Once upon a time, one could light up a Joe in an airplane.
One could blow a butt in a bar or kill a cancer stick in a restaurant. Once, one could Don Draper a cig in a boardroom.
But that was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
These days, one can’t even smoke outdoors without enduring a smug non-smoker’s bothered hacking and a typical“those are bad for you, you know.”
But Draper, of course, is the madman in this day and age. Suffice it to say, a lot’s changed since the ’60s.
A lot has changed since the ’90’s.
In 1993, the average retail price of a pack of cigarettes was $1.69, including federal and state excise taxes. In 2010, that same pack of cigs ran $4.80, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Then, the rootin’-tootin’ Marlboro Man was still take-no-messing across America’s billboards and magazine pages, driving Americans like cattle to “Marlboro Country,” where the “flavor is.”
Now, three of the knight-in-shining-armor Marlboro Men depicted in such advertisements — Wayne McLaren, David McLean and Dick Hammer — have died of lung cancer, and Marlboro Reds have been knighted “Cowboy Killers,” in turn.
Ah, Flavor Country!
Marlboro, produced by Philip Morris USA, now makes the world’s best-selling cancer sticks.
But the Lucky Strike brand, or “Luckies,” now produced by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and British American Tobacco, was the world’s most popular cigarettes for much of the 20th century, famous for the slogan “It’s Toasted” — that its tobacco wasn’t sun-dried.
Tobacco ads are scarce these days, as it were, but there was a time when a Camel advertisement could shamelessly proclaim that “more doctors smoke camels than any other cigarette.”
These days, the doctors have their own advertisements, themselves indicative of one of our era’s most substantial tobacco-related about-faces.
Anti-smoking zealotry.
The surgeon general’s warnings on cigarette packages — advertisements, by all means — have hitherto been limited to inconspicuous black-and-white text: “
Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide,” for instance.
But the FDA proposed last year the mandatory printing of graphic warning labels on cigarette packages, which Big Tobacco subsequently filed suit against, asserting it was a constitutional infringement — an argument I supported in a column last semester.
Then, I confessed that I smoked “like a burning pile of tires,” that I’ve smoked “more than the Orient Express” and “ashed more than Mount Vesuvius.” But even I’ve changed since then.
Changed brands.
Admittedly, I’m still among the CDC-estimated 19.3 percent of Americans who smoke cigarettes — though I now smoke the “100% Additive-Free Tobacco” of Natural American Spirit cigarettes.
But even as the company itself concedes: “No additives in our tobacco does NOT mean a safer cigarette.”
There are no safe cigarettes, by all accounts. In fact, according to Judith Sylvester, mass communication professor and anti-smoking zealot, tobacco consumption is the single most preventable cause of death, disease and disability in Louisiana.
In 2000, Sylvester founded SmokingWords, a “program advocating tobacco-free living” and “a tobacco-free [LSU] campus,” according to the campaign’s website.
“We’ve come a long way,” she said.
Whereas “smoking was allowed in offices” when Sylvester first came to LSU in 1994, it’s now prohibited within 25 feet of public buildings’ entrances.
Cough.
Nearly 30 percent of University undergraduates are among the smokers of 7,777 cigarettes on campus daily, according to Sylvester.
“It’s a health and safety issue,” she said. “We have an obligation to educate and reform people.”
Sylvester — bless her heart — is the quintessential anti-smoking zealot, blessed with a holier-than-thou evangelistic idealism and the sort of sanctimonious faith that purports to move mountains.
She’s mindful, at any rate, of the Kilimanjaro before her, formed of rocky budgetary constraints and crumbling student indifference.
But she cares, ultimately. “I don’t care if students don’t care about [smoking] — I care for them,” she said.
And therein lies the problem: Sylvester cares too much.
The prevalence of tobacco consumption steadily declined for decades vis-à-vis the emergence of scientific data documenting the hazardous risks of such consumption — and for no reason more than that one.
The implications of such data are moronically obvious: Smoking kills. The facts speak for themselves. One need not speak on their behalf.
And to do so is, quite plainly, an affront to Americans’ freedom of choice.
Americans have been educated. Americans have been informed. Butt out, in other words. Let Americans choose for themselves.
Whereas the decades-long decline in American tobacco consumption has leveled since 2007, the percentage of University undergraduate smokers has actually increased, according to Sylvester.
Given Americans’ — and Louisianians’ — notorious aversion to arm-twisting and coercion, anti-smoking zealotry might thus be the problem, not the solution.
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
