Candace

Talmadge

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February 27, 2009

Anti-Smoking Zealots’ Agenda Not About the Science

Anti-tobacco zealots have smoke pouring from their ears over an editorial published recently in Tobacco Control. The piece, co-authored by public health physician Michael Siegel and University of Washington sociology graduate student Brian Houle, questions the ethics and the effectiveness of the rush to ban smokers from the workplace instead of just their habit of lighting up.

Surprise, surprise. The war on smoking is, in reality, a war on smokers. Just like the war on obesity is really a fatwa against fat people and the war on drugs is really an assault on small-time recreational drug users.

In the editorial, Siegel and Houle write that as of August 2008, 21 states and more than 400 U.S. cities had laws requiring 100 percent smoke-free workplaces. Nine Canadian provinces, six Australian states and territories and 14 other countries have banned smoking in workplaces as well, including restaurants and bars.

Siegel, a long-time smoking-ban advocate and tobacco company nemesis, is a professor and associate chair of academics in the social and behavioral sciences department of the Boston University School of Public Health. He is so concerned about the trend toward parting smokers from their jobs that, in addition to the article, he established a web site to discuss this issue.

This site, the Center for Public Accountability in Tobacco Control, lists the growing numbers of employers going beyond just bans on workplace smoking. They now demand that workers quit smoking altogether or be fired, try to stretch their tobacco bans to employees’ spouses and refuse to hire anyone who smokes. The list includes the City of Atlantic Beach, Fla., Clarian Health, The Cleveland Clinic, Crown Laboratories, The Homac Companies, Medical Mutual, Scotts Miracle-Gro, Truman Medical Centers, Weyco and the World Health Organization.

Siegel and Houle argue that this trend is discriminatory and possibly counterproductive. Smokers who lose their jobs in the United States often lose access to health insurance and thus medical care, putting their health in jeopardy and making it that much harder for them to quit smoking. Only 26 states have laws that prohibit employment discrimination against workers for smoking or other legal activities off the job.

“We in tobacco control have been arguing for decades just how addictive nicotine is,” Siegel says in an interview. “If smoking is so addictive, how can anyone argue that smokers can just quit?” Indeed, a Florida jury recently found that a 40-year chain smoker died because he was helplessly addicted to nicotine and could not give up cigarettes.

Moreover, the anti-smoker employment trend “opens the door to any kind of lifestyle category being used in employment decisions,” Sigel says. “What kind of discrimination is next?”

How about discrimination against fat people or diabetics? The article notes that Clarian, an Indianapolis-based hospital system, plans to fine not only workers who smoke, but those whose body mass index exceeds 30, and employees whose blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose levels are too high.

Siegel seems genuinely puzzled by the venomous reaction to his editorial. He has been accused of taking tobacco company money, which he says is simply not the case. “I have been more vigorously attacked by my own colleagues than I was ever attacked by the tobacco industry.”

He maintains that the science is simply not there to support those who want to ban smokers from employment, but it does not seem to matter.  “Tobacco control is turning into an ideology,” he says. “Even if you use science to argue against the ideology, you are viewed as a traitor or a denier.”

Let’s break this gently to the good doctor. The entire tobacco control movement has rarely been about the science, just as the quaint phrase “states rights” was rarely about the actual rights of states vs. the rights of the federal government. In the latter case, “state rights” was a socially acceptable fig-leaf phrase for those who wanted to maintain racially discriminatory laws.

In tobacco control, the ideologues are running amok, buoyed by their success against the tobacco industry. “More and more,” Siegel writes on his web site, “communities, college campuses, and other entities are reaching beyond the science and banning smoking everywhere, not in order to protect non-smokers from secondhand smoke exposure, but to protect nonsmokers from ever having to see a smoker. Smoking is being treated as a moral affront, not merely as a health hazard.”

How thin the line between health hazard and moral blight.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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