Could it be? Only hours after the settlement last week, CNN was already airing a story about old cigarette ads as collectibles. Will my 6-year-old someday tack an ancient Joe Camel poster over his bed? Smoking has always been about more than addiction, of course. It’s about cool, though it’s hopelessly uncool to say so. Beyond the question of whether the tobacco companies got off too easily lies the more pressing matter of whether smoking will get hipper or not. It’s a close call.
Smokers make strange political bedfellows, pairing lefties and libertarians. And rebellion against the settlement has a certain symmetry. Critics on both sides argue it’s anti-American, but for different reasons. Smokers think it impinges on their God-given right to hurt themselves; anti-smokers think it impinges on their God-given right to sue. Both are correct, though the anti-tobacco crowd has more reason to read the fine print. History is full of heavily regulated industries that quickly co-opt their regulators, and the tobacco industry can cough up millions more to wriggle through loopholes we don’t even know exist yet.
On the other hand, just because the industry - and Wall Street - like the certainty that a settlement would bring doesn’t make it by definition bad for the country. (If the deal’s terms are enforced, it will be plenty good for uninsured children, a thought that should be more than parenthetical.) Even so, the ban on punitive damages means that lawyers will no longer take tobacco cases, which in turn means less pressure on the industry in the years ahead - when today’s figures won’t look so astronomical.
The best way to cut teen consumption is price. Until last week, Congress showed no appetite for that strategy, rejecting higher cigarette taxes (and even subsidizing cigarettes in military stores). Under the settlement, the companies would pass along costs of as much as a dollar a pack. That would help, as would money in the deal for anti-smoking ad campaigns. There’s ample precedent, from the effective American Cancer Society spots of the 1960s to the success of public campaigns to cut drunken driving and drug use. When California Proposition 99 funded an aggressive anti-smoking campaign in 1990, the number of total smokers quickly dropped by a million - until the money was diverted by tobacco lobbyists. Advertising does have the power to change what’s cool.
But it would be nice if the rest of popular culture was willing to go along. Instead, smoking has made a comeback in movies and music videos, almost as a gesture of defiance. This is the Forbidden Fruit Theory of teen smoking - that we’ll let the tobacco companies off the hook only to find kids smoking no less than they do now. The heavy regulation of ads in Europe hasn’t done much to curb teen smoking there.
Whether smoking stays hip in the youth culture depends on its outlaw esthetic. At first glance, that seems fairly simple to predict. Smoking will be pushed even further underground, giving the young rebels a certain cause. Adult smokers will continue to buy into this rebelliousness, too, subconsciously reminding themselves they’re still proudly working-class or proudly politically incorrect or the proud member of yet another abused minority. For kids, smoking is about looking old. For adults, it’s about feeling young, irresponsible - cool. And so smoking will become a fashion accessory once again, though this time a more deliciously illicit one, as it was for those sepia-tinted Victorian women in the old Virginia Slims ads.
It’s almost axiomatic: the more stigmatized smoking becomes, the more tempting it is to rebel against the moralism of the stigma. But the inverse may also be true, which could lead to a different post-settlement result. How strong a moral stigma can there be against an industry with which the larger society has just cut a deal? How angry will we stay at an industry that is making a good-faith effort to live up to its end of the bargain? If the settlement goes through, the political wars over tobacco in Washington and state capitals will recede, and much of the moral fervor will drain out of the debate. When it’s harder to work up righteous indignation, it will be harder to rebel against that (lack of) indignation. If parents put anti-tobacco moralizing behind them, their kids may find another way to act out.
The zealotry can be counterproductive. By driving smokers out of buildings, instead of letting them have special rooms indoors, nonsmokers actually inhale more secondhand smoke - from the smokers now lingering in doorways. The law of unintended consequences will no doubt govern this settlement, too. Whatever happens, I’m going to miss the intensity of the anti-smoking movement. In a world of grays, the sins of the tobacco companies have allowed a beautiful hatred. Nearly everyone - from workers with pensions that invest in mutual funds holding tobacco stocks to writers for magazines that accept tobacco ads - has been complicit to some degree. But it is still strangely comforting to know evil when you see it. That zeal is hot and earnest, not cool and worldly, which is why it’s still too early to say it has won.
