THE CALIFORNIA Medical Association recently voted to recommend that its home state increase its smoking age from 18 to 21. Under the doctors' recommendation, buying or possessing cigarettes would be illegal for anyone under the new age limit. While their intentions are good, the CMA is misguided in its approach to lowering public nicotine addiction. Smoking clearly is a social disease, but government-legislated prohibition is not the correct prescription.
The issue at hand isn't whether people should smoke. They obviously shouldn't, unless they enjoy perpetual bad breath, yellow fingernails and the future promise of slowly hacking up bloodied pieces of their blackened, tattered lungs. Everyone should be against the habit and especially against those who actively perpetuate it for their own financial gain.
The question that best serves us to address is how to reduce the frequency of smoking in society. The CMA would say that more government regulation is the way to reduce smoking. Although such an easy solution is tempting, it is insufficient and wholly unsatisfactory in the long run.
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The CMA cites the American Lung Association, which estimates that around 90 percent of smokers become addicted to tobacco before they're 21. Four hundred and thirty thousand of these addicts die each year from tobacco-related illnesses. Stopping people from smoking before age 21 could save an incredible amount of lives each year.
Passing a law that bans college-age students from smoking is a poorly conceived approach to the problem. Even the American Lung Association, whose statistics the CMA uses to bolster their proposal, does not support raising the smoking age. They instead point out the need to better enforce current smoking regulations.
It is unlikely that any new law could succeed in curing our society of its smoking disease. In the 1980s, legislators tried to solve America's drinking problems by raising the drinking age from 18 to 21. Any student at the University can attest to how unsuccessful that law was at stopping binge drinking among college-age individuals. According to a 1999 study by the Harvard School of Public Health, 42.7 percent of college students still were classified as binge drinkers only five years ago, after the drinking age had been set at 21 for over a decade. Prohibitory laws can't hope to stop college-age people from smoking any more than they have been able to keep them from binge drinking.
Even if the CMA's proposal did somehow manage to succeed in its goal of reducing nicotine addiction, the decline would come at the unacceptable price of young people's freedom. We must value this freedom above all else. It was Patrick Henry who said, "Give me liberty or give me death." Smokers are entitled to have both on their own terms; no matter how stupidly they use their liberty or how horrible they make their deaths. If the government starts making unhealthy lifestyles illegal, what is to stop it from eventually banning the Big Mac? Or the Whopper?
If someone wants to fill his own lungs with hundreds of toxins and cram their arteries full of sludge fresh from the deep fryer at the local McDonald's, it is not the government's place to directly intervene. Closing fast food joints certainly would cut down on heart attacks, but who wants to live in a country where you can't sink your teeth into the occasional quarter-pounder with cheese? Health and nutrition are personal choices and they should stay that way as long as we claim to live in a free nation.
Getting people to stop smoking, drinking or gorging themselves on fast food can't and shouldn't be accomplished with the sweep of a legislator's pen. People will treat their bodies how they want to, regardless of the law. The battle to make people put down their cigarettes and fries is one of hearts and minds.
Hearts and minds are won with education and reason, not with age-based legislative prohibition. Forcing people to stop smoking might help them in the short-term, but providing them with the information they need to make their own choices is an infinitely better solution.
Nobody needs to be coerced out of smoking. The simple facts of the matter are enough to keep any sane person from ever lifting a cigarette to his mouth. Tobacco companies spread misinformation and coercion through advertising to distort the simple facts. If the government wants to eliminate nicotine addiction from society, it has to educate people. It's tougher than simply telling them they can't smoke, but at least it's an approach that'll work.
(Anthony Dick is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com.)
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