WHEN COMMON SENSE GOES UP IN SMOKE

After three years of warning U.S. smokers against the health hazards of cigarettes, Public Health Service heads and other concerned officials have concluded that it is not enough to let people know what is good for them and what is harmful.

Cigarette consumption is at an all-time high — 525 billion cigarettes for the fiscal year just ended. Yet evidence is increasing that cigarette smoking is cutting back the life-span of millions of U.S. men and women.

Recent reports from the Public Health Service show substantially higher death rates from heart disease, stroke and lung cancer among both men and women cigarette smokers. Other studies show a death rate from bronchitis and emphysema five to six times as high among cigarette smokers as among non-smokers.

While those concerned for U.S. health are trying to discourage cigarette smoking, the tobacco industry is pouring $300 million a year into cigarette advertising, much of it to persuade teenagers that cigarette smoking will do such things as increase their popularity, make young men more masculine or attractive to the opposite sex, or enhance their social poise. So effective is this barrage that more than a million young people a year take up the cigarette habit.

The situation suggests a point that is far from new: if men must choose between high profits and conscience, they will find a way to keep the profits. This being true, the tobacco industry at the very least should be restricted in its advertising.

But why, when the issues are clearly drawn, should the public have to be protected? The National Observer contends that the cigarette manufacturers’ appeal is effective because of the appeal of here and now. “People will, in fact, do what is bad for them in the long run if offered a reward that can be collected in the short run.” Thus the suggestion of popularity and appeal to the opposite sex right now in the opinion of the Observer has greater weight with teenagers than the danger of health impairment in the future.

There is truth in this, of course, but the real answer, we believe, goes even deeper. For all his vaunted intellect, man is not the rational creature he would like to think he is. Leave him alone and he will do what he wants, not what he knows is right or even what he knows is best. This is why every man needs God, the Bible and the Saviour. Without such help from above and beyond himself, he will spoil his own life and the lives of those he influences.

— Selected

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