Ayn Rand Centre: Smoking and personal freedom

Today the Ayn Rand Centre for Individual Rights released an article describing the tobacco control community as "a cancer on American liberty". It's ironic really, calling the American Cancer Society a 'cancer'.

The article claims that smoking by-laws, taxes on cigarettes, tobacco advertising bans and lawsuits against Big Tobacco unnecessarily inconvenience smokers and tobacco companies. Smokers should be left to make their own decisions, free of interference, it argues.

So, let's get this right: the Ayn Rand Centre supports smoking everywhere without restriction, no taxes on tobacco, allowing drug dealers to advertise their product without restriction and that tobacco companies ought to be allowed to lie to protect their business and be immune from prosecution for doing so. It sounds like the 1950s and the effect of these policy reversals would be to dramatically increase smoking rates to levels seen back then, undoing 50 years of public health education and initiating a dramatic explosion of the current health crisis at untold financial and human expense.

Actually, I'm a big fan of individual freedom and responsibility myself. But can a child be expected to demonstrate the same degree of maturity and responsibility as an adult? Of course not: just watch an episode of 90210.

The problem here is that over 90% of smokers get hooked in childhood - years before they are able to exert adult thinking and maturity. Tobacco companies know this very well and have been shown to market to teens on a routine basis. This makes sense: when you kill 5,000,000 of your customers every year, you need fresh meat. It is almost impossible to get adults to start smoking, so tobacco companies use cartoon characters, cellphone-shaped packaging and candy-like flavours to promote tobacco to kids.

Is the Ayn Rand Centre really suggesting that this is OK? When you end up supporting drug dealers promoting to children because of 'personal freedom', surely you know something isn't right? Someone needs to point out to them that real adults take real responsibility, including responsibility for their families and their fellow citizens - it's what humans do in civil society. With respect to tobacco, this means protecting easily-misled children from rapacious, amoral tobacco companies looking to make a buck.

We see tens of thousands of smokers every year in our seminars. Over 90% of them started smoking as children and not one of them ever thought they would end up smoking for as long as they have. Kids fall into the nicotine trap very quickly, but it can take them a lifetime to escape.

This is the problem when an idea (personal freedom) becomes a dogma, to be slavishly followed, irrespective of the consequences. Yes, of course personal freedom is important, but it should not trump everybody else's personal freedom. Surely the right to clean air for everyone trumps an individual's right to smoke? Let's not make our children pay the price of Ms. Rand's intellectual masturbation.

It is tobacco companies, not the tobacco control movement who are cancer on American freedom. Every year they steal life from the 450,000 Americans who die from smoking, and liberty from the 8m Americans living with a smoking -related disease or condition.