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Ah, the humble cigarette. It’s Nature’s little way of exacting revenge on Europe for the whole smallpox-blanket thing in times of yore, a wondrous little abstract machine for killing off people with little interest in living. (And don’t get your hackles up already. I’ve had a family member die of lung cancer just like the rest of us, and I know what it’s like to watch them fade. It’s sad, but it doesn’t make them any smarter: I stand by my statement, and all the increasingly ‘offensive’ ones which are to come.) Given that our economy is still founded more or less on the productivity of living individuals, it’s become understandably fashionable in liberal countries to hate on these little tobacco-sticks. Don’t think that I buy your trumped-up moral arguments for even one second, you anti-smokers. You’re just buying into the ‘healthful’ dogma that you’ve been fed by the powers that be, who for the time being want us living and breathing (at least well enough to show up at work). And so the health nuts haven’t stopped at banning smoking from restaurants (understandable), but have moved on to bars (less so) and are beginning to set their sights on cars, open spaces, and perhaps even prohibition in general. The British have even proposed this absurdity called a ‘smoking licence,‘ while at my university a number of overzealous health nuts are trying to ban cigarette sales in the campus variety store. Maybe smokers will soon have to hide out in a secret room in their basements smoking hydroponically-grown tobacco: it won’t be all bad though, maybe it’ll give tobacco smokers the same appreciation for their hobby that pot smokers have today.

I bet that last paragraph sounded like the diatribe of a seasoned smoker, irritated that he’s having more and more trouble getting his fix. Wrong. I haven’t smoked (tobacco) in years, after a fortunate incident in which I had half a Marlboro and puked violently for about twenty minutes, giving me an entrenched hostility to the scent and flavour of this acrid smoke. So, I hate smoking just as much as the vitriolic anti-smoking crowd. It’s smelly and idiotic: everyone who’s not in denial about their addiction knows this. It’s supposedly twice as addictive as heroin, and certainly only a fraction as interesting. Smoking cigarettes alone does not a Kurt Cobain produce. And the pitiful arguments that smokers use to rationalize their addiction are the worst. “It keeps me thin.” Yeah, well, so does eating less and exercising. “It relieves stress.” Yeah, well, so does pot and beer, not to mention simply not being an uptight idiot. Moreover, it seems that finding time for another smoke is the principal cause of stress among smokers. Smoking is really the perfect addiction for our capitalist society. Not only is it a hilariously expensive habit, it’s impossible to figure out why people acquire the habit in the first place. Smokers start smoking because they want to be cool (or, in my case, because that nicotine headrush in the early years is a great addition to being stoned and drunk out of your mind). But eventually all coolness and pleasant headrushing fades, and you’re just straight-up addicted to something for no good reason. Smoking a cigarette is indeed incredibly satisfying for a smoker, simply because it relieves them of the desire to smoke a cigarette for a little while. In this, it’s just like any number of other consumer goods, producing a desire which it then temporarily satisfies. At least when you’re a habitual drinker or pot smoker, you still get a little buzzed while you’re slowly killing yourself. So once again, we can see that cigarette smoking is a perfect fit for the capitalist lifestyle: its psychotropic effects are so mild that you can be incredibly addicted and still functional and productive. It’s not the kind of addiction that makes you miss work, it’s the kind that you can bring with you to work.

Anti-capitalist musings aside, it should be clear that I don’t think there’s any rational argument for cigarette smoking. It’s something that you start doing and continue doing for profoundly irrational reasons, reasons which lie in the addictive processes of the unconscious. Conversely, there are rational arguments for banning smoking in certain places, particularly in places where people might be exposed to carcinogenic smoke against their will. This is doubly so when one thinks about the rights of employees: customers can always choose a different location if they don’t like the smoking, but employees who might like to save their lungs don’t generally have that privilege. There is no rational argument for why smokers should be allowed to foist their preferred means of amortized suicide upon an unwilling group of people, whether it’s founded in a business logic or a libertarian one. (And never mind the multiplicity of equally carcinogenic industrial pollutants already in the air: there’s still no need to make a bad situation worse.) Even the strictest libertarian ought to recognize that their rights end where my nose begins. So I think it’s great that society has taken up a more enlightened stance on smoking in these contexts, and abandoned the old paternalistic attitude (a pater who smoked, obviously) which demanded that non-smoking customers and employees simply suffer in silence. Likewise, I would also say that I recognize the need for a punitive tax rate on tobacco products, not only to discourage potential new smokers, but to recoup some health care costs (especially in a country with socialized medicine – but I’ll come back to this health-care question shortly).
Where the anti-smoking crowd and myself diverge is when this enlightened attitude toward smoking law turns into a new paternalism, the same paternalism which has always been deployed to justify prohibition. Weak-kneed anti-smoking lobbyists won’t usually claim that the practice ought to be completely illegal, instead falling back on an increasingly complex system of restrictions and quasi-prohibitions with the intention of making it more and more difficult not only to become a smoker, but to remain one. Economic disincentives and other market-based measures are one thing; to think of every smoker converted to a non-smoker as some sort of victory for humanity is another thing entirely. I got my very hostile attitude toward the concept of smoking from my father. Nevertheless, said father, a good liberal to the end, can be incredibly irritating once he gets on to the topic of smokers and their vanishing rights. Like most anti-smokers, he seems to positively revel in trashing the concept of smoking, in his deep ressentiment that other people continue getting away with what he believes himself morally compelled not to do. Vigorous campaigners for anti-smoking regulations, like most dogmatic liberals, are always wallowing in this kind of ressentiment, and attempting to entrench their own moral principles in law. Like I said, some anti-smoking laws are reasonable. But such resentful and dogmatic liberals always seem to think that if a little bit of legislation is a good thing, then a lot of legislation will be a great thing. (Not incidentally, we might observe that this will never be a credible belief, and it will always give ammunition to conservatives, whether principled or otherwise.) The drive to institute an effective prohibition on all smoking is based upon a fundamental misapprehension of the function of anti-smoking legislation. Justifiable anti-smoking laws are the ones which prevent non-smokers from being unwillingly or unwittingly exposed to carcinogenic smoke. Paternalistic anti-smoking laws are the ones which seek to prevent smokers themselves from enjoying their vice, even when they aren’t harming anybody but themselves. These sorts of paternalistic laws can only have outright prohibition as their ultimate aim, which is not only unjustifiable from the perspective of individual liberties, but profoundly ineffectual as a disciplinary method.

Paternalism is always ultimately based on economic necessity. Daddy wants you, more than anything, to be productive. As long as smokers seem just as productive (or more so) than non-smokers, smoking will remain a non-issue. (Likewise, if overpopulation ever becomes a serious drain on the economy, you can bet that the institutionalization of ‘healthfulness’ will fall by the wayside). As the Cancer Society reminds us, “For each pack of cigarettes sold in 1999, $3.45 was spent on medical care caused by smoking, and $3.73 lost in productivity, for a total cost to society of $7.18 per pack.” Apart from the incredibly spurious nature of these sorts of ’statistics,’ we can clearly see their paternalistic appeal: smokers need to be stopped from smoking, not just for their own health, but for the greater good. This has, of course, been the argument deployed by all authoritarian regimes in order to justify the unjustifiable, abrogating individual rights for the perceived good of the collective. I’m not going to scapegoat the Russians, Italians or Germans in this respect: every government that enforces a prohibition on an act which harms only the individual actor (or nobody at all) is in this sense authoritarian and paternalistic. And thanks to Harry Anslinger’s remarkably successful (albeit poorly-named) Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, this list includes approximately every nation-state currently in existence.
Here, a good-ole-fashioned libertarian would be ready to end his or her discourse on smoking: smokers, like all individuals, have liberties, and they oughtn’t be hindered from enjoying them unless they are themselves hindering someone else from enjoying theirs. This seems like a pretty solid moral foundation for legislation, and in most respects it is. But I’m no ole-fashion libertarian, and I’m not really happy just appealing to the liberties of smokers as a value in and of themselves. After all, they’re stupid enough to continue being smokers, so I don’t see why we really ought to respect their liberties all that much. This is more or less the implicit claim of paternalistic legislation, after all: those unfit to govern themselves must be governed by law. So I’d like to take up this paternal claim on its own terms, and demonstrate its essential absurdity. Essentially, what’s at least a bit ‘radical’ about my take on smoking law is that I wholly agree that smokers aren’t really fit to govern themselves, and for this precise reason they ought to be allowed to continue doing so. Smoking, far from being a practice which needs to be prohibited for the greater good, in fact contributes to this ‘greater good,’ however it may be defined.
Let’s start this section with a little thought experiment that’ll hopefully get your hackles up again. (What are hackles, anyway?) In your head, I want you to rank-order the following four hypothetical individuals in terms of how much they deserve to die. If you’re uncomfortable with this formulation, then just rank them in order of how upset you would be to hear they’ve died:

1) A 25-year, pack-a-day smoker.

2) A morbidly obese individual who simply overeats.

3) A morbidly obese individual with a hereditary thyroid condition.

4) A healthy baby in Central Africa.

I’ll give you a second.

All done?

I’m willing to bet that, once you got over your initial distaste at the premises of this thought-experiment, 95% of all you hypothetical readers didn’t change the order, and not just because you’re very suggestible.

Why? Because there’s a huge difference between the first two hypothetical individuals and the second two. The first two are individuals who, whether or not they know it, have made life choices which are almost certainly going to entail a shorter lifespan. The second two are individuals who, through no fault of their own, are likely going to have a shorter lifespan. In setting up your ordering, you’ve relied on an implicit ethical principle: people who die because of choices they’ve made are more deserving of their death than people who die because of an accident of birth.

What does the death of a pack-a-day smoker have to do with the life of a baby in Ethiopia? Simply put: Everything.

Everyone knows it, but nobody is willing to come right out and say it: the human race is multiplying out of control. Malthus recognized this as far back as the eighteenth century, while in our own century Paul Ehrlich derived some rather silly predictions from this underlying principle. What does ‘out of control’ really mean in this context? (NB, for those of a very philosophical bent, my thoughts on these issues are strongly influenced by the late Garrett Hardin and his always-irreverent take on ethics) It simply means what it says: populations of animals are generally controlled by a variety of natural factors, including food supply, predation, and climactic catastrophe. We human animals, however, have placed ourselves not simply ‘atop’ but outside the natural food chain by constructing our own artificial food chains (wheat-truck-mouth/hay-cow-mouth/etc.), while our technologies have made us incredibly resilient in the face of natural catastrophes. This not only allows our population to grow and grow, uncoupled from any natural control factors; this growing population and its increasingly complex techno-society are in themselves an apparently inexhaustible resource for solving future population problems (as outlined by Julian Simon). And so, as humanity continues to push the carrying capacity of its planet to the maximum, it also continues to find new ways of expanding this global capacity.

It seems to me that the debate between Simon and Ehrlich over whether and when humanity will one day run up against some fixed carrying capacity and simply collapse, is not only a bit overblown, but profoundly misses the point, especially in terms of what we might call ‘population ethics.’ If we look at the various means by which capitalist society has been able to expand the global carrying capacity of the human race, one thing should be clear: from a local perspective, these mechanisms are often profoundly unequal (and therefore unjust). Farmers in America get subsidized to grow corn nobody wants to buy, while on the other side of the world, millions starve to death. The fastest-growing problem in the developed world is obesity, while the developing world is still stuck on the same old problem of malnutrition. If this doesn’t strike you as the most evil irony of the contemporary world, then you are not only lacking a sense of irony, but a moral sense.

What the hell does this have to do with smoking, and the thought experiment above?

It’s simple. All the noble efforts to feed the starving masses of the world can only go so far. The only sustainable solution to the problem of overpopulation is simply population control. We need to overcome our selfish instinct to be fruitful and multiply as much as Nature will allow, because we don’t live in Nature anymore: we live in an accelerating industrial culture that has latched onto an unsustainable spiral of growth. The particular time is irrelevant: we need to solve this problem of growth for ourselves, or Nature will reassert her power and solve it for us. Not only do we need to rethink our lust for growth, but we need to rethink the incredibly unequal distribution of this growth: individuals born in developing countries are more likely to die simply by the accident of their birth.

And so, paternalistic legislation against smoking is not only an affront to liberty and a colossal waste of time, but grotesquely misguided to the point of becoming immoral. Why the hell should we fight to save the lives of individuals who are ready to pay for a chance to throw theirs away, when millions of individuals starve to death every year, even as they desperately fight to survive? Even the economic arguments ‘for the greater good’ are a bit silly. In a study with wonderfully contrarian conclusions, the Danish Institute of Health concluded that the lifetime “health-related costs of smoking are balanced by smaller expenditure due to shorter life expectancy.” When you think about it, smoking is in fact a wonderfully democratic system of population control. Thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, less and less people (in developed countries) die each day, but just as many people get born. This progressive elimination of natural selection from human existence can only exacerbate the problems of overpopulation and their concomitant inequalities.
Population control is the only solution to overpopulation, but it’s an extremely problematic one in almost any form. After all, everybody wants to live, and they at least want their families to live (beyond that, it seems, many people don’t really care that much). So how does the ‘controller’ of population decide who gets to live and who is allowed to die? Essentially this is the problem of deciding who deserves to live, and who deserves to die: this is a problem suitable for a god, not a man. The solutions proposed by ‘eugenics’ are so profoundly repugnant that they barely deserve a mention. Controlling the birth rate through legislation is another option, but there remains the ethical problem of what to do with babies in excess of the limit. Garrett Hardin’s solution – ‘don’t help the poor!’ – is equally problematic, insofar as it assumes that those who are born into poverty have less right to life than those born into wealth. The moral quandaries of population control by legislative fiat have led most liberals to cast the idea aside, to proclaim that all life is sacred and that we have a sacred right to protect life: in this respect they’re not far from ‘right-to-lifers.’

But liberals still support abortion rights, for good reason, and for the same good reason as they ought to allow smokers to keep on smoking. Abortion and smoking are passive, ‘democratic’ modes of population control, modes of control which in fact reintroduce some semblance of natural selection into the sphere of human existence. People who choose an unhealthy life get sick and die; embryos whose mothers don’t want them and so won’t raise them well, simply don’t get born. (The net effect of this second fact seems to be, on the whole, positive.) These notions might be repugnant to the liberal mind. If so, fuck the liberal mind. I think liberals should learn to stand up for principles, even when it means they have to tolerate a few repugnant conclusions and cast aside their paternalistic impulses. Save paternalism for the familial sphere, where it belongs: if you’ve got a child who smokes, you can and should go right ahead and pressure them in whatever fashion you’d like to stop doing so. But in the legal sphere, we need to bow to a higher principle of liberty, whereby others are free to do whatever they want so long as it doesn’t directly affect us. This doesn’t even demand that we liberals give up the desire for a better world, or the hope to improve humanity. Quite the contrary: I should say that if smokers are dumb enough to continue smoking, while fully aware of the consequences, then their deaths ought to be continually improving humanity’s aggregate intelligence. If they’re wealthy and irrational enough to sustain a smoking habit, then their share of the earth’s carrying capacity should go to somebody more deserving, like the starving Ethiopian from the thought experiment above. Maybe as we start to think about smoking in this context, we’ll even start to reconsider the disproportionate investments that are made in lung cancer research, and start to think about simpler (and less profitable) things, like malaria and malnutrition.
So, as non-smokers, let’s forget the pipe dream of a non-smoking society and say to smokers: light up! Be proud of the sacrifice you’re making for the greater good!

Just don’t blow that shit in my face.