Customer Reviews

Smoked: Why Joe Camel is Still Smiling (The Read & Resist Series)

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Whatever happened to the smoke-free society we were supposed to have by 2000? The author's thesis (which he convincingly backs up with facts and figures) is that we've been bamboozled by the tobacco industry. Instead of the sensible campaigns (led by Everett Koop, for example) to make smoking (by anybody!) socially inappropriate, which actually did bring smoking down, the tobacco folks are now concentrating on a campaign to criminalize teenage smoking..... this gets adult smokers off the hook and has actually increased teenage smoking by making it an "adult" thing to do! No wonder Philip Morris sponsors all those anti-teen-smoking ads: they've actually increased smoking more than the old cigarette ads did! Should be required reading for members of Congress (though I'm not optimistic that it will have much impact, alas).

What I found most interesting about this paper (calling it a book is an exaggeration) is that it focuses its lucid and rabid attacks where they belong: on the hopelessly flaccid anti-smoking lobby and not the tobacco industry itself. If anything, Males's charts, graphs, and refreshing commentary gave me a grudging respect for the industry's ability to use bribery, politics, and moral outrage to make everyone fall into step.

In the end, though, Smoked didn't change my ambivalent feelings toward tobacco. Partly this was because Males's uncharacteristically general discussion of the financial `cost' of smoking contributed to my suspicion that it's a myth. I was left wondering if increased healthcare costs are more than offset by the early deaths of users, the fact that tobacco is the most heavily taxed consumer product in the world, and the hundreds of thousands of jobs the industry creates. Of course there are the incalculable human costs, but hey, lots of things are bad for you.

The anger you take away from these pages will more likely be aimed at the anti-smoking lobby, which has missed every opportunity to actually reduce tobacco use and in many ways have allowed themselves to be manipulated into promoting it. Tobacco is not a public health issue in the U.S., it's a political issue. And as such, it will always be with us.

We've had everything from 9-11 to the Iraq War to the first black president to electronic cigarettes since then. Teen smoking, adult smoking, and middle-aged vaping are all likely quite different now than in the late Nineties.

I'll be reading more of Males' stuff, though, because he's willing to look into the real numbers and tell us the cold, hard truth: young people aren't as f-ed up as we like to think they are.