New
pro-smoking book contains argument
loopholes
Elena Vassilieva
A few weeks ago, the city of Calabasas, Calif., made headlines with its secondhand
smoke ordinance that bans smoking in all public areas of the city, including
parks, sidewalks and outdoor businesses.
Strangely enough, the tobacco companies are reported to be ecstatic.
Seem bizarre? Not really. After all, if you’d never heard of Philip Morris
until last year, these days you might think the company’s sole purpose
was to make people quit smoking.
The Calabasas ordinance follows the lead taken by the California Air Resources
Board that has issued a regulation to treat secondhand tobacco smoke as a toxic
air pollutant. Europe is following suit with the first steps taken by the United
Kingdom, which has recently adopted a ban on public indoor smoking to take
effect in 2007. Looking at this, it would appear that everyone seems to be
in agreement — even the smokers — that smoking needs to be eradicated.
There is a new book, however, determined to teach the general population how
to smoke in an expert way and feel good about it. “The Easy Way to Start
Smoking,” by George Cockerill and David Owen, scheduled to appear in
stores this March, unabashedly maintains that smoking is cool. The text states
that lighting up has always been cool and the risks associated with taking
a drag are just, well, part of the deal.
The previous book by Cockerill and Owen made a spectacular jab at the get-your-sex-life-hotter
type of reading and instead proposed to work on making it more mundane and
use pleasure sparingly.
As an exercise in reflection on the publishing hits — endless self-help
books — “The Easy Way to Start Smoking” is very entertaining.
After a proper disclaimer stating, “The publisher maintains smoking is
harmful” and “does not endorse smoking in any way,” the authors
go on to initiate the reader into the gentle art of lifetime smoking.
Cockerill and Owen do not just maintain that starting the habit needs expert
advice so that the new smoker can exude the air of a seasoned junkie, but also
the life-long support of like-minded friends because the pressures to quit
are multiplying each day. This last part of the book that deals with smoking
against all odds in an increasingly smoking-unfriendly society is the most
amusing one as it offers some most unexpected rhetoric maneuvers.
For instance, while lamenting the airplane smoking ban, Cockerill and Owen
maintain that the dramatic decline in air travel by Christmas 2001 must be
inextricably tied to the ban. By omitting any mention of the 9/11 terrorist
attacks, the authors achieve a semblance of a credible argument.
Long-term health concerns? Cockerill and Owen suggest dealing with those by
looking at a time when no European knew what tobacco was. That is, in the Middle
Ages. Because life expectancy back in the day was quite dismal, we might as
well conclude that the longer humanity has smoked, the better our life expectancy
has become.
And as for the future, the authors speculate by 2025 the toll of cell phone-related
deaths might very well be higher than smoking-related mortality. The 150-page
book is full of hilarious, if somewhat dubious, rhetoric and is highly recommended
to anyone who would like to learn how to argue the least popular point and
appear to win against established opinions.
The social pressure to quit smoking in the last several years has been reflected
in legal provisions. These are mostly in terms of protecting non-smokers, or
in other words, restricting smoking environments.
Until the California Air Resources Board’s ruling to consider nicotine
a toxic air pollutant, restrictions followed the physical demarcation of interior
versus exterior space.
But why not, for instance, designate spaces such as work or campus as non-smoking?
The current understanding whereby smokers are allowed to smoke in public at
all acknowledges that the smoker might actually need to smoke. Once secondhand
smoke is deemed an air pollutant, smoking is equated to littering. And arguing
that you really need to litter is not going to be easy.
What does that mean to the student community?
If anything, “it is easier to smoke at school than anywhere else,” according
Jules Browaeys, a postdoctoral research assistant in the Department of Earth
Sciences.
The fact that a book such as “The Easy Way to Start Smoking” is
appearing in print and has been featured prominently on the French branch of
Amazon.com suggests the debate on smoking is far from over.
The recent California ruling mirrors a new stage in our reflection of what
the personal freedom to smoke means. For all the tongue-in-cheekness of Cockerill
and Owen’s mock self-help, the ethical stance of the book is so evasive
that the reader is forced to reconsider everything we know about the biggest
addiction of the 20th century.
This column originally appeared in the Daily Trojan at USC.
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