The tobacco industry, and Tonya Harding - 18 March 1994

I noticed last week two news items that appeared the same day and that together provided a double irony of American history. The first English settlers of the northern colonies who founded Massachusetts were kept alive through the first gruesomely hungry winter by a fish, the cod, which subsequently was the lifeblood of the New England economy.

Well, I told the story that the cod along with the haddock and the halibut, the three most prolific and profitable of New England's catches are growing scarcer and scarcer, that it's the same story down the east coast with other fish round into the Gulf of Mexico and that way out on the Pacific coast the decline of the famous and always abundant Pacific salmon is, the government, says catastrophic.

We heard about the general story only after there were public demonstrations in Boston harbour of the desperate and they say about to be impoverished fishermen, the matching irony is about Virginia and North and South Carolina. And there the story is that the article that saved Virginia and the first southern colonists from extinction is now being deplored and condemned by governments local, state, national in terms almost as demeaning as those of the pamphlet issued by King James I, VI if you're a Scot, which constituted a furious attack on what he called that most filthy weed "tobacco", he didn't hint or suspect that tobacco was bad for, he simply announced in about 2,000 sulphurous words that the use of tobacco, which was a new fashion at the time would afflict every organ of the body with most loathsome and festering pustules and would he assured us, actually destroy the lungs. No evidence for these assertions was offered or indeed came to light for more than 300 years.

It was in 1952, that the American Cancer Society at the end of a five-year study of several thousands smokers followed over a decade or so reported that cigarette smoking could directly cause lung cancer, emphysema and other respiratory afflictions. Well, I don't have to tell you that was only the beginning. Throughout the next 40 years more and more and longer studies have been done in the United States, Britain, Sweden, two or three other countries of Western Europe and the evidence is overwhelming, it overwhelms everybody but, naturally, the tobacco industry.

It's now been 23 years – January 1971 – since the Congress banned all tobacco advertising on television and radio, it was just an interesting item at the time, but I don't believe that the citizens of the Virginia and the Carolinas trembled or foresaw the landslide of propaganda that was moving against them. Two weeks ago, 1,500 hoarse marchers who had come up from those three states whose economy is rooted in tobacco chanted and groaned outside the White House. The occasion was the rustling in Congress of several bills to ban smoking in all public buildings throughout the United States. You know of course that this is already been done in several cities, most remarkably in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The most drastic law has just gone into effect in Los Angeles, which has now outlawed smoking in all public buildings including all restaurants. Now other cities – New York, Boston for instance – have laws that also prohibit smoking in offices and government and public buildings, but require restaurants to allow a small section for smokers, it used to be a small section for non-smokers. This requirement has been abolished in Los Angeles and is vanishing fast everywhere else.

The protest of the marchers is against the possibility – I should say the likelihood in the next few years – of a federal national law. There already is one about smoking in aeroplanes, not allowed on any plane flying anywhere in the continental United States – that's been true since 1988 and how it came about should have been an omen for the tobacco growers and dryers and graders and processors and manufacturers in Virginia and the Carolinas.

An airline stewardess sometime back then developed lung cancer and sued the airline on a then unfamiliar ground, she didn't smoke, she never smoked, but she said she'd been infected by the smoke concentrated in the aeroplane cabin while she was at work. She adduced medical evidence about her condition asserted that she was a victim of strange phrase "passive smoking". Soon other afflicted ones picked up the cry and the legal aid. That one stewardess's suit worked like a fire bell. Of course the airlines saw the prospect of a raft of suits and no senator or congressman was going to be advertised at his next election as one's whose quite willing to let his constituents be poisoned, so the Bill shot through Congress and now as I say there are even stricter bills shovelling for a hearing, which as two successive surgeons general have predicted with pride could lead to the decline and abolition of the tobacco industry in the next generation. It was very unlikely a generation ago in 1973, just over 50 Americans in 100 smoked, it's now 24.

No need just yet, however, to mourn for the tobacco companies, at the moment they're quite happy if a smidgen guilty at doing a land-office business in what we used to call the Third World. Evidently, the many millions smokers in Asia and Africa haven't yet heard the news or don't care, but the outlook here is bad enough to make the 400,000 Southerners engaged in the tobacco industry fear for their livelihoods. So far, I don't hear any practical solutions offered from all the groups who are cheering the bad news about tobacco and the good news about the accumulating laws against it, but the problem of all these workers mainly in those three States is exactly that of the hard-working peasants in Peru and Colombia who tend and nourish the cocoa crop, which gives us cocaine. If you find another crop that can give them a living, they will consent not to starve.

This week's seemed to write the end to a sad squalid story that riveted public attention in a score or more of countries only because of its bizarre soap opera connection with the Winter Olympics. If an American girl skater had not been wounded by an assailment who got away, the names of Kerrigan and Harding would stayed known only to ice-skating fans whatever happened at Lillehammer. But as soon as it came out that the arrested suspect was Tonya Harding's ex-husband with whom, however, she was then living. All it took was for the wretched man to confess his guilt to turn the Olympic figure-skating competition into a massive million-dollar Hollywood production, which in fact attracted a world audience 30% larger than any previous television audience for figure-skating. The moment that statistic was known, both Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding could more or less feel guaranteed of television contracts, book deals, movies, professional tours no matter how grievous their intermediate feelings between the attack and the appearance in court this week of the perky sad young woman who became known as the poor little Portland waif.

Until last Wednesday, the big question was who was going to get to Tonya Harding first, the United States Figure-skating Association, which might suspend her for conduct unbecoming or the courts, where after a hearing and/or a grand jury indictment she might be convicted for one or more felony accounts or she might be acquitted. All we knew before either happening was that she'd confessed that knowing about the plot after the attack happened. Since she did not tell this to any authorities at the time, she knew that constituted a single felony account, a charge of interfering with the prosecution. Then by Wednesday night, the whole scandal blew up in our faces.

What had happened what we should have guessed would happen all the time, a legal twist that is becoming almost routine for every sort of crime from shoplifting to serial murder, in the vernacular she copped a plea.

The lawyers agreed to a guilty plea on the felony account, the one, and would accept the punishment of the court. In fact, would dictate the punishment on the understanding with the prosecution that all other charges would be dropped, it's known as "plea bargaining" and the ease with which serious criminals can escape a just punishment is today something of a social-legal scandal in this country. So we may never know if she knew more, if she was in on the conspiracy, we know just as much as she told us. She's been given probation for three years, must do 500 hours of community service and pay a fine of $160,000, which should be handled nicely by a couple of paid for television interviews or the first weeks earnings on her first professional tour. She was required to resign from the US Figure-skating Association, which she was going to do anyway after the Japanese championships.

The people left foaming with speechless were the US Skating Association bigwigs, their authority as the ruling body in skating has been pre-empted by the courts. The same thing happened in recent years to the United States Baseball Commissioner and to the United States Golf Association, when a golf club they declared illegal was taken by the accused manufacturer to the courts, he had millions of dollars to spend on lawyers. The United States Golf Association not so much, so they had a face-saving settlement out of court.

The deputy district attorney in Portland thought the Tonya Harding deal was the best thing that could happen, after all, he said, "a trial could have tied up the courts and this office for a year at the expense of the taxpayer". The New York Times headline on Friday was not by intent hysterical, it summed up the present dispensing of justice whenever showbiz or sports big shots are concerned, "Harding Plea Bargain Is Called A Time Saver".

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