind.”
Take any set of drugs – say marijuana, heroin, amphetamines and hallucinogens – and ask yourself which ones should be legal versus illegal. There are certainly places at the extremes: Portugal, for instance, has decriminalized all drug use, while Singapore has attached the death penalty to consumption. But what exactly does the US do?
Mark Gottlieb, a public health lawyer at Northeastern University, describes how federal drug policy seems almost random, carved into stone by whoever’s in power, oddities of their own times.
Hart puts it more directly: “Whatever the white majority says is illegal, is illegal.”
The ideal, of course, would be to have society plot all drugs on a spectrum and legalize those whose benefits outweigh the harms. But it’s probably ridiculous to claim that harm reduction alone drives US drug policy, given that alcohol and cigarettes are not only legal but remarkably accessible. “I find it ironic that these two drugs collectively cause way more destruction, loss of life, loss of productivity than every other drug of abuse all combined,” says Lukas.
It might even be overly generous to lump cigarettes with alcohol. After all, when used exactly as its manufacturers intended, tobacco kills up to half its users, making cigarettes the deadliest object in the history of human civilization. And while 5% of individuals who drink are alcoholics, 90% of those who smoke are nicotinics, according to Robert Proctor, a professor of history at Stanford University. “But that’s not even a word, right? We don’t even have a word for nicotinics because almost everyone who smokes is addicted.”
by Simar Bajaj, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Lucas Jackson/Reuters
