Continued from The Persuasion unto Death: Moral Fiction and Propaganda of Innocence in the Tobacco Industry Papers

“In general none of the managers of RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company smoked. I asked them why they aren’t smokers. … One said: ‘We don’t smoke this shit, we only sell it.’ … He added: ‘We reserve the right to smoke for the young, the poor, the black and the stupid’.” — David Garlitz, former Winston promoter

The Tobacco Industry presents itself as a protector and defender of adult freedom of choice. People should be allowed to choose to smoke, and companies allowed to provide smokers with cigarettes, whatever the health risks of smoking because it’s a free country.

The story the tobacco companies tell about smoking is this: smoking cigarettes has health risks, yes, but if people know about these risks [and everyone does] and they choose to smoke, that is their right. It is an exercise of their free will, a cherished value that American society is allegedly built upon. Adults make choices. They, and only they, are responsible for these choices and their consequences It is deceptive to talk about cigarette smoking as an addiction — because unlike drug addicts, cigarette smokers hold down respectable jobs, do not engage in crime to support their habit, and so forth. The main point of calling something an addiction is to deny that the addict can exercise free will over his habit. But on the contrary, the freedom of the smoker to smoke or not is clear — smokers have that choice, because millions and millions of them have quit.The major tenets of this story — freedom, adult choice, individual responsibility, (not) addiction and the common knowledge of the health risks of smoking can each be analyzed usefully — each reveals and hides some important aspect of human experience. But I think it’s more interesting to ask whether, even if all these claims about freedom and responsibility are valid, would this establish the innocence of the Tobacco Industry. I want to show that this intended exculpatory conclusion does not follow. And so, for the sake of this argument, let’s grant that there is truth to each of these major claims of the Big Tobacco Innocence Project; that is, that smokers:

1. make informed adult choices regarding smoking.
2. have individual responsibility for their smoking.
3. are exercising their free will when they smoke.
4. are aware of the common knowledge that cigarettes are harmful.
5. are not addicted to cigarettes in the same way that narcotics,
   cocaine, or amphetamine addicts are addicted to their drugs.

A way to approach this subject is to look at the pronouncements of the Tobacco Industry. Here is an example of claims (1) and (4) above:

“For the plaintiffs’ lawyers to claim that Ohio’s working men and women were unable to make personal and informed choices about smoking because of tobacco advertising, or to understand the well-known health risks of smoking, is both patronizing and insulting . . . It’s preposterous to think that those who manage union health care funds were somehow insulated from all the scientific, public and common knowledge of the health risks of smoking.” —Robert C. Weber, lead attorney for the tobacco companies in a suit by Ohio Labor Union Health Funds, March 18, 1999.

Not only is it true that “Everyone knows cigarettes can kill you, so those who smoke have only themselves to blame,” but, remarkably, those who claim to protect the smoker’s interests (by suing the tobacco companies for damages) are actually ‘patronizing and insulting’ the smokers. This strangely desirable right to choose to become sick and die by (not) being addicted to cigarettes is an important article of faith in Tobacco Industry discourse. Perhaps it should give us pause, those of us who have fought against what we called the simplistic reactionary ‘just-so-no’ war on drugs propaganda. We too have defended the rights of people to engage in harmful drug use. The tobacco companies’ use of the 60s and 70s language of drug tolerance, the freedom to take things into your own body, is not an accident. It should not be dismissed as mere opportunism, though opportunist it certainly is. This libertarian premise gets its power and plausibility from all the styles of political and personal discourse that argue individuals should be shielded from the attempts of governments to prevent them from engaging in self-harming legal or illegal drug use. This is an example of how the hugely successful anti-government propaganda of the right over the past 30 years owes a lot to the anti-government propaganda of the left during the 50’s, 60’s, and 70s. The similarity of right wing and left wing conspiracy narratives are a striking manifestation of this. Someone else is always in power, scheming to oppress us and rob of us our freedom. For the right, it’s always the government; for the left, it is often the government, as well as the corporations.

What interests me about the common knowledge defense is that it seems simultaneously reasonable and egregiously disingenuous. Of course, anyone who began smoking after it became an accepted medical fact that smoking is VERY dangerous to your health, must bear some responsibility for doing so.
I’m one of the millions of people who did this. And I, like most everyone knew, if only in the back of my mind, about the arguments and evidence that cigarettes make you cough, may give you lung cancer, and are likely to kill you. But can we seriously listen to this reasoning when it comes from the people who make their fortunes encouraging people to smoke and preventing public health efforts to curtail smoking and thus save lives? Can it be, in reference to the quotation from Mr. Weber above, that the tobacco
companies are so high-minded as to be passionately interested in allowing the brave and distinguished ‘working men and women of Ohio’ the hallowed freedom to make catastrophic and fatal choices? Can it be that this is a more honorable stance toward smokers than that of those who try to limit cigarette advertising and make tobacco companies pay for the deaths of those killed by their products? How wide the gap is between the assertion of these righteous moral principles and the self-interested, murderously conceived and ruthlessly executed actions these principles are meant to justify?

All this libertarian rhetoric, including the bombastic pretense that there is some crucial human right at stake in the smoking of cigarettes, does not (and cannot) diminish the culpability of the tobacco industry. This is true because what we have here is a case of:

Blaming The Dead and The Dying

The repetitive barrage of accusations directed at ungrateful smokers by the Tobacco Industry is meant to displace blame from the industry onto the unfortunate consumer. The moral logic on which this depends, the notion that if the smoker is to blame than the industry is not, is completely fallacious. It rests on a false rhetorical duality used by corporate propagandists to protect their clients: the idea that if the consumer is to blame for something, then the manufacturers, distributors, advertisers, and marketers can not be. From the fact that the smoker bears some responsibility for his fate, we are told we must conclude that he is the only guilty one, the one who bears the entire responsibility for his illness and death. And so, conveniently, the Tobacco Industry is innocent, and not responsible, and not liable. This deduction rests on the idea that fault, blame, and responsibility are always unitary, indivisible, and singular: - “If it’s Your Bad, it’s not Mine.” Or more cynically, since someone has to take the rap for the 400,000 Americans who die every year from smoking, let’s blame the smokers. Since they are already sick, guilty, and dying, this shouldn’t be very hard.

It Takes (At Least) Two to Tango

In real life people do not act in a social vacuum, uninfluenced by anyone else, having sole responsibility for their feelings, choices, thoughts, and actions. People interact with their families, coworkers, their drinking buddies, with television advertisements, corporate sponsorship of sporting events, and marketing campaigns to popularize all manner of consumer purchasing. In other words, people interact with the entire social and commercial world in which they live. Many, presumably most, actions or events that harm people have multiple causes and yield multiple responsibilities. To have a smoking
pandemic, for example, you have to have smokers; you need to have friends and loved ones who tolerate, if not support, the habit; and you also have to have a cigarette industry, performing supplying, enticing, legitimating, lobbying, and litigating functions. The horrific yet casual dance of death in which the smoker and the cigarette industry engage is enormous, fearful, morbid, gruesome and utterly gratuitous. The notion that only one of the dancers is responsible for the dance is preposterous, and where it is not dishonest, idiotic. There is so much colossal blame to go around here - who could have a monopoly on it? When tobacco companies blame smokers for smoking, and so propose that their role in the slaughter is free of sin, they hope that no one notices the strangeness of the hypothetical world they have conjured, where one and only one of us must be blamed, where your guilt implies my innocence.

Libertarian philosophy in our time is based on denying the social reality described in the above paragraph. This would seem to make it a useless and empty basis for understanding social issues. But that is also its real strength: the simplicity of its moral precepts allows the moralist to not dirty his hands actually trying to understand what goes on in the social world. Things can be understood without inquiry; simplicity is restored; the truth can be ascertained, and the losers blamed for their losses.

A straight forward parallel: Guns don’t Kill People, People do. The manufacturers, distributor, seller or reseller of the gun, and the gun culture that encourages gun ownership, are thusly held not responsible for a shooting because someone else—the shooter—pulled the trigger, and broke the law, perhaps panicked, and showed bad judgment, or freaked out, or misread the situation, or is just an plain evil. Without going into this politically berserk controversy deeply, we can observe that in any particular shooting/killing, the question of culpability is open ended. If the shooting was by a distressed or disturbed or violent person, we naturally ask, how did they get the gun? While the supplier may well be innocent, this is not a priori true—one has to learn the facts. One must ask the reasonable questions that any adult without political blinders would ask—who is responsible for this death? If we held them responsible, morally and legally, would fewer innocent people die?

So it is with the marketing of any substance or device with notably harmful and predictable effects—guns and cigarettes, or alcohol, or food shot through with sugar, encased in grease and lacking in nutrition, or automobiles designed to glamorize power and aggression and show contempt for the air that others breathe. In every case there is a consumer who chooses to buy the object and use it. Rarely does anyone directly compel them to do so. But so what? Most of the influence or control that people have on each other, and that organizations have on people, is not strictly coercive. It is not primarily implemented by a gun, or a club, or a subpoena or a sheriff’s handcuffs. Instead, social and personal influence and coercion operate through encouragement or discouragement, glamorization or disparagement, the enabling of access to a milieu in which an activity can freely occur, or, contrarily, through the restriction and withholding of such places and resources. Threats of social humiliation, peer group criticism, of being shunned and excluded are more powerful and more common than the threat of incarceration. To praise something publicly, to provide something cheaply and conveniently, is to bear some responsibility for the predictable consequences.

When smoking is glamorized in various media, in sports and fashion magazines, in the movies, when cigarettes are available in almost every grocery and liquor store on the planet, when hospitals allow patients and workers to smoke on the hospital steps, when churches countenance smoking in 12 step groups they host, when restaurants and bars accommodate gaggles of smokers jamming sidewalks partying and talking excitedly, when universities tolerate students smoking all over the campus grounds, that is when cigarette smoking is enabled. Do the movie producers, magazine editors, grocery store owners, liquor licensing agencies, hospital and university administrators, church activity coordinators, and restaurant managers bear any responsibility for providing these places where people can light up/shoot up in peace?

‘I guarantee that I will use Brown & Williamson tobacco products in no less than five feature films. It is my understanding that Brown & Williamson will pay a fee of $500,000 .00.”‘
- Sylvester Stallone, letter to Brown and Williamson, 1983. (http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/zmf53a00 )

Of course they do. They are responsible in the same way that parents who leave town and turn over the keys to house and car to teenagers known for hosting drunken parties are. The consequences of their actions and non-actions are predictable, lethal, and preventable. Adults are supposed to know better, and to act better. It is strange to ponder the notion of adult choice and freedom that protects the smoking of cigarettes, yet does not extend to a concern for the life and death of those around us.

The smoker’s agency in smoking is clear, as is the agency, and therefore the responsibility, of all the people and institutions providing smoker-friendly environments. Surely it is indeed common knowledge—among people who every day coordinate and regulate the behavior of others—that cigarettes kill and kill mercilessly, and that our society as a whole has been disastrously irresponsible in the face of this wholesale killing. Surely there is no escaping the responsibility for acting or not acting in the face of this knowledge.

If we can see that these intermediary, often relatively innocent parties are responsible for the smoking they enable and allow, then how much more emphatic must be our judgment of those who make their living coordinating world wide campaigns to spread and encourage cigarette smoking? And how should we respond to the libertarian logicians who buttress the arguments in defense of this sociopathic behavior?

Sooner or Later One of Us Must Know

If the Big Tobacco Smoking Narrative does not absolve the Tobacco Industry of responsibility, its true function may lie elsewhere. Political and consumer logic does not function in a simple way. Perhaps the most common rhetorical procedure, when confronted by evidence of wrongdoing, is to subtly change the focus of the discussion, in effect changing the subject under discussion. This technique is greatly favored by politicians, lawyers and public relations professionals. This strategy works very well. We are discouraged from thinking about what tobacco company executives really do, what they really think about and plan, or of what the lawyers or public relations firms or marketing and advertising firms do for them, or what the pro-tobacco politicians and hired pundits (a august breed of thinkers, surely) are up to, these dubiously self-described ‘conservative’ think-tankers who never encounter a corporate crime they could not justify and defend. No, let’s think instead about the pathetic behavior of the unhappy smoker. Were it not for his retrograde behavior, of course, the industry that enables and encourages that behavior could not exist. As we’ve been told for over a century, industry merely gives the public what they want. Sadly, in this case what they appear to want are cheap, addicting, lung and heart destroying, fatal drugs. It is a helluva adult choice, but if they are going to make it, are we not obligated to defend to their death their right to make it? And is this not a case of American know-how to make a profit while so doing?

SMOKING: A QUESTION OF FREE CHOICE AND PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
It is a question fundamental to the American system of rights and justice: where does the responsibility of a company, or society at large, end and individual responsibility begin? More specifically, should we allow a person who makes a free and informed lifestyle choice to engage in an activity involving well-known risks to shift responsibility to others for the possible adverse consequences of his decision?
—”POSITION PAPER PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND LIABILITY THIRD DRAFT 880510?
From the Public Relations Firm of BURSON-MARSTELLAR, May 10, 1988

The critical truth is this: human beings do a lot of foolish and dangerous things, hurting themselves and others. Those who encourage these things, who work to legitimate and protect these activities, and who set up a worldwide marketing system to make the means of self-harm and self-destruction available, nearly ubiquitous, are guilty, guilty, guilty. All the facts alleged by the Big Tobacco Innocence Project does not demonstrate Tobacco Industry innocence. The degree to which the Tobacco Industry’s victims participate in their self-destruction does not mitigate the industry’s responsibility, liability, and guilt.

Consider a much milder parallel: people have a legal right, I imagine, to go hiking in very rugged terrain without the gear and supplies necessary to make their journey reasonably safe. Does this justify a well-financed international campaign to encourage this behavior, to glamorize it, to make it a symbol of heroic individual freedom, and continue to do so as the fatalities mount? Hardly. And so the well documented propaganda campaigns to persuade smokers to continue smoking and induce non-smokers to begin, by such legitimating and glamorizing of cigarette smoking, betray an unspeakable depth of criminality and morally atrocious behavior undertaken with malice aforethought. This guilt can not be diminished, sidestepped, or excused by the rhetoric under examination.