US anti-smoking legislation - 24 April 1998

I'm not myself much of a collector of antiquities, as distinct from antiques. I mean whimsical oddments like the original movie theatre poster of Mary Pickford in Little Lord Fauntleroy or, what would fetch almost as much today, a first edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost. All the more priceless if the word 'horrid' was mis-spelt in line 103.

But a couple of full-page headlines in two papers that don't usually go in for such blazing horizontals immediately reminded me that some generous friend, or maybe listener, once sent me, out of the blue, a pamphlet written in 1605, written in blood by King James of the new United Kingdom, no less. It's called A Blast, or maybe it's A Counterblast (I'm 300 miles away from the books), say then, A Counterblast Against Tobacco.

It's an extraordinary, and extraordinarily radical dissenting piece for the time, when some of the best poets were singing the praises of man's best friend, sweet baccy. James's detestation of tobacco was so violent and so spontaneous, nobody had to teach him to hate it, he must just have been repelled at the first whiff of the stuff. A sentence or two is memorable, I hope. He called it a noxious weed, a contempt of God's gift of the sweetness of a man's breath. That's an odd gift to be grateful for in the dark age of dentistry, when Queen Elizabeth used to lay on a quarter of an inch of perfumed ointment to disguise the smell of her skin.

Anyway, James I didn't have a good thing to say about this corruption by stinking smoke and he forbade all smoking in and around his palaces and, I was about to say, even on the golf course. But he was quite a one for condemning most human pleasures and put out an edict when the masses started rushing to the links, prohibiting golf, saying it should be utterly put down because it was imperilling the national defence by taking young lads away from their archery practice. However, the prohibition of golf was a second thought. The tobacco pamphlet caused quite a stink, you might say, as much as the campaign that now fills our headlines. Here are two in the morning and evening San Francisco newspapers.

Tobacco learns that lobbying has limits and a think piece – or propaganda column, if you like – by Mr Clinton's former Secretary of Labour, "Big tobacco must lead the fight against teenage nicotine addiction". They're writing about the number one issue Congress is about to tackle, now it's come back from its spring break. In fact, the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, first day on his feet, complained that while he was back home in Mississippi, nobody brought up the pending Tobacco Bill and that in the minds of his people, tobacco was not the first issue, or the second, third, fourth, fifth or sixth.

They were eager to have the Congress get busy on turning welfare into workfare, to save social security, to improve American schools and, for the sake of their children of all ages, to do something to redeem the miserable record of several administrations of both parties, in the matter of drugs and drug use, which goes on rising alarmingly most among teenagers.

But you'll notice there's being worked up general concern about teenagers on another matter. In a country in which today only one adult in four smokes, they are smoking more than anybody and this is the pretext for all the hullabaloo about bashing the tobacco companies, who recently cried help and walked out of an agreement that last autumn we all thought had more or less solved, or softened, the problem of discouraging teenage smoking. By the way, a hefty proportion of teenagers have picked up from their baseball heroes the habit, which I'm sure King James would have thought even more stinking than smoking, of chewing tobacco.

Let's look into this much-praised agreement between the law and the tobacco companies and see what went wrong and what the present brouhaha is all about. The Surgeon General reported 36 years ago, following much American and European research that positively linked cigarette smoking to cancer of the lung and emphysema. The tobacco companies retreated to the storm cellar to await a blizzard of lawsuits and in spite of the well-known fact that health warnings have been compulsorily printed on every pack of cigarettes since that report, so that people who can read and who choose to smoke are responsible for the ill effects, this did not deter people from suing the companies.

Through many cases and great expense on both sides, nobody won damages until the theory came in, proved to the satisfaction of many eminent doctors, but not all, that simply being around cigarette smokers, being within whiffing distance of a cigarette, could badly affect your lungs and that if you got cancer or another respiratory disease, it might be due to what became known as passive smoking. And that prompted one suit in particular, I recall, that can now be seen to have caused the tobacco companies all their woe and loss of Eden.

A woman flight attendant of a prominent airline developed either emphysema or lung cancer, I forget which. She sued, as a victim of her job, which forced her to be enclosed in a smoke-filled area or room, and she won. The airlines panicked and promptly Congress passed a law prohibiting all smoking on all airplanes that flew across this continent. It's been all downhill for the companies ever since.

The Democrats seized on a new issue, the fight against passive smoking and that led to city ordinances. California was a pioneer against smoking, first in restaurants and offices, all public buildings and now even in bars. Congressional committees met and hauled before them officials of the leading tobacco companies and on the first day put to them a simple question: Is nicotine addictive? In a scene which they all wish had never happened, certainly never been televised, they raised their right hands and swore in turn, like Boy Scouts swearing to do one good deed a day, that nicotine was not addictive. Subsequently, one big company official welshed on his colleagues and cited company studies to show they well knew that the curse of nicotine is its addictiveness. Many months later, the big boys who took the oath came back and swore again that, ouch, they had lied.

Now the field was open for Mr Clinton, much in need then of a moral crusade, to demand that the tobacco companies be made to pay a very large sum for what cigarettes might do to people in the future, along with a guarantee that they would be safe from lawsuits. Well, the tobacco companies had pumped 60 millions in lobbying whichever party controlled Congress, which since 1995, has been the Republicans. It was not enough. Sick people and state governments were now fuelled by the reforming spirit and there was a dramatic meeting between the tobacco tycoons and the conclave of states' Attorneys General. They cut a settlement, greatly applauded, only a few months ago. The companies agreed to stop advertisements that were designed to appeal to youngsters. They would agree to a small increase in the price of cigarettes. They would set up a fund of 368 billion dollars, to be used over 25 years to indemnify them against lawsuits. Well done.

It hasn't worked. They'd assumed that this deal would soon go though Congress with the blessing of the president and both parties. An expert in the art of practice of lobbying remarked: the tobacco men clearly got some horrible political advice.

Now the villain of the tobacco companies' script is, strangely, a Republican. A maverick Republican who has drafted a Bill, with Mr Clinton's blessing, that would greatly restrict advertising, would raise the cost of a pack of cigarettes by one dollar ten cents over five years (not exactly a draconian measure) and allow six and a half billions a year for individual lawsuits. But now this Bill offers no protection against class action lawsuits, that is suits on behalf of a group and, it turns out, the total outlay for the tobacco companies will be not 368 billion dollars but 516 billions.

They have walked away from the debate in disgust and are thinking, reluctantly but quite seriously, about the prospect of bankruptcy, which is, of course, what the more extreme of the campaigners, including one or two old government health officials, want, Well, it's very unlikely that the whole thing will go through in this Congress in an election year. There is, first, the rising anger and frustration of several Southern states, comprising a landscape the size of twice the United Kingdom, whose staple crop is tobacco. A quarter of a million jobs are on the line and if some realist in Congress wants to hit the true unanswered question, how do you kill or lessen teenage smoking, he could point out that throughout the scare and the negotiations and the public debate, teenage smoking has been rising dramatically.

All, surely, that's needed to make it rise higher still, would be to ban cigarette smoking altogether. That's what happened with the demon liquor, the so-called noble experiment of prohibition, which did not make Americans noticeably nobler than they already were, but created a huge underground empire of crime and made it cool, when I arrived in this country, for even the most innocent and respectable 15-year-old girl to carry, at all times outside school, a flask of gin.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.