Not even wrong

When scientists come across something spectacularly stupid, they refer to it as 'not even wrong'.

I was troubled to see an editorial in the CSU's Rocky Mountain Collegian asking the FDA to reverse its decision to ban the manufacture and sale of falvoured cigarettes. The basis for this demand: the ban is an affront to 'personal liberty'.

This demand is 'not even wrong'. Nothing is preventing the author from favouring his own cigarettes, should he or she wish, and nothing is preventing them from buying other flavoured cigarettes - in fact, all US cigarettes are flavoured with sweeteners, to mask the taste of the tobacco.

On the basis of this argument, nothing could be prohibited: coke, crack and crystal meth would all be legalised. Sadly the author does not explain how this exciting new public policy initiative would work.

The author claims that if the FDA really cared about 'the children' they would ban smoking outright, but wouldn't this be a further erosion of liberty? I think the FDA, along with public health workers, oncologists, cardiologists, pulmonologists and surgeons would love to ban smoking, but with 45m Americans addicted to this drug, prohibition is impractical.

With an outright ban not on the cards, we are left with a relatively small menu of options to deal with this public health catastrophe: prevention and cessation campaigns, smoking bans, advertising bans, plain packaging, elimination of 'power walls', taxation and de-normalisation.

So here's the argument against flavoured cigarettes:

1. Smoking kills around 5m people every year, therefore...
2. For tobacco companies to continue to make money (and boy, are they good at making money!), they need to find fresh meat to compensate for those killed by smoking
3. It is very difficult to get adult non-smokers to start smoking, therefore...
4. Tobacco companies need kids to start smoking - it's a commercial imperative and therefore...
5. Tobacco companies need to develop products that appeal to kids, for example, cigarettes with cool-sounding flavours and cellphone-like packaging

By banning flavoured cigarettes, we will not reduce youth smoking. We will stop it from getting even higher though.

Every DAY 3,500 American kids will smoke their first cigarette. For 1,000 it will turn into a life-long drug addiction and it'll kill half of them. That's why it is not only right, but also a moral imperative, to uphold this ban.