9 November 1998.

A few hundred years ago when the explorers first found the New World, they also found tobacco. They brought it back to the Old World and it quickly became a popular habit. It has been snorted, sniffed, chewed and smoked. In our present culture smoking if far and away the most popular.

When I was young it was an accepted thing. Motion pictures glamorized smoking. It was generally shown as the elite thing to do. During the Second World War soldiers were given a ration of cigarettes whether they smoked or not. Both of my parents smoked. I never asked my father when he started smoking. He was in the war. Many men who didn't smoke when they went overseas did when they came back. It was taken for granted that anybody who wanted to smoke could smoke most anywhere they wanted. Homes where non-smokers lived usually still provided ashtrays and matches for their smoking friends. Fortunately, I did not ever take up the habit. It turns out that I am allergic to tobacco. It is likely that this is because my parents smoked when I was young. Allergies are also more common among children of non-smokers.

About 20 years ago it became apparent that smoking was a likely factor in causing lung cancer. Both my father and my father-in-lay died of cancer in their mid 50's. My father-in-law died of lung cancer so the correlation is probably direct. He smoked a pipe most of his life. He also sold agricultural chemicals. For most of his career the carcinogenic nature of many of these chemicals was not known. His cancer might have been triggered by that as well as by the smoking. My father's cancer originated in his adrenal gland. The correlation with smoking is less obvious for him. Still ...

The United States Surgeon General has issued guidelines stating that tobacco products are hazardous to health. Not only are they carcinogenic, they also have numerous adverse effects on health. One of my Uncles, for example, is dying from emphysema, caused mostly be smoking several packs of cigarettes a day for most of his life. Advertising of cigarettes (and many other tobacco products) is banned from magazines and television and severely restricted in other media. All cigarette packages must carry a warning label that says they are addictive and hazardous to the health.

Evidence is not coming out that tobacco is also extremely addictive. Smokers have always said that it was hard to quit smoking. It now looks as thought nicotine is more addictive than many other drugs that are completely outlawed. Fortunately, cigarettes are readily available and fairly inexpensive. (At least they are inexpensive compared to the other drugs that are considered to be more dangerous.) They provide the drug in small doses and in a delivery system that usually fairly safe. (A few fires a year - deaths so remote from the smoking act that they are generally not attributed to that act as such.)

As time has gone by smoking has become less and less popular. Nowadays smoking is prohibited in most public places. Certainly enclosed spaces like elevators. Also most offices restrict smoking to some place outdoors. In Arlington, the town where I live, restaurants must either not allow smoking or must have a separate dining area with specific ventilation requirements so that non-smokers can dine without being bothered by the smoke. If one does not smoke, having smoke in the air dulls the sense of smell and limits one's enjoyment of the food.

To some extent smoking is less popular than it once was. If for no other reason, it is just harder to find a place and time to smoke. However, in certain segments of the population smoking is actually up. For example, it is up in young people. It is hard to understand why young people have such a care-free attitude about health. They have the most to loose since they have only begun their lives. I suppose that they are also motivated by the need to rebel - to be their own person, as it were. Still, you would think that it would be possible to think of other ways to rebel. Things that are not deadly like weird haircuts, odd clothes, makeup, etc.

What is even more curious is that young women are starting smoking more than young men. The role of women in our society has changed markedly over that past couple of decades. This may also be a spin-off of WW2. Women are being allowed more freedom in their choice of careers. Families are getting smaller. Partly because of pressure that is starting to build up on resources in the environment and partly because in our economy it is no longer advantageous to have large families. Having fewer children means that one can devote more resources to the education of those children. When we were primarily an agricultural economy a family just needed extra hands to help in the fields. They didn't need to be highly educated. Now uneducated people are no longer in great demand so they have become a commodity. A family in our culture needs to raise a few highly educated children to help provide for the parents in their old age.

The great irony in this situation is that the United States Federal Government continues to provide subsidies to the farmers who raise tobacco. There is a twisted logic to this. Farms subsidies arise because of the erratic times farmers have. One year they will have a bumper crop but the prices fall because everyone else had a good crop too. The next year they have a terrible crop due to lack of rain, or whatever, and the prices go into orbit, but they have nothing to sell. They probably do the best when times are just so-so. The government provides a subsidy for the market, sometimes as outright cash payments, sometimes as price supports - a sort of minimum price guarantee. In return, only a limited number of farmers are allowed to raise tobacco and they are limited in the acreage they can plant. Naturally there are only certain areas of the country where tobacco can be grown well. These states will therefore naturally receive a greater share of their income from the federal government in the form of tobacco subsidies. Naturally their legislators will fight fiercely to protect these subsidies. They trade their votes on other issues that matter less to their constituents than do the subsidies.