You Can't Afford to Get Sick by Andrew Weil

Author:Andrew Weil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2010-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

Until fairly recently Americans regarded tobacco as a good thing, and our government saw no reason to discourage its use. (It included cigarettes in the emergency rations of soldiers right up to the 1970s.) Smoking may have annoyed nonusers, but few thought it was harmful. Many people believed that it improved concentration and the productivity of workers. Once the social taboo against women smoking dissolved in the early 1900s, women took up the habit enthusiastically; it helped many of them curb eating and weight gain. In fact, smoking was in high fashion in our country for much of the twentieth century. Smokers appeared glamorous, sexy, and a tad rebellious, characteristics that enticed many young Americans to join their ranks. Movie stars and other celebrities smoked. Successful people smoked. Athletes smoked. Intellectuals smoked. Cigarette makers played up these themes in ads that targeted young people, their future customers. They knew that most young people who tried cigarettes would not stop using them and that if people didn’t smoke before age twenty, there was a 90 percent chance they never would.

Even doctors smoked. As late as the 1950s, doctors appeared in ads for cigarettes, giving assurances that certain brands were less irritating or even good for the throat. Not until the mid-1980s did the American Medical Association, under pressure from members, divest itself of its large holdings of tobacco stock.

Once a more accurate understanding of the nature and risks of tobacco addiction grew in the medical community, concerned experts started campaigns to fight it in order to prevent the diseases it caused. The antismoking movement has relied on a variety of strategies, such as banning smoking in public places and restricting tobacco sales to minors, taxing tobacco to make it less affordable (especially for young people), pressuring the tobacco industry to put health warnings on products and drop some kinds of advertising, launching massive educational efforts to make people aware of the dangers of smoking, and supporting much-publicized class-action and individual lawsuits on behalf of people harmed or killed by tobacco-related diseases. We have seen the demographics of smoking change as a result—down in some groups and up in others. But too many Americans still smoke, and our health-care system is left to deal with the consequences.

Analysts have tried to evaluate the effect that each of these antismoking strategies has had in reducing the incidence of smoking and changing its demographics. They discount the influence of lawsuits against tobacco companies, which have had mixed success, and of restrictions on advertising, which have inspired companies to find ways of getting around them (such as using more print ads and billboards instead of television and radio commercials). Most effective, they think, have been informational initiatives that warn about health risks and the added taxes on cigarettes, which tend to deter young people from buying them.

Reducing smoking in our population to a level we can live with will require a comprehensive society-wide effort. Our success so far has been limited for the following reasons.

• Although smoking has gone out of fashion in some subgroups, it has not in others.

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