To the Editor:

I am forced to disagree with one of the finest thinkers in our modern world. In “Furtive Smokers—and What They Tell Us About America” [June], the brilliant Peter L. Berger is at least partially correct in warning us of the threats to our personal liberties by the politically-correct crowd. Unfortunately, in defending the alleged freedom to smoke, he has gone one step too far, slipping unwittingly into argument ad hominem. Mr. Berger overlooks the overwhelming evidence that smoking transcends mere individual preference and has adverse social consequences that simply cannot be ignored.

Smoking harms not only the health of those who indulge, but the nonsmoker is also subject to irritation, if not actual medical damage, from secondhand smoke. . . . The deteriorating physical condition of the smoker places enormous economic stress on our private-insurance programs and government-welfare system. There is no legitimacy to claims of an autonomous right of self-destruction if others are financially imposed upon. We no longer have an obligation to be tolerant.

David Thomson
Houston, Texas

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To the Editor:

As a practicing physician who has treated many individuals afflicted with tobacco addiction (TA), I believe Peter L. Berger’s article tells us more about him than it does about the residual hard-core smokers in the U.S.

I have been treating patients with TA for over 30 years, publishing my first findings a quarter-century ago, when I was a naive young clinician (not statistician). I found patients who, indeed, ceased smoking. However, some of them became depressed, drank excessively, and beat their spouses. With experience, I learned to build in techniques that prevented the emergence of such untoward effects.

If the proverbial diabolical doctor of science fiction set out to create a substance that would cause disease, he could not have dreamed up a more malignant product than tobacco. Even H. G. Wells and George Orwell did not conceive of a product that could be massively produced worldwide, endowing those engaged in its production and manufacture with almost unbelievable political and economic power. Unlike the bad, illicit drugs, tobacco is legally sanctioned for use by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Let me give a few brief clinical sketches of the “nonstatistical” patients I have seen:

• An elderly woman with severe emphysema who walked into my office carrying an oxygen tank which she turned off only to smoke! . . .
• A young housewife with asthma who was asymptomatic until she was visited by houseguests who smoked.
• A middle-aged man with severe leg pain (intermittent claudication) when he walked who found that after he stopped smoking, he could walk for miles.

I could easily fill up this entire issue of COMMENTARY with similar case histories.

Mr. Berger whines that we have not categorically stated that cigars and pipes are less hazardous than cigarettes. A good clinical example of this misplaced denial was the unfortunate Sigmund Freud, who was addicted to cigars and underwent 31 operations for oro-pharyngeal carcinoma. Would Mr. Berger call this a nonhazard?

Mr. Berger states that studies “purport to show” that environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) is really not so bad. Ask the asthmatic I mentioned above and millions of other Americans who experience burning eyes, allergic symptoms, and other problems. Mr. Berger states that “by itself, the anti-smoking phenomenon will hardly be high on anyone’s list of pressing concerns in America today.” In terms of illness and death, there is no other single factor that comes near to producing the devastation caused by tobacco. . . .

Mr. Berger is right that those furtive smokers with whom we all sympathize do feel guilty, alone, and isolated. However, it is because of their inability to forgo the use of this, the most addictive substance in the world.

Sheldon B. Cohen, M.D.
Atlanta, Georgia

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To the Editor:

The publication and placement in COMMENTARY of Peter L. Berger’s “Furtive Smokers—and What They Tell Us About America” are truly astonishing. Surely you do not subscribe to the bleating of smokers, tobacco growers, and tobacco companies that this is some sort of civil-rights issue and that curtailment of smoking in public spaces represents some sort of dictatorship?

The cost to the nation of harm to the smoker—in diseases and disabilities suffered that must be paid for—is bad enough, but there is ample evidence that smoking, at least of cigarettes, also harms others. The miasma of a smoke-filled room or vehicle; the stench of offices, homes, and clothes of those exposed to smoke; the distortion of the taste of foods in restaurants constitute reasons enough to have smoking labeled a public nuisance. We have laws about littering and polluting—smoking results in both. Its prohibition in public is amply justified, and any means that will counteract the seduction of the young into this addictive practice seem to me justified.

George E. Ehrlich, M.D.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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To the Editor:

“Furtive Smokers—and What They Tell Us About America” must be disputed on both practical and ideological grounds. It does not accurately depict why smoking is increasingly abhorred, nor does it identify why opponents of smoking feel they may be, finally, on the verge of “success.” . . .

Central to the article’s imagery is a shivering smoker, servicing addiction in foul weather, after having been expelled from his workplace. Central to its “science” is the assumption that the report of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the hazards of secondhand smoke merely represents a retrospectively-composed analysis, designed to fit preordained conclusions and premeditated governmental fiat. And central to its ideology is the concept that involvement in a “good cause” could become corrupting, that the commonweal is best left unsullied by searches for political correctness, that vigilance against overreaching laws must extend into every corner of society.

How accurate is the database upon which these views are built? And how true is the portrayal of the anti-tobacco movement’s victory during recent years? . . .

The visceral flaw in the medical component of the argument is embodied in its erroneous rendition of the harmful consequences of smoking: “To be sure, the evidence is statistical rather than clinical, as the tobacco industry has protested all along.” It is granted by Mr. Berger that smoking endangers health, particularly with reference to lung cancer. But how about lip, tongue, larynx, pharynx, esophagus, pancreas, kidney, bladder, and cervix? And how about legions of cardiac cripples and epidemics of wheezing emphysemics?

And regarding the EPA, what must be understood is that scientific studies are not always able to demonstrate a scientific fact; thus the need to define parameters for statistical significance. And behind the literature is the obvious infliction of the smoke-filled room upon the respiring inhabitant of public spaces. What is wrong with providing smoking restrictions to protect millions known to be sensitive (allergic or irritated) to the simple, known pollutant: tobacco exhaust fumes? If one cannot legally swing a fist beyond another’s nose tip, then why should one’s foul air be permitted to proceed beyond? Why should known carcinogens be inhaled and exhaled by all lungs, normal and impaired? The inability to take a deep breath is the worst pain one can experience. . . .

Ideology emerges when the drive for a smoke-free society is demeaned by its portrayal as arbitrary; and bias becomes palpable when sincere labor to achieve acknowledgment of the desirability of this goal is labeled discriminatory. To “single out” smoking represents little more than recognizing a diagnosis and formulating an effort to treat a pathogen. . . .

The anti-tobacco movement cannot be pigeonholed, nor are its participants neatly polarized. That is the origin of its strength, and the source of the fear it invokes in those who continue to peddle poison.

Robert B. Sklaroff, M.D.
Rydal, Pennsylvania

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To the Editor:

According to a two-part series in the New England Journal of Medicine, smoking cigarettes is truly a life-and-death matter. Written by physicians at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, the series provides these disconcerting facts:

• In the United States in 1990, 418,690 deaths were attributed to the harmful effects of smoking; indeed, almost one in five deaths resulted from a smoking-related illness.
• Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in America today.
• In 1990, 179,820 deaths were attributable to a cardiovascular disease that resulted from smoking.
• Each year in the U.S. 53,000 die from environmental tobacco smoke; 151,322 people die from cancer caused by smoking. In 1990, 84,475 died from pulmonary diseases, such as pneumonia, influenza, bronchitis, emphysema, and chronic-airway obstruction, which resulted from smoking.
• Eighty-five percent of all lung cancer in the U. S. today is caused by smoking. Other cancers linked with tobacco use include cancers of the mouth, pharynx, larynx, esophagus, stomach, pancreas, uterine cervix, kidney, ureter, and bladder.
• There is a 33-percent increase in stillbirths and neonatal deaths among the babies of mothers who smoke. Each year there are 26,000 new cases of asthma among children caused by mothers who smoke ten or more cigarettes per day.

Haven Bradford Gow
Arlington Heights, Illinois

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To the Editor:

Peter L. Berger is no doubt correct to note that there is an unpleasant streak of Puritanical self-righteousness in the anti-smoking movement which can make smokers feel like pariahs. Frankly, though, I won’t lose much sleep over this. Tobacco-chewing used to be somewhat more acceptable than it is today; if social conformism played a role in reducing the number of people who indulged this habit, then let us hear two cheers for social conformism and Puritanical self-righteousness. Now, if only the same pressures would work against people who carry boom-boxes or play their car radios at approximately 150 decibels.

That said, it seems predictably perverse that COMMENTARY would publish Mr. Berger’s class-based analysis of the anti-smoking movement while ignoring the rather more interesting question of what drives thousands of well-educated people to work for an industry which causes the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans each year, along with perhaps two million people in other countries (though only some of these smoke American cigarettes). Not content with the present death rate, the industry also hopes to bring American cigarettes to untapped markets in Asia, which, according to the New York Times, might ultimately bring the annual death toll as high as ten million. If it has not already done so, the tobacco industry will kill more people in the next few decades than have died in all of the wars, concentration camps, and killing fields of the 20th century.

Mr. Berger and others might object to this comparison on the grounds that the smoker is exercising his free choice. But it is disingenuous to speak about adults exercising their right of free choice when in many cases smokers begin their habit in their teens when they are likely to see themselves as immortal; once addicted, it becomes very difficult for them to stop. Furthermore, I doubt the tobacco industry will go out of its way to warn foreign customers of the danger unless forced to by those New Class crusaders that Mr. Berger apparently holds in such contempt.

Finally, even if one restricts the discussion to those smokers who were old enough to make an adult decision to smoke and knew the risks, what motivates people to manufacture an addictive carcinogen and sell it? The answer, of course, is the desire for profit. How can they live with themselves? Rather easily, since we live in a country where both Left and Right confuse the legal right to do something with the moral right to do it, and where virtually any socially destructive activity is passionately defended and even justified by someone on the basis of individual freedom. The tobacco industry has been a great proponent of individual freedoms, but I do not think it is pumping huge amounts of money into public-relations campaigns because of an altruistic concern for the defense of individual life-style choices; the right it really cares about is the right to make a buck off other people’s self-destructive choices. One might think this worthy of slightly more moral indignation than the Puritanical self-righteousness of the anti-smoking movement, but conservative ideologues rarely become too exercised by any sin which is rooted in the profit motive.

Donald Johnson
Nyack, New York

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To the Editor:

Peter L. Berger is to be commended for his penetrating analysis of tobacco smoking in America today. In the United States, as in Canada, the anti-smoking campaign has had a substantial impact. In both countries, the percentage of adult smokers in the population has declined dramatically. In Canada, this percentage has dropped from about 50 percent in 1961 to about 30 percent in 1991. Similarly, for the U.S., the figures were 40 percent in 1961 and 25 percent in 1991.

These declines in North America are undoubtedly the largest in the world; one need only compare the smoking experience in North America with Europe, Asia, and Africa. A visit I made to China in 1989, for example, revealed widespread smoking and a virtual absence of anti-smoking propaganda.

As a Canadian physician with specialist qualifications in both public health and clinical psychiatry, I have been involved with both preventive policy and the treatment of heavy smokers over the past 25 years. It is worth noting that the first major epidemiological study demonstrating the direct correlation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer was carried out by Dr. Richard Doll in England just after World War II. It took at least fifteen years before this finding had any significant influence over public policy or individual smokers’ habits.

During the ensuing years, numerous studies in the U.S., Canada, and other countries have provided overwhelming confirmation of the linkage between tobacco smoking and serious pathology of the pulmonary, cardiovascular, and other organ systems. While epidemiological findings have been contested by spokesmen for the tobacco companies, they have been generally accepted as “hard” data which have been confirmed many times over by independent scientific studies.

On the other hand, Mr. Berger is accurate in pointing out the “softness” of the data concerning secondhand smoke.

Many factors have contributed to the decline in the incidence of cigarette smoking. The widespread educational campaigns over the years in schools, on billboards, on cigarette packages, on TV, and elsewhere have motivated literally millions of North Americans to abandon smoking completely and permanently. These ex-smokers have accepted the validity of the data and have quit, on their own, without any assistance.

Thus, during the past 30 years coronary-heart-disease mortality has declined by about 50 percent. The combined influence of reduced tobacco use, reduced intake of dietary cholesterol and fats, and more effective diagnosis and treatment of hypertension has paid off.

Notwithstanding these advances in prevention, the anti-smoking movement has grown and continues to target the remaining millions of smokers and their suppliers—the cigarette manufacturers. (Curiously, the farmers who grow the lucrative tobacco plant are somehow kept on the sidelines.)

A central factor driving the anti-smoking lobby has been the notion that tobacco smoking is an addictive phenomenon and, therefore, accounts for the great difficulty smokers face in quitting. Reports of Surgeons General of the U.S. have drawn this conclusion and have designated tobacco smoking as an addictive process equivalent to the use of heroin or crack cocaine. Having been involved with the treatment of moderate and heavy smokers from all walks of life, I have concluded that this notion violates common sense as well as extensive clinical observation.

I realize, of course, that I am expressing a minority view. However, for many years I have concluded that the fundamental obstacle many people face in seeking to abandon smoking is not addiction but ambivalence. When one questions any informed, articulate smoker about his desire to quit, he will respond that he wishes to stop but also to continue. Tobacco smoking is universally pleasurable and the smoker, while wishing on one level to stop and avoid the dire pathological consequences, is unwilling to pay the price and sacrifice the pleasure.

This concept is supported by the observation that persons with schizophrenic illness, especially in mental hospitals, find it virtually impossible to stop smoking because of their pathological ambivalence. Abstaining alcoholics also find it difficult; they have sacrificed alcohol and often refuse to submit to a further sacrifice.

I hold no brief for the cigarette manufacturer or for the tobacco farmer (let them grow soy). Nor need one feel sorry for the “furtive smoker.” He need only take an essentially moral decision and not hide behind the flawed notion of addiction.

Murray S. Acker, M.D.
North York, Ontario
Canada

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To the Editor:

Peter L. Berger is right in his assumption that tobacco prohibition will be the next major extension of government power. But he misses the primary motivation of the anti-smoking campaign by blaming it on the leftist cultural elite. For the last several years, the United States has had a “war on drugs” and tobacco is a drug.

The “war on drugs” has been led by neoconservatives like William J. Bennett who believe that it is the government’s duty to impart values to the people and punish citizens for moral transgressions. During the 1980’s, the United States government launched a massive campaign against illegal drugs. It was only a matter of time before prohibition would be extended to legal drugs like tobacco.

After all, by what objective standard can you prohibit other drugs and then ignore tobacco?

• Addiction? Tobacco is, according to the U.S. Department of Health, one of the most addictive substances out there.
• Toxicity? Tobacco kills several hundred thousand people every year. Recent studies blame secondhand smoke for another 60,000 or so deaths a year. This is far greater than the number of people who are killed by illegal drugs. . . .
• Social pathologies? Rest assured that the moment tobacco is illegalized, your friends in law enforcement will start to tell you that because 90 percent (or some other percentage) of all criminals have smoked cigarettes at some time in their lives, tobacco causes crime. Ah, but you say, that is a correlation, not causation. True enough, but lapses in logic have never stopped the forces of prohibition. In reality, illegal drug use does not lead to a life of crime (other than selling/buying/possessing illegal substances). . . .

What can we expect from a campaign against tobacco? If the “war on drugs” is any guide, we will see police programs encouraging schoolchildren to turn in their parents who smoke; television public-service announcements stigmatizing tobacco smokers (“this is your lungs on tobacco. . . .”); screening tests in industry which will exclude smokers from employment; police use of infrared and molecular sensors to discover evidence of smoking; seizures of houses where tobacco is found growing. . . .

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms will be given extraordinary powers (as the Drug Enforcement Agency now has) to attack tobacco in this country. What happened at Waco, Texas, last year will be repeated as SWAT teams crash around the country looking for targets to attack. We might even see the armed forces get into the act. . . .

If tobacco smokers are not now willing to stand with other drug users in a single front for individual liberty, I guarantee that all will end up in the same federal-detention center. And if you are not willing to join the fight for liberty, do not start complaining when the tobacco Gestapo comes knocking on your door.

Joseph Miranda
Northridge, California

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To the Editor:

Peter L. Berger assumes that Americans accept and tolerate the idea that “individual rights must be subordinated to the common good,” but he overlooks the reality that individualism continues to exist in today’s society. Though it does appear that the New Class is exerting its moralistic influence over America, turning us into “timid joiners” and “self-denigrating conformists,” the truth may actually be that many Americans resent the revocation of their rights but are too indolent or unsure to verbalize their sentiments.

Americans should always be prepared to counteract the “slippery slope” of government control of their behavior. The proposed ban on smoking in all public places is one more example of this misguided regulation which pretends to advocate “protection” of the public. It may not seem as though Americans are fighting back, but if their rights to drink water from certain areas, to own diesel vehicles that use certain heating oils, or to live near electric-service lines which present the danger of electromagnetic fields were taken away, perhaps they would become more defiant. All of the above rights could be repealed if the standards involved in the case against secondhand smoke were followed.

Smokers may be harming or killing themselves, but even these actions should be respected as an expression of their individual rights. . . . Enough evidence of the true nature of our country lies in Benjamin Franklin’s statement that “He who would exchange liberty for security deserves neither.”

Laura Gasslein
Lawrenceville, New Jersey

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To the Editor:

When I read Peter L. Berger’s article on smoking, I felt like standing up and cheering. Mr. Berger hit a grand-slam with this one. I write only to put a slightly different spin on the problem in hopes of sharpening the debate just a little.

Mr. Berger concludes that the smoking debate is about the subordination of individual rights to the collective good. I agree, but I think it useful to point out that not all individual rights are at stake. For example, one rarely hears the New Class arguing that we should overturn the Miranda decision.

Mr. Berger comes closest to the central issue when he questions the role of the EPA in the anti-smoking campaign. Mr. Berger rightly observes that the EPA’s “wetlands regulations add up to one of the most massive assaults on private property since the invention of zoning.” He makes this point almost in passing, but here is where I think the whole ball game is to be found. One can make a plausible case that the individual right at stake in the smoking debate is not the right of smokers to smoke, if such a right exists in law, but that of private property—the right of owners of private property to use their property freely—which is codified in the takings and due-process clauses of the U.S. Constitution.

Notice that the principal regulatory and legislative efforts against tobacco take the form of bans on smoking in virtually all public places. According to those who favor the bans, public smoking is what economists would call an externality. Externalities sometimes justify government intervention. The mere existence of an externality, however, does not justify legislation. In a free society, which is supposed to be characterized by limited government and respect for private-property rights, at least two conditions must be satisfied before government intervention is warranted. First, the regulated action must in fact produce external costs. Second, there must be a market failure—a showing that people cannot solve the problem without government help.

No sensible observer can deny that smoking meets the first condition. When I smoke an after-dinner cigar, I impose a cost on those around me. The extent of this cost, however, is easily overstated. To be sure, many people find tobacco smoke annoying. But we are exposed to many annoyances in our daily lives. The real issue is whether secondhand smoke threatens the health of nonsmokers. Jacob Sullum, the Congressional Research Service, and others have demonstrated that the health effects of secondhand smoke are vastly overstated.

In the end, however, the question of whether public smoking should be the subject of federal legislation comes down to the issue of whether the problem can be solved by private ordering. Let us start with the most basic example: my backyard. Should I have the right to smoke a cigar on my back porch, where the only person who smells it is my dog? Presumably so, since I am not imposing on anyone (my dog seems to like the smell).

If you admit that a ban on smoking in my backyard is not appropriate, let us turn to restaurants. Restaurants are clearly a place in which private ordering can work and in which government intervention is unnecessary. Consider the following case: the 21 Club in New York City has a long history of being a cigar-friendly environment. Nonsmokers who eat there do so knowing that they may be exposed to cigar smoke. On what basis can such a person complain? Did he not assume the risk of being exposed to secondhand smoke by deciding to patronize an establishment that allows patrons to smoke cigars? Conversely, many restaurants already forbid smoking in whole or in part, especially restaurants that serve families. In these places, nonsmokers have a reasonable expectation of being safe from cigar smoke. . . .

This is what I mean by a system of private ordering: if the place is one that nonsmokers can readily choose to avoid, then they have no right to insist on imposing their preference for a smoke-free environment on me or (and this is the key point) the owner of the establishment. Absent a showing that private ordering cannot work, the owner of private property has a right to decide what conduct will take place on his property even if it is open to the public. So long as nonsmokers are free to decide not to enter an establishment in which smoking is allowed, the necessary prerequisite for regulating private property simply does not exist. What we have here, then, is exactly what we have in the spotted-owl and wetlands cases—one more unjustifiable limitation on private-property rights by a government that seems increasingly bent on destroying the minimal legal protections still afforded those rights.

Stephen M. Bainbridge
College of Law
University of Illinois
Champaign, Illinois

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To the Editor:

Peter L. Berger offers a picture of American society “not as a nation of rugged individualists, but of timid joiners, petulant victims, and self-denigrating conformists.” I assume he does not see that characterization as applying to the scattered remnants of smokers. I do not smoke, but my observation of smokers is that they see themselves not as timid but as brave souls, a put-upon minority, and even as a band of brothers in a sea of angry persecutors.

It apparently is the self-righteous persecutors who provide evidence of the pressure toward conformity that Mr. Berger laments. But apart from the pressure to conform, which, as he notes, has always been widespread in American society, what needs explanation is why the persecutors of smokers are so angry and self-righteous. . . .

One clue Mr. Berger mentions in passing: he notes, I think quite correctly, that the anti-smoking movement was hugely accelerated by the claim that environmental tobacco smoke was also deadly. In my mind, this link with environmentalism is no accident. As such, the search for a smoke-free world is related symbolically to the search for nonpolluted rivers, for national parks free of human beings, and for the endless Los Angeles freeway, which is, at last, completely smog-free—without, of course, restricting the rights of drivers in any way. . . .

But there is something else which helps account for the anger and self-righteousness of the anti-smokers. Its source is not any real danger of disease, which is slight. Rather, we must look to the analysis of pollution presented by the anthropologist Mary Douglas, who sees impurity as danger. We fear the smoke as polluting not simply our bodies (in much the same way as those who saw fluoridation as polluting) but, to paraphrase the words of the American general in Dr. Strangelove, as polluting our bodily essence. So the persecutors will be satisfied with nothing less than having smokers (if they will not stop altogether) carry the leper’s bell, repeating “Unclean! Unclean!” as they huddle shamefully on the outskirts of the marketplace.

Edward Gross
Professor Emeritus
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington

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To the Editor:

Among Peter L. Berger’s penetrating observations on the pious crusade against smoking is that “American adolescence . . . has been a veritable pressure cooker of conformity.”

Indeed, the elevation of . . . “youngness” and the corresponding discrediting of maturity . . . has become a hallmark of our Clintonian age. Look at youthful, blow-dried Bill jogging, and then look at old writers and editors at their typewriters—smoking! Look at advertising, TV, movies—everything. . . .

One longs for the robust spirit and tradition exemplified by an authentic, mature American like Mark Twain, whose only temperance rule was to smoke just one cigar at a time. He would hardly be welcomed in the White House today! Nor would Winston Churchill, who was also an incorrigible cigar smoker, or Franklin D. Roosevelt, a shameless smoker of cigarettes. . . .

Of course, when we think of Roosevelt or Churchill, we summon another age—a vanished era before TV, the jet plane, and the UN imposed their homogenizing heavy hands. Churchill, for instance, never stood in awe of Arabs or let them instruct him about anything—including smoking. After Churchill’s last meeting with President Roosevelt, on board an American cruiser off Alexandria in February 1945, he gave a banquet for King Ibn Saud at the Fayyum Oasis—he had in mind a reshuffling of the Middle East, with Saud, as client of Britain, made suzerain over the entire region, including a Jewish Palestine. . . . Protocol people told him the king forbade drinking or smoking in his presence. Churchill’s full reaction is not recorded—perhaps it was unprintable—but this much is preserved: he was the host, and made it clear to his guest that

if it was his religion that made him say such things, my religion prescribe [s] as an absolute sacred ritual smoking cigars and drinking alcohol before, after, and, if need be, during all meals and the intervals between them.

The feast went off without a hitch. Churchill was a mensch. And he lived to be ninety.

David Lyon Hurwitz
New York City

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To the Editor:

Congratulations to Peter L. Berger. He has skewered the political philosophy of the 1960’s, whose adherents are now ensconced in parts of the media, colleges and universities, think tanks, public-interest law firms, and the White House. Their politics is utopian, parallel to Marxism-Leninism, and instinctively hostile to Western (particularly American) concepts of individual liberty. The guiding principle of utopian philosophy is that human nature is perfectible. Utopians seek to reconfigure and perfect society by using the coercive power of the state. . . .

Mr. Berger has pointed out the tenuous nature of the claims that smoking hurts others. In the march toward Utopia, truth is any claim that advances the cause. In order to persuade the American people, or at least render them uninterested in opposition, the New Class . . . in its anti-smoking campaign had to emphasize harm to innocent bystanders. How else to render statutory what was hitherto private behavior?

The choreographed speech control which passes for political correctness on campuses is the product of the same people who preached an absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment when they were out of power. Political correctness is another example of attempted state control of perceived bad attitudes and behavior. But this at least has generated a backlash. . . .

Mr. Berger is concerned that the anti-smoking crusade is a harbinger of the future. I hope that he will write as concisely about the next event. I suspect he will not have long to wait.

Gloria M. Stewart
Thousand Oaks, California

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To the Editor:

Peter L. Berger’s article was refreshing and long overdue.

Just who do these neo-Prohibitionists and “health” promoters think they are, increasingly dictating how we should live our private lives? Although the health-promotion movement had noble beginnings, it seems to be degenerating into a vindictive crusade with myriad trappings of a witch hunt. In addition, it has become one of a number of current causes whose tactics and ends in no small way desecrate the Bill of Rights.

The great irony here is that Americans have been asked in numerous wars to sacrifice their health—even their lives—for freedom. Now, however, they are being told to surrender that very freedom in the name of health! Whatever happened to “give me liberty or give me death”?

As a life-long smoker, I believe health-promotion zealotry presents a far greater threat to my well-being than does environmental tobacco smoke. Let there be no doubt about it: those who dictate our life-styles dictate our lives.

John H. Kilwein
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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To the Editor:

Applause to Peter L. Berger for sounding the alarm on the “furtive-smoker” complex, his metaphor for the increasing tension between individualism and conformity in this country. It is, arguably, the leading dilemma of our times.

The insidious collectivism Mr. Berger speaks of is mushrooming slowly and steadily . . . in response to the machinations of the New Class. The result is a situation now involving something more serious than strain on a governing philosophy and system of American values balanced between two opposing concepts. These concepts have been more or less with us for a very long time now, but have been moderate in their composition. . . .

That composition is ominously changing. The extreme elements are aiming at domination of both parties, and woe to the nation that disregards this change. . . .

And meanwhile, the Left, with its unrestrained do-goodism, beckons us with the siren song of increased governmental interference and control, leading also to eventual authoritarian socialism. With such polarization taking place in America today, we seem poised for an eventual showdown—and all in the name of improvement in the quality of life. It is the very pinnacle of irony that the warring factions will each have been a little right and a little wrong. At age seventy, I doubt I shall witness any resolution of this conflict, but I fear for my grandchildren and for my country.

Stanley P. Kessel
Hollywood, Florida

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Peter L. Berger writes:

I will reply to David Thomson’s letter more extensively than to the other letters commenting on my article, not because he generously refers to me as “one of the finest thinkers in our modern world” (though, come to think of it, that deserves some special treatment), but because his comments touch succinctly on the two major points at issue in the current campaign against environmental tobacco smoke (ETS).

Mr. Thomson proposes that “smoking transcends mere individual preference and has adverse social consequences,” and this proposition is supposed to be supported by “overwhelming evidence.” It is, first of all, unclear what evidence he has in mind. The evidence that smoking harms smokers is, if not overwhelming, certainly robust; the evidence that smoking harms nonsmokers is underwhelming with a vengeance. But leave aside the matter of evidence, important though it is. I would ask Mr. Thomson: what do we do that does not transcend our individual preferences and that does not have social consequences, some of them adverse? Masturbation comes to mind. Not much else. My diet and my exercise (or lack thereof) minimally affect those who live with me; the way I raise my children will affect everyone who has to deal with them throughout their lifetimes; my notorious ignorance of geography affects my voting on matters of foreign policy and may implicate me in terrible events on the other side of the globe; and so on.

Mr. Thomson hedges on the “overwhelming evidence” by saying that secondhand smoke, even if it does not cause actual medical damage, is an “irritation,” thus (he implies) justifying prescriptive intervention. I would not want to diminish Mr. Thomson’s generally high opinion of me by listing here all the behaviors that irritate me in public life and which, if government came to my assistance, would inaugurate a veritable regime of terror; but I invite him to make a mental list of his irritations. And then Mr. Thomson tells us that we have no right to self-destructive behavior “if others are financially imposed upon.” This, of course, is the argument from “social costs.” If pursued to its logical conclusion, it is a blueprint for a therapeutic totalitarianism, because virtually all our actions have social consequences which in turn impose costs on others. It is precisely because the slippery-slope character of the social-costs argument becomes obvious upon even cursory reflection that the anti-smoking movement has not pushed it very hard and has instead concentrated on the “innocent-bystander” argument—the nonsmokers allegedly harmed by ETS.

I am glad that Murray S. Acker agrees that the data on ETS are “soft” and that the application of the term “addiction” to tobacco smoking is inappropriate. I am sure that he is right when he says that many smokers are ambivalent about their habit, at least when they are “informed.” He should add, I think, that “information” makes for ambivalence all over the place, because the more we are “informed,” the more we realize the risks we take every day. I am also sure that Stephen M. Bainbridge is right when he points out that private-property rights are very much involved in this issue. I too would wish that more room were allowed in our society for what he calls “private ordering.”

No sensible person would quarrel with Sheldon B. Cohen’s point that smoking is bad for people with the conditions of the patients he mentions. I gather from his letter that treating patients with these conditions is a specialty of his, and this makes understandable his strong feelings in the matter. After I read his letter, I found myself imagining the feelings of a trauma surgeon about automobiles, as day-in, day-out he sees the victims of automobile accidents in the emergency room. One would understand if this individual would want the government to ban or at least greatly reduce the number of automobiles, to prohibit automobile advertising (especially targeted to young people, who cause most accidents), and to pillory the CEO’s of the major automobile-manufacturing companies. After all, there are about 50,000 deaths resulting annually from automobile accidents in the United States (and this figure derives from an actual count, not from the fanciful statistical projections that generate the numbers thrown about by the anti-smoking movement).

The editors of this publication must decide whether George E. Ehrlich is right in finding it “truly astonishing” that my article appeared in their pages. I will only note, once more, that there is an odd ambiguity here as to whether the alleged “ample evidence” about ETS concerns actual medical harm or only what Dr. Ehrlich calls a “public nuisance.”

My advice to Haven Bradford Gow: do not believe everything you read in the papers! Not even in the New England Journal of Medicine! I must confess that I do not subscribe to that publication, so I cannot tell whether Mr. Gow’s figure of 53,000 deaths annually from ETS comes from that source. Wherever Mr. Gow took this (indeed “truly astonishing”) figure from, it affords wonderful support for my prediction that the estimated number of ETS-caused fatalities will rise as the current campaign escalates. Thus far, we have been told over and over again that about 3,000 Americans die from ETS every year. If this figure has now gone up to the one cited by Mr. Gow, I would take it as moderately good news: the anti-smoking crusaders must feel that they are running into opposition!

I agree with Edward Gross that the link with environmentalism is important. I also agree that one reason for the link is the fear of impurity that was studied by Mary Douglas. One may also refer here to the work that Douglas did in collaboration with the late Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Safety (1982); Wildavsky continued this inquiry in his Searching for Safety (1988). The lessons from these studies are essentially simple: the notion of a risk-free life is utopian, and to try to take no risks at all is perhaps the greatest risk of all. The environmentalist movement and the anti-smoking campaign, along with several other contemporary cultural trends, share the utopian fantasy and create their own risks, not least the risk of tyrannically intrusive government. The “robust spirit” which David Lyon Hurwitz longs for in looking back to an earlier period of Western history was probably in large measure based on the acceptance of the dangers of life.

Donald Johnson wants more, not less, social pressure against putatively obnoxious behavior, such as that of people marching around with “boom-boxes.” Maybe. But would he want federally prescribed decibel levels? Mostly, he denounces the tobacco industry. It seems that the industry is motivated by profit and is disingenuous in some of its arguments. I do not doubt it. The same motivation and the same disingenuousness characterize the industry’s foes. Most disingenuous is the notion that here is a battle between the vested interests of the tobacco industry and those who are motivated only by disinterested concern for the public welfare. It is important to understand that there are anti-tobacco interests as there are tobacco interests.

Joseph Miranda gives it to conservatives for being upset about the anti-smoking movement while having been enthusiastic about the “war on drugs.” He has a point, though only the most committed anti-smoking activist would equate the lethal effects of cigarettes and, say, heroin. In any case, I happen to be one conservative who believes that the “war on drugs” has been an exercise in monumental folly. But that is another story. Laura Gasslein is optimistic about American individualism reasserting itself. May she be right! I could not agree more with Gloria M. Stewart as to the hostility to freedom of all brands of utopianism, as I also agree with John Kilwein that health-promoting zealotry is more dangerous than ETS.