On the Anti-Smoking Witchhunt

(Letter)

November 25, 2005
“Black” Friday

Workers Vanguard:

Perhaps this is not a class struggle issue, but recently I have been accosted by signature-gatherers for a proposition to “Tax tobacco to pay for emergency rooms”. Now smokers are mostly low-income—the middle and upper classes have rejected this habit—and constitute about 20% of the population, many of whom are people of color. Smoking, at least in California, is no longer “cool”—it is prohibited almost everyplace, including on the sidewalk within thirty feet of a business entrance, and, in San Francisco, in many parks.

Smokers are a despised minority. When I began smoking around 1960, cigarettes were 29¢ a pack—today they are $5 a pack, most of it taxes. This proposition would add $1.70 to the cost of a pack of cigarettes, which assuming a pack a day habit is average, amounts to about $500 a year in additional taxes to be paid by each smoker, above and be-yond the taxes she already pays. This proposition is a slam dunk to get on the ballot and to pass because the non-smoking population hates and despises smokers, who are unable to defend themselves. Nevertheless, I am here bringing the issue before the Tribune of the People—what do you think? Smoking definitely IS bad for your health, as every smoker has heard ad nauseam, but it is a very pleasurable vice and not nearly so deadly as, say, joining the US Army and going to Iraq! Do you defend the right of smokers to smoke, or do you stand with the enemies of this addiction? If it is OK to smoke, should the habit be taxed to the max, on some cruel premise that this will “discourage” us from smoking? Or should we be left alone to “increase the cost of health care” without serious financial damage to ourselves? Is smoking a class issue? And should there be any recourse at all for the workingclass, black and Latino individuals constituting the smoking class, against enforced taxation by the non-smoking majority? (I quit a year ago, but I identify myself as a smoker).

C.O.
Oakland, CA

WV replies:

Anti-smoking hysteria is very much a class issue, and it has been rampant for decades now. The most typical venue for this “purer than thou” moralism is California. Some time back, a black San Francisco State University student was stabbed by an anti-smoking fanatic who ranted, “She thought she had a right to pollute my air.” Unfortunately, this puritanism is increasingly gripping parts of the globe that used to provide a limited “safe haven” for smokers.

In this country, working people routinely die because the capitalist ruling class doesn’t want to spend any money to keep them healthy and workplaces safe—like by enforcing industrial safety standards, or repairing the levees in New Orleans. The tragic deaths at non-union, deathtrap West Virginia mines this month, and the deaths and abandonment following Hurricane Katrina of thousands of poor, particularly black people, reveal the callous indifference of the ruling class to the lives of workers and the black population. It is grotesque that the same rapacious rulers who begrudge every dime they spend on working people want to put moral blame and the financial burden of the capitalist system that kills them on…working people.

As we wrote in “Anti-Smoking Tyranny” (WV No. 612, 9 December 1994):

“Despite absurd denials by the tobacco industry, it’s never been a big secret that ‘coffin nails’ or ‘cancer sticks,’ as cigarettes used to be called, aren’t healthy. But most Americans somehow believe they’re supposed to have the right to choose their own poison—whether it’s cigarettes, cholesterol-rich steaks or martini lunches.…

“As far as we’re concerned, people ought to be able to read, eat, drink, smoke, and enjoy whatever consensual activities they want without cops, courts, employers and yuppie totalitarians sticking their noses in.”