SMOKING: FIGHTING FIRE WITH IRE

By Michael Demarest

A bilious tract written in 1604 by King James I of Great Britain has made that widely unadmired monarch a belated hero to certain Americans in 1976. The royal broadside, A Counterblaste to Tobacco, was a lengthy denunciation of smoking, culminating in the sentence:

"A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless." James's obsessive abhorrence of smoking is more than matched today by members of militant groups who, to protect their lungs and nostrils, seem determined to restrict the consumption of tobacco to consenting adults behind closed doors.

The leading counterblasting outfits, GASP (for Group Against Smokers' Pollution) and ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), as well as such organizations as the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association, have had some impressive successes: largely as the result of their campaigns, 31 states and scores of cities in the U.S. have passed a wide range of laws that prohibit smoking in places as varied as elevators, museums, hospitals, theaters, stores, buses and subways. Now, however, the antismokers seem bent on controlling all public "breathing space." In offices and waiting rooms, desk plaques admonish:

YES, I MIND IF YOU SMOKE.

After the RSVP on a dinner invitation, GASPers warn putative guests: NSP --meaning, in Jacobeanese, "no stinking puffumigation." Even cab drivers lecture passengers. Says a sign in a Manhattan taxi: YOUR RIGHT TO SMOKE ENDS WHERE MY NOSE BEGINS.

These are the politer ploys in what has become a rather uncivil war. Fighting fire with ire, bumper stickers declaim: KISSING A SMOKER IS LIKE LICKING A DIRTY ASHTRAY. A bellicose lapel button declares: SMOKERS STINK. Since slogans do not extinguish cigarettes, many antis become vigilantes. A scourge at some business conventions these days is a self-appointed enforcer who goes around plucking butts from smokers' mouths. One vigilante tactic: when a fellow guest lights up after dinner, an antismoker dunks his hand in the smoker's water glass. "What the...!" expostulates the smoker. "You don't like me polluting your water," replies the grim dunker. "I don't like you polluting our air."

Probably the most implacable of the antismokers' groups is S.H.A.M.E.! (Society to Humiliate, Aggravate, Mortify and Embarrass Smokers).

Its founder, Minneapolis Tribune Columnist Will Jones, explains: "The whole idea is that anyone who even ventures to smoke in the presence of another person is a slob. If someone smokes and gets cancer, we say, 'Good, there goes another smoker.'" While many tobaccophobes maintain that their aim is to "educate" smokers, they have not in the past been noticeably successful--as witness a turn-of-the-century campaign to censor a nursery rhyme because Old King Cole "called for his pipe." In a fit of moral fervor, the town fathers in Longboat Key, Fla.

(pop. 2,850), engaged in hot debate over a proposed law to ban smoking in public elevators and theaters--though Longboat Key has no elevators or theaters. "These nonsmokers could get so powerful," complained Columnist Alan MacLeese in the Flint, Mich. Journal, that "one day they'd have us all up before firing squads. And not allow us the traditional courtesy of a last cigarette on grounds that it is harmful to our health."

Today's Jamesians, of course, have more than aesthetic and moral arguments to back their cause. In places like stores, theaters and libraries, smoking can pose a fire hazard. Many individuals are sensitive to what they call "secondhand smoke." The prohibitionists set much stock by a 1972 pronouncement of a former Surgeon General, who reported that tobacco fumes "can contribute to the discomfort of many individuals"--who, presumably, also suffer from inhaling what passes for air in city streets. Most anti-tobacco rodomontades, however, center on what nonsmokers call their "civil rights."

Constitutionally, the issue is so new that the right to smoke or to be protected from smokers' exhalations has yet to be determined. The first major court test will come next month when a Michigan state court will hear a pro-football fan's suit to establish his right to breathe unpolluted air in the new Pontiac Stadium.

It can be argued that the 41% of adult Americans who smoke are sufficiently harassed already: they pay $6 billion more in federal, state and local taxes than nonsmokers, and they are subjected to a constant drumfire of sermonets warning that their habit is dangerous to their health. Though liquor was considered hazardous enough to be prohibited for 14 years in the U.S., no such caveat has ever appeared on whisky bottles.

While smokers are outnumbered by nonsmokers, those who actively oppose smoking are an even smaller minority.

Most smokers do not deliberately seek to offend abstainers, and can generally be persuaded to douse the weed with a mild adjuration. (The model might be Cardinal Newman's warning to a fellow passenger on a train who, after lighting up in a no-smoking compartment, demanded: "And what will you do, Sir, if I continue to smoke?" Replied Newman: "You will make me sick, Sir. And you will have to take the consequences upon yourself") In their evangelical zeal, the antis might ponder history. Legislating conduct has always been a tricky business; attempts to discourage or prohibit smoking have been doomed to failure. Even after King James boosted tobacco import taxes by 4,000%, smoking continued to spread throughout Britain. When an 18th century Swiss government imposed heavy levies on smokers, they had to be repealed for fear of revolution; and, in fact, a ban on smoking in the streets in Prussia contributed to a revolt in Berlin in 1848.

Even Turkish Sultan Murad IV, who executed as many as 18 puffers a day, and the first Romanov czar, who was in the habit of slitting users' noses, could not make the citizenry kick the habit.

In the 1920s, when smoking came un der vociferous attack in the U.S., "smokers' leagues" sprang up to defend the right to light.

Smokers' resistance might be a force to reckon with if Congress were ever to pass into law a prohibition, like a bill be fore a House committee, sponsored by Massachusetts' Robert F. Drinan, that would forbid smoking in most waiting and boarding areas, and restrict it in military bases and federal buildings. As the Spokane Chronicle's John J. Lemon said of a similar ordi nance that had been proposed in Washington State, "The next victims of such rule making may be whistlers, gum chewers, bone crackers, dandruff scratchers, lint pickers and popcorn eat ers." Not to mention tooth pickers, gar lic eaters, liquor imbibers, belchers, non-bathers and puffers of pot at rock concerts.

A few hardy smokers'-righters are already at work. In cities where smoking is banned in elevators, signs are often mutilated or removed. In New York City, where smoking in elevators is for bidden, an official of Philip Morris has offered a reward to the first employee who is arrested for violating the one-year-old law. Indeed, the great mass of smokers might be well advised to or ganize in defense of their own "civil rights." They might call their league Smokers United to Avoid Vigilante Excesses -- the acronym, of course, being SUAVE.

Michael Demarest

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