The
tobacco control movement is a term used to describe organizations opposed to the practice of
smoking, or those which advocate strict regulation of
tobacco products due to their
associated health risks and
addictive potential. Rationales for such advocacy generally include concern over the
public health costs of smoking, as well as the hazard posed to non-smokers by
secondhand smoke.
The tobacco control movement was
pejoratively referred to as the "anti-smoking movement" in internal
tobacco industry memoranda, to describe organized threats to their business interests and denigrate public health concerns.
History of opposition to smoking
Pope Urban VII's 13-day papal reign included the world's first known public smoking ban (1590), as he threatened to
excommunicate anyone who "took tobacco in the porchway of or inside a church, whether it be by chewing it, smoking it with a pipe or sniffing it in powdered form through the nose". The earliest citywide European smoking bans were enacted shortly thereafter. Such bans were enacted in
Bavaria, Kursachsen, and certain parts of
Austria in the late 1600s.
In 1604, King
James I of England wrote
A Counterblast to Tobacco, where he described smoking as: "A custome loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmeful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomeless."
Smoking was banned in
Berlin in 1723, in
Königsberg in 1742, and in
Stettin in 1744. These bans were repealed in the
revolutions of 1848.
The
Nazi Party imposed a
nationwide tobacco ban in every
German university, post office, military hospital and Nazi Party office, under the auspices of Karl Astel's Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research, created in 1941 under orders from
Adolf Hitler. Major anti-tobacco campaigns were widely broadcast by the Nazis until the demise of the regime in 1945.
The tobacco control movement today
Today, the tobacco control movement is primarily motivated by health concerns, subsequent to Sir
Richard Doll's research in the 1950s linking smoking to
lung cancer and other diseases.
Prominent tobacco control organizations include
Action on Smoking and Health,
Airspace Action on Smoking and Health and the
Canadian Council for Tobacco Control.
There are two major strands to the tobacco control movement's arguments:
- firstly, that smoking is both offensive and harmful to non-smokers, and that they have a right not to be exposed to smokers' waste gases and debris
- secondly, that smoking is harmful to smokers' health, and that therefore
- * children and teenagers should be prevented from starting to smoke
- * smokers should be motivated to quit smoking for their own protection.
Significant factors in the success of the tobacco control movement have been the mainstream acknowledgment that smoking is both
addictive and
harmful to health, which has repositioned tobacco control advocacy in the public mind and challenged the previous social consensus that smoking was a harmless and even beneficial habit. In particular, awareness of the health risks of
passive smoking shifted the debate from the rights of smokers to the rights of non-smokers.
After centuries of smoking being seen as normal behavior, and in spite of massive opposition from the
tobacco industry, the tobacco control movement has slowly achieved increasing success in a number of countries, with numerous jurisdictions having passed
laws to forbid smoking in enclosed public spaces, and government support in some countries for tobacco control campaigns as part of their public health initiatives.
Opposition to the tobacco control movement
A number of organizations oppose the tobacco control movement, on
libertarian grounds, among other motivations. Such groups include
FOREST, which is primarily funded by the tobacco industry. Other
politically conservative or libertarian groups include the
Cato Institute, which refers to the "anti-smoking lobby" as a "war driven by greed and bad science" and the
Heartland Institute.
See also
