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A truce in the smoking wars

By Jim Waters

Instead of working toward a reasonable compromise, Kentucky’s health police have started a war on smokers with the force of government being the preferred weapon of choice. Frankfort increased the cigarette tax by nearly 1,000 percent and two cities, Lexington and Georgetown, have now passed prohibitive smoking bans.

Health advocates are delighted. They have convinced themselves that these policies will curb smoking across the commonwealth. Such prohibitions seem to make sense in the short run. But what can history tell us about the long-term, unintended consequences of such laws?

A tax increase may seem like a great plan to curtail smoking. However, once cigarette prices rise, people look for alternatives hoping to feed their habits at the same or lower prices, and not always through legal means.

A Louisville businessman recently was convicted of selling Kentucky cigarettes to customers as far away as Chicago and pocketing most of the difference between Illinois’ 93-cent tax per pack and Kentucky’s 3-cent levy. Instead of working through the anguish of “cold-turkey” cessation or the additional cost of medication to lessen the pain of quitting, his Illinois customers bettered their lots at his expense.

With tobacco taxes now on the rise in the commonwealth, it won’t be long before Kentuckians will be the ones buying – rather than selling – cigarettes on the black market. And if what’s happened in other states and even other countries is any indication, buying low and selling high could convert even more law-abiding Kentuckians into cynical criminals.

For example, in Maine – where policymakers recently approved doubling the cigarette tax from $1 to $2 per pack – a man was charged recently with stealing $900 worth of cigarettes from a convenience store.

To predict the future extent of such activity in the United States, one needs only look across the Pacific Ocean. Following a government-mandated five-fold price increase in December, nearly 827,000 packs of cigarettes were stolen during the first quarter of 2005, compared to only 113,000 during the same period in 2004. Nevertheless, The Korea Herald reported only a “slight” decrease in the number of Korean men identifying themselves as smokers last year.

Attempts to eliminate unhealthy behaviors by raising taxes do not work.

Current crusaders who wish to ban smoking today bear some of the same characteristics as the health luminaries of the ill-fated prohibition movement of the early 1900s. The 18th Amendment was intended to stop the consumption and sale of alcohol and the behavior that often accompanied it, including gambling and prostitution. It did neither.

Will history repeat itself, enabling today’s anti-smoking zealots to make the same mistakes of past prohibitionists? Or will our elected officials learn from these blunders and act reasonably in the face of emotional enticements?

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a Michigan physician, misdiagnosed Prohibition in a 1928 newspaper story by enthusiastically proclaiming: “Prohibition has come to stay. It is the greatest forward step ever taken.”

Likewise, someone should have stopped the spokesman for The Illinois National Bank when he proudly proclaimed at Prohibition’s passage that “the country will never go back to licensed selling of liquor in any form.” In fact, the official era of Prohibition lasted only 13 years.

Smoking-ban enthusiasts across Kentucky fervently believe that barring people from lighting up in certain places will reduce smoking rates and the negative health effects of second-hand smoke. History suggests that these 21st-century prohibitionists will not obtain the healthy outcome for which their advocates dream.

In fact, what government seeks to ban today, the magic of the market is already resolving. Prior to its recently imposed smoking ban, a third of Georgetown’s restaurateurs had already voluntarily prohibited smoking by their patrons.

Instead of insisting on an “all-or-none” policy – similar to the approach taken by the Temperance Movement in the early 1900s – today’s smoking-ban advocates should search for moderation. To assist in that effort, we offer a truce in the form of an alternative being used in Great Britain, where “The Public Places Charter” (http://www.bipps.org/pubs/publicplaces.pdf) protects the health of consumers while preserving the freedom of business owners to determine their establishment’s smoking policies.

Under this arrangement, owners must place signage in plain view to inform patrons about that establishment’s smoking policies. If customers do not want to enter an establishment that allows smoking, they can choose a different one that bans the unhealthy practice.

If the goal of today’s health advocates is to safeguard Kentuckians from the dangers of secondhand smoke, they should support alternatives that both protect health and respect private-property rights. Otherwise, they are fighting a war that history indicates will yield a few short-term victories but prove un-winnable in the long run.

– Jim Waters is director of policy and communications for the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free-market think tank.

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