Money Angles

By Andrew Tobias

NEW YORKER JOSEPH SCOTT QUIT SMOKING AND PUT the money he would have spent on cigarettes into a cookie jar. Seeing the money mount, he says, helped reinforce his resolve. Now, two years later, Scott has amassed $3,285, and he's taking a luxury cruise.

Forget health; let's talk money.

Consider a teenage girl, eager to be attractive and confronted constantly with images of healthy, Virginia-slim tobacco models. Like about 1 in 5 teenage girls today, she gets hooked. Taking into account FICA and income taxes, she could see $1,500 in pretax earnings each year go up in smoke -- $1,500 that could otherwise be put toward her kids' education, a first home, equity in a small business, or an IRA.

Nor are cigarettes the only cost.

--Smokers spend more on cold remedies and health care. (A division of Dow Chemical found that smokers averaged 5.5 more days of absence each year and took eight more days of disability leave.)

--And they spend more for life insurance. (The Tobacco Institute may not be convinced that smoking kills, but the three life insurers owned by tobacco companies certainly are. CNA is owned by Lorillard parent Loews, the Franklin Life and American Tobacco are owned by American Brands, and Farmers Group and British-American Tobacco are owned by B.A.T Industries. All three charge smokers nearly double for term insurance. Why? Because at any age, a smoker is about twice as likely to die as a nonsmoker.)

In short, tobacco addiction is a major economic handicap. A child who can avoid it has a far better shot at lifelong financial health than one who gets hooked.

The tobacco industry professes not to want children to smoke. It points to a free pamphlet it distributes called Tobacco: Helping Youth Say No. But the pamphlet never once mentions the word cancer, never once mentions addiction. (Nicotine is as addictive as heroin, says the Surgeon General.) Instead, the reason given is that kids aren't old enough. Smoking -- like driving and sex -- is for adults. Of course, it's hard to imagine a message that would make smoking more attractive.

A better approach, I like to think, is contained in a $6 paperback called Kids Say Don't Smoke. (I like to think it's better, because I helped write it.) For a free copy, send four 29 cents stamps to SmokeFree Educational Services, Box 3316, New York, N.Y. 10008.

The tobacco industry says its advertising is designed merely to persuade existing smokers to switch brands, not to encourage nonsmokers to start. If so, why not simply ban all tobacco advertising and promotion? Surely Congress would agree to do so if the industry asked it to. And look what would happen: brand switching would largely stop, leaving market shares essentially "frozen." And the $4 billion the industry currently spends on U.S. advertising would fall straight to the bottom line! Pure profit! You'd think the tobacco industry would be begging for this.

Instead, of course, it's crucial to keep that lovable Camel cartoon character in front of children, and to fly Newport banners up and down the beach, because if we don't hook the kids, how are we to replace all the customers who quit or die each year? Most smokers start between the ages of 8 and 18 -- thousands of them a day in the U.S. (and, thanks in part to aggressive efforts by the Bush Administration, many more abroad).

More than 800,000 Americans derive their livelihood from tobacco-related jobs -- almost double the 435,000 that the Surgeon General estimates die each year from tobacco-caused disease. A ban on promotion would cost some of those jobs. Still, it's ironic that, as a society, we spend billions to keep people from breathing asbestos -- the EPA estimates 17 non-occupational asbestos- related deaths a year -- but billions more to promote smoking.

Limiting the industry's right to glamourize smoking raises obvious First Amendment questions. But even if Congress hasn't the power to ban tobacco promotion -- and it well may -- what of private restrictions? Why shouldn't publishers, including Time Inc., decree that they will no longer push tobacco? When is TV Guide owner Rupert Murdoch (a Philip Morris board member) going to announce that since cigarette ads are inappropriate on TV, they're also wrong for TV Guide, which has a huge readership among kids? Is it appropriate that seven pages of a recent issue of Self magazine, with all its articles on fitness and health, were devoted to making smoking look healthy, sexy and fun? How about Rolling Stone? Any kids read that? It's been estimated that fully one-third of all U.S. hospital beds are devoted to tobacco-caused disease. Many magazines, including the nation's largest, Modern Maturity and the Reader's Digest, already reject tobacco ads.

Tobacco is unique. It's the only legal product that's highly addictive and that, when used exactly as intended, causes great harm.

Obviously, smoking should be legal. Obviously, smokers are fine people. But should we actively promote America's leading cause of preventable death?

Forget about health. Think about the money!