Renewed Concern Over Secondhand Smoke - 10 December 1999

Before we move on to more cheerful or entertaining things I think a postscript to the battle of Seattle is not only in order but compulsory - since the problems and the protests that infested the World Trade meeting will be with us well into the foreseeable future.

The comment here from the White House to the nearest pub is so wide-ranging that practically anything you care to say about the collapse of the talks is being said by somebody.

From the phrase used by the strongest critics - "an unmitigated disaster" - all the way across to the official White House view which is almost pathetically modest - "Well at least," one official said, "we made the World Trade Organisation better known."

Better known as what, was not answered.

My own fear is that what became better known was the view of the WTO by the most violent and most ignorant of the protesters, not just the way out anarchists but a great number of crusading groups.

A random survey of the 40 or 50,000 protests disclosed that as many as a half of them had never heard of the World Trade Organisation before they arrived in Seattle. But by the time they left they had settled for a definition which went something like this:

A new and dangerous kind of global bureaucracy, an international bully, an unelected government of rich corporations dedicated to cutting down all of the rainforests, defiling rivers and forcing the poor populations of Asia to make things for a pittance and so put millions of American workers out of high-paying jobs.

And where did they pick up this piece of learning? On the Internet, that's where.

One militant group that claimed to speak for many more reported that their own independent websites had received hundreds of thousands of visits from people who wanted to know - and the strong implication was to support - whatever they were protesting about.

So you could say that thousands of small-time crusaders you never heard of got their message over by means of the globalism they were meant to oppose.

The other more bitter irony which most of the protesters will either ignore or refuse to believe is that the most powerful protesting movement - the American labour unions that want Western standards of labour and pay to be enforced on the manufacturers using Asian labour - they were defeated, not by the corporations, but by the delegates of the poorest nations.

It was the delegates from Asia who matched the righteous anger of these labour standard protesters by declaring that what Asia needs first and above all is economic growth.

All that the pious American legislation would do would be, of course, to protect the American workers, but would further impoverish the very poor, who if they did not make these shoes at those prices would be earning a 10th as much in a rice field or cleaning out middens.

In other words you could say that the people who made the talks collapse were the Far Eastern delegates who begged to differ from the high-minded American labour unions and their demand for a universal standard of work and pay.

One writer from the so-called Third World put it with brutal crispness:

"Citizens of the poorest countries have only one possible path out of the horrifying levels of poverty, malnutrition and disease in which they live and that is economic growth and every country in history that has raised its living standards - including the United States - has done so by hitching its wagon to the world economy."

To help as many nations as possible do this is what the World Trade Organisation is all about. Not to impose trade barriers on international trade but to break them down.

The struggling, baffled WTO is a sort of world appeals court, except that its decisions are not binding but mean to be helpful.

An Indian writer who runs a think tank in New Delhi - a man plainly beside himself to see and hear the gross ignorance of global trade shown by most of the protesters, especially the ecological protesters - wrote that "the burden of restrictive regulation borne by the farmers of the poor Asian countries is imposed by their own sovereign governments.

"It is their own governments that force them to sell their produce domestically at below-market prices, so they have little incentive to grow more.

"The bullies, the people who want a world government of trade, are the protesters themselves who demonise technology and wish to impose their own Luddite vision on the rest of the human race."

I think the saddest scene at Seattle was the last one. Mobs of ecstatic young people dancing in the streets shouting: "We won, we won." While one loud voice proclaimed the mantra that makes a ludicrous comparison and confirms their wholly false view of the failed Seattle effort: "We stopped Vietnam, we'll stop WTO."

A headline of recent days seems, at first glance, a harmless item but it suggests if not proposes in this country anyway, a new federal law which would in time come to cost the Republic and its citizens a great deal in money and grief.

The headline: "Renewed concern over secondhand smoke."

Before we look into whose concern let me remind of the early concern amounting in some Americans to near hysteria. The early concern over what was first called "passive smoking" - the simple situation of being a non-smoker in the presence of a smoker. You were said to be the victim of "passive smoking".

My liveliest memory of those early, scary days happened a block - a street - away from me, on one of the four corners of Madison Avenue and 96th Street - it's a crosstown street - which means it has crosstown traffic both ways - and also up town along the avenue. So there are five streams - rushes - of traffic.

And about every minute or so the roaring traffic's boom is punctuated by the moan or squeal of an ambulance siren.

My point is not that it's deafeningly noisy, which it is, but that the atmosphere - however clean and bright it might appear - is dense with innumerable toxins emitted by the hurling cars, trucks, vans and cabs.

There's a famous hospital nearby, and on the corner of Madison and 96th Street there is a coffee shop - a restaurant - much favoured by the nurses and the resident doctors.

One luncheon time about, I guess, 10 years ago, an old doctor was in there finishing his meal and - oh it must have been 15 years ago, before smoking in restaurants was banned - before, I might add, every doctor in sight had stopped smoking.

Well this one ordered his coffee and lit up a cigarette. He'd taken no more than a single puff when a young, bearded apostle of something or other jumped up from the neighbouring booth and said sharply to my old doc: "Would you stop doing that at once?"

The doctor, who was not wearing any identifying professional gear - a stethoscope or white coat - the doctor looked up in a kindly way.

"Surely," he said, "if you promise before you go out to cross Madison Avenue to wear a mask or handkerchief and rush home before the dozen or so poisonous emissions from the traffic get to you."

The doctor snuffed out his cigarette, the young beard was - abashed, I suppose is what the Victorians would have said. Actually he was petrified. He had a new menace to consider, not only the cancer he'd pick up from the man smoking in the next booth but Lord knows what disease from just crossing Madison Avenue.

The whole passive smoking scare started some 20-odd years ago when a stewardess on one of our chief airlines acquired emphysema and sued the airline since she attributed her complaint to the passenger cabin in which she was daily confined - a cabin which in those days contained smokers.

I don't know if the attribution was ever proved but the stewardess got some financial compensation and the airline quickly banished all smoking.

So did the other lines and in no time the Congress passed a law, and before you could say "Got a match?" smoking became illegal on all American domestic flights.

The stewardess's triumph led the medicos to start considering people with lung disease who did not smoke but who lived in a house or flat with a smoker or smokers, and once this research got under way the surgeon general was not the only medical authority to find or declare that it was possible to pick up a respiratory or a lung disease from somebody else's smoke.

The alarm bells rang, the media clanged with warnings and came the day when the courts were receiving not only suits from smokers against the tobacco companies but suits from wives, girlfriends, brothers - all sorts of non-smokers who had probably lost their fancy for their smoker room mate.

Many doctors have joined the chase on behalf of non-smokers. Many doctors think much too much has been made of either close or remote contact with smoky air.

But now this new story will stimulate more sufferers and, you may be sure, a plague of lawsuits.

Quote: "Secondhand cigarette smoke may be more dangerous than previously believed according to researchers at a Los Angeles medical centre who report that some women with a common gene mutation who live with smokers are two to six times as likely to develop lung cancer as women with the mutation who do not live with smokers."

This will add more fuel to an ex-surgeon general and more influential doctors who want to bring tobacco under the control of the Food and Drug Administration and thereby make smoking a criminal activity.

The Food and Drug Administration is the government body that approves and licences new drugs of all kinds, allows them to be put on or taken off prescription, certifies the purity and safety of foods and in many other ways is an admirable public institution.

But there is strong opposition outside the tobacco companies to having tobacco declared illegal. Why? Because by now, surely, the only people licking their lips over the prospect of a national prohibition of tobacco must be the rising generation of Al Capones and Dutch Schultzes and Lucky Lucianos who for 13 long years ruled over the huge underground criminal empire of bootleggers, created to satisfy the appetite for alcohol in people who formerly had never had any taste or desire for it.

I've not heard of any government medical official looking at this prospect and shuddering.

Maybe somebody should paste up at the entrance to the Food and Drug Administration's headquarters a large sign saying simply: "Been there, done that."

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