The Cigarette Century

by Allan Brandt

  Try though the companies might to stir a popular rebellion against restrictions on cigarette smoking, smokers never really warmed to the campaign. Even as the industry sent its patrons into battle in defense of the right to smoke, smokers themselves, increasingly stigmatized and socially marginalized, went AWOL. The antismoking campaign had scrupulously avoided a Prohibition-like stance. The real contest centered on where one could smoke, not on smoking per se. Efforts by the tobacco companies to generate sympathy for their aggrieved constituents by claiming the language of rights—most baldly visible in Philip Morris’s promotion of the two-hundredth anniversary of the Bill of Rights—came across as but a new form of postmodern humor.87 The thinly veiled self-interest of the industry and its historic hypocrisy on the health issue left it little room to maneuver.88

  The industry understood how important it was historically that smoking be accepted as a public behavior. Early in the twentieth century, it had been critical to secure the notion that men and women would prominently smoke in public. This was a crucial element of the highly positive social meanings that the cigarette would acquire in the first half of the twentieth century. In those days, opposition to public smoking had centered on questions of gender equality and morals. Now, the practice was under attack again, but on decidedly different grounds.

  Internal documents reveal the extensive planning and resources devoted to the industry’s effort to keep smoking a legitimate activity.89 In 1985, the president of the Tobacco Institute outlined the industry’s strategy concerning environmental tobacco smoke, explaining that the industry would act “to redefine [the issue], to broaden it, to demonstrate . . . that we are contributing to the solution rather than to the problem.”90 This strategy quickly took tangible form. During the first four months of 1986, tobacco PR representatives lobbied representatives of 1,500 companies, 14 chambers of commerce, the National Restaurant Association, and 13 state restaurant groups, running seminars concerning workplace smoking policies. 91 To keep smoking in the realm of socially acceptable behavior, the industry focused on manners, insisting that conflicts could be dealt with through “mutual respect” and “accommodation.”92 Any tensions engendered by smoking could be resolved by a polite tolerance of others’ needs. Smokers and nonsmokers could amicably negotiate the use of public space. Such tobacco industry rhetoric became well established by the mid-1980s.

  In the early 1990s, Philip Morris undertook a new campaign for what it called “The Accommodation Program.” Advertisements for the program argued that negotiation, manners, and mutual respect were a better means of regulation than “outright bans.” “The rights of one group should not supersede the rights of the other,” one ad explained. Another advocated “common courtesy and mutual respect . . . to work things out.” The company produced materials for business owners, restaurants, hotels, and bars to advise them on voluntary policies to assure protected space for smokers and nonsmokers alike. “The program works because it respects the rights and wishes of both groups,” Philip Morris explained, “So both get what they want.” An ad for a similar campaign, R.J. Reynolds’s Project Breakthrough, noted, “There are ways for smokers and non-smokers to co-exist.” “Together, we can work it out,” the ad promised. Project Breakthrough also suggested that the ultimate goal of the new regulatory environment was prohibition. One ad featured a nonsmoker who explained, “The smell of cigarette smoke annoys me. But not as much as the government telling me what to do.” The industry repeatedly sought to link restrictions on public smoking to a conservative political argument about overreaching government.

  Even Emily Post would have had difficulty negotiating this cultural territory. As the tide shifted to favor smoke-free public space, the United States’ new etiquette maven, Judith Martin (a.k.a. Miss Manners), frequently encountered what she identified as discourtesies among the nonsmokers. “Miss Manners is not a smoker herself,” Martin wrote, “but she has noted that foul emissions from non-smokers are hazardous to the public welfare. . . . The idea that health-conscious righteousness justifies rudeness is a repulsive one.”93 She found that the whole smoking issue, much to her professional chagrin, had degenerated into conflict and acrimony. “Miss Manners is hard put to say who is behaving worse: those who insist upon offending other people with their smoke or those who insist that only rudeness and humiliation toward smokers will clear the air.”94 In 1985, Martin threw up her hands, exclaiming, “The issue of smoking has inspired such widespread unacceptable manners in both smokers and nonsmokers for so long that Miss Manners would be relieved to have regulation of smoking made a matter of law, as many people are suggesting. She is more than ready to turn her attention to more complicated problems.”95 The very fact that smoking had passed from a matter of etiquette to a regulatory issue was an impressive victory for antismoking advocates. “Society has changed on this issue,” Martin would later conclude, “and smoking is no longer considered to be a standard liberty.”96

  Individuals, who a decade earlier would not have dreamed of asking a smoker to stop, now became emboldened. With the sudden flowering of “No Smoking” signs, the nonsmoker was deputized as an agent of the state. Smoking in such areas now constituted an infraction; asking a smoker to stop was a far less aggressive act than it had been in the past. Further, smokers themselves viewed violation of the new norms as inviting personal embarrassment, if not overt hostility. They came to internalize a new set of ethics about public smoking, just as nonsmokers developed new and heightened sensitivities to smoke. Peer pressure and social conformity—critical aspects of the cigarette’s popularity earlier in the century—now weighed heavily against it. The most basic assumptions about where and when it was appropriate to smoke had been reconfigured. As a result, the very meaning—even the “pleasure”—of cigarettes began a downward spiral.97 Try though the industry might to create some cultural space for the smoker through smokers’ rights campaigns and the insistence on accommodation through manners, by the 1990s smokers in the United States literally had no place to hide.

  Airplanes, the epitome of enclosed spaces, became the focus of considerable debate. Most of the new initiatives to restrict smoking had occurred at the local and state level, but air travel remained under federal jurisdiction. In the battle maps of the tobacco wars, antismoking advocates looked on the federal government, especially Congress, as enemy-occupied territory. Calls for smoking bans on airlines date back to 1969, when consumer advocate Ralph Nader first asked the Federal Aviation Agency to eliminate smoking on flights. Many individual consumers also complained to airlines. In 1971, United became the first carrier to develop segregated seating for smokers and nonsmokers, with other carriers soon following.98 Two years later, the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) made nonsmoking sections a federal requirement. Banzhaf successfully petitioned the CAB in 1976 to ban cigar and pipe smoking on planes. GASP established a Non-Smokers Travel Club for members eager to avoid exposure to smoke in their travels.99

  But the airline industry and public commentators did not quickly jump on the smoke-free bandwagon. In a 1977 editorial criticizing a federal proposal to limit the number of smoking seats on all planes, the Washington Post claimed, “The CAB should tell anti-smoking groups to back off. It’s reasonable to make smokers sit in the back of the plane. But it isn’t the airlines’ business, or the government’s, to decide how many passengers should be allowed to smoke.”100 Even after nonsmoking sections were required on all U.S. airlines, the carriers (and the tobacco companies) by no means accepted smoking bans. The airline industry claimed it should be free to decide how to accommodate passengers without outside interference. Airline executives worried that federal policies would put them at a competitive disadvantage internationally, that effectively separating smoking and nonsmoking sections would prove costly and difficult, and that these policies would create extra work for their in-flight personnel.101

  The creation of separate smoking sections, moreover, did little to improve air quality in the cabin. Smokers of
ten selected nonsmoking seats but would then congregate in the back of the plane to smoke. As one reader put it in an outraged letter to the editor of the New York Times in 1983, “Why is smoking permitted at all on airplanes? There appears to be no effective way to section off the fuselage so that non-smokers can be adequately protected from drifting smoke. . . . Health and safety benefits will far outweigh the inconvenience suffered by temporarily deprived smokers.” 102 Passengers seated near the smoking section frequently filed complaints. One critic suggested that “a smoking section on an airplane . . . is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.”103 Airlines found no easy way to accommodate both smokers and nonsmokers, especially since nonsmokers felt increasingly entitled to demand smoke-free space.

  The issue of smoking on airplanes brought together several strands of the rising concerns about cigarette use as a health risk, a nuisance, and an occupational hazard. While it was sometimes difficult for nonsmoking passengers to justify their demands for a smoke-free flight on the basis of risks to health (given short exposures), such was not true of flight attendants, whose work required repeated exposure to smoke-filled cabins. They became leading advocates for more aggressive regulation of smoking on flights. Joyce Hagen, a flight attendant, explained, “While we wait for someone to take the lead on this, we are breathing this carcinogen for hours at a time every time we fly.”104 Still, despite flight attendants’ rising concerns and increasing public opposition to smoking on flights, bans did not quickly follow. As late as 1984, the U.S. tobacco industry joined forces with the airline industry to help defeat a proposed CAB smoking ban on short flights. The CAB’s chairman, Dan McKinnon, explained at the time, “Philosophically, I think nonsmokers have rights, but it comes into market conflict with practicalities and the realities of life.”105

  The National Academy of Sciences issued a report in 1986 that evaluated the risks posed by smoking on airplanes. Since aircraft ventilation systems, the committee found, were not capable of meeting the standards required in other public spaces, “cabin air ventilation is in violation of the building codes for most other indoor environments.” The report pointed out that the group most significantly affected by smoke on airplanes was flight attendants, whose exposure was estimated to be the same as living with a pack-a-day smoker. Thomas Chalmers, president emeritus of Mount Sinai Medical Center, who chaired the study, explained that the group of eleven experts had concluded that smoking should be banned on all commercial flights in the United States.106 With the other NAS and surgeon general’s reports on environmental smoke appearing in 1986 as well, the scientific basis for federal regulations of airlines was increasingly secure.

  In the fierce battle that ensued, public sentiment and the tobacco control lobby won out over the tobacco interests. GASP chapters and ANSR mobilized their considerable constituencies on behalf of a ban on smoking on all flights two hours or less. They secured the support of the AMA, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, and Koop himself, among others. The legislation, sponsored by Congressman Richard Durbin, passed in the House by the narrow margin of 198-193, after the tobacco and the airline industries lobbied vigorously to kill it; in the Senate, the vote was 84-10. “People choose to smoke, but there is no choice about breathing,” said conservative Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, a supporter of the legislation. In fighting the ban, the industry sought to foment grassroots protest among smokers. “People who smoke cigarettes have a right to,” noted Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina (also a conservative Republican), “but they are going to have no choice.”107 “I doubt the studies show you anybody dying on an airplane from smoking.” added Democratic Senator Ernest F. Hollings from South Carolina. “The Indians were smoking when we got here.”108 The smoking ban on flights of two hours or less went into effect in 1988. At that time, Northwest Airlines announced a total ban on smoking on all its flights and heavily advertised the new policy. When such restrictions proved popular with a majority of passengers, the airlines dropped their opposition. A year later, legislation was introduced to ban smoking on all domestic flights. Although the Tobacco Institute argued it was “unnecessary, unfair, and unwarranted,” this legislation passed easily in 1990.109

  The popularity of airline bans reinforced the broader cultural changes already underway. Each new restriction brought dire warnings of civil unrest and nicotine fits, but the reality was that smoking bans were often celebrated by nonsmokers and smokers alike. Planes were both cleaner and safer from fire risk—advantages shared by all. Smokers found, sometimes to their surprise, that they could do without their cigarettes. It was a message that the tobacco industry had sought to hide. Today, it is sometimes hard to remember that smoking on airplanes was once permitted.

  In late 1992, after more than two years of evaluation and political wrangling, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared tobacco smoke a Class A human lung carcinogen. Unlike the earlier NAS and surgeon general’s studies, this ruling had far-ranging policy implications, putting the Occupational Safety and Health Administration under pressure to ban smoking in the workplace nationwide. The industry and its allies in Congress had fought to delay or weaken the final report, which declared ETS responsible for approximately three thousand deaths from lung cancer each year among nonsmokers. The study suggested that 20 percent of all lung cancers among nonsmokers were due to ETS, making the risk about one in one thousand; higher than almost all chemicals regulated by the agency.110

  The tobacco industry responded by criticizing the EPA for inadequate and poorly analyzed data. The Tobacco Institute called the study “another step in a long process characterized by a preference for political correctness over sound science.”111 Steven Parrish, senior vice president at Philip Morris, argued that the EPA was indirectly targeting smokers. “There is a mind-set that we want to discourage people from smoking,” he explained, that made the EPA willing to “adjust the science to fit the policy.”112 Parrish’s statement reflected a deliberate and sharply articulated strategy within the industry. As an internal memo from Philip Morris explained, “The growing perceptions about and animosity to EPA as an agency that is at least misguided and aggressive, at worst corrupt and controlled by environmental terrorists, offer one of the few avenues for inroads.”113 With the assistance of APCO Associates, a public relations firm, Philip Morris established a “sound science” coalition ostensibly dedicated to improving the quality of scientific discourse by rooting out “junk science.” One aspect of this carefully calculated effort was a move to revise the standards of scientific proof so that the harms of secondhand smoke could never possibly satisfy them. C. C. Little’s dogmatic assertions of “not proven” would no longer suffice: the industry realized that it could avoid new regulatory intervention only by redefining the science of risk. Following years of fighting epidemiologists, Philip Morris now initiated a campaign for “Good Epidemiological Practices,” organized to “fix” epidemiology to serve the industry’s interests by changing standards of proof. One objective of the program, an internal memo explained, was “to impede adverse legislation.”114

  By the late 1980s, as local ordinances spurred by grassroots public health campaigns proliferated, the tobacco industry returned to a strategy that had proved valuable and effective in the past. It sought state-level statutes that would preempt the profusion of local ordinances.115 This approach offered a number of important advantages. The industry simply could not keep up with the hundreds of pending ordinances being introduced and enacted in such short order. As Roger Mozingo of R.J. Reynolds explained, “They can introduce a bill one day in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the same bill will turn up two days later in Marin County, California.”116 By working at the state level, the industry could reduce the number of battlegrounds.

  As the industry continued to lose credibility in the 1980s and early 1990s, preemption became an increasingly important political tool. By 1997, nearly thirty states had passed legislation that in one form or another pre
empted local jurisdiction over tobacco. The industry increasingly utilized legitimate antitobacco legislation as a “vehicle” for inserting preemptive clauses. Given that such bills often originated with public health advocates and their allies, the addition of preemption clauses sometimes had the effect of dividing the antitobacco coalitions, as they found themselves forced to decide whether to accept valuable public health interventions at the cost of conceding preemption of local controls.117 These divisions nearly killed California’s smoke-free workplace law as well as similar legislation in Pennsylvania, Florida, and Illinois.118 Walker Merryman predicted that this strategy would ensure that “about 90 percent of legislation at the state level [adversely] affecting our industry will not be enacted.”119 In 1987, for example, as Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and several other Pennsylvania towns moved toward enactment of local smoking restrictions, the state of Pennsylvania passed a clean air bill mandating weaker rules than those under consideration locally. The state act preempted the local governments’ proposed rules. Mark Pertschuk of Americans for Non-Smokers Rights called the state legislation “a tobacco industry relief act.”120 At the behest of tobacco interests, several states passed smokers’ rights laws that prohibited public regulation of smoking.121 About half the states passed laws guaranteeing that smokers would not be discriminated against in hiring decisions. In lobbying for such legislation, the Tobacco Institute would bring forward restaurant associations, grocers, marketers, and retailers, as well as organized labor, farming groups, and other allies, to help dilute clean air standards. Even in an increasingly hostile cultural environment, the tobacco industry found strategies to sustain its product and its profits.