After the Bell: How the Department of Health encourages smoking by discouraging it

In 2005, the movie Thank You for Smoking was released — a satirical black comedy starring Aaron Eckhart, based on a book by Christopher Buckley. The movie has always stuck with me because instead of being a condescending, instructional tutorial about the dangers of smoking, it applies a jaundiced eye to the public relations “spin” around it. The result is a hugely funny examination of rhetoric, argumentative flexibility and the nature of truth.

The lead character is the chief spokesperson for big tobacco, Nick Naylor, who regularly has lunch with two colleagues from the public relations industry who represent, respectively, the alcohol and gun lobbies. They jokingly call themselves the MOD Squad, as in the Merchants of Death, and regularly argue about which of the products they represent causes more harm. As I said … dark.

It’s set at a time when the links between tobacco and various forms of cancer were just being established, so the war between health professionals and the industry was just warming up — and when it came to the arguments, Naylor was nailing it.

In one particularly poignant moment, when he is testifying before a congressional committee, he is asked whether the fact that big tobacco funds his theoretical employer, a sham organisation called the Academy of Tobacco Studies, affects its priorities. He replies, “No. Just as I’m sure, campaign contributions don’t affect yours.” The gallery giggles nervously.

He is then asked whether he believes that smoking cigarettes, over time, can lead to lung cancer. He shocks the committee by saying he does, and adds: “I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who really believes that cigarettes are not potentially harmful.” But then he goes on, “I just don’t see the point in a warning label for something people already know.”

If you were going to attach warning labels to everything dangerous, then you should slap a skull and crossbones on all aeroplanes and cars, he says. A senator objects that the deaths from smoking massively outnumber car and aeroplane deaths. Actually, Naylor retorts, the demonstrable #1 killer is cholesterol. Consequently, we should have dire warnings on cheese.

The tactic is a wonderful demonstration of shifting the basis of a discussion from what your adversary wants to talk about, even if they are right in that frame, to a different premise, where you are right. And then by definition, they are wrong, even if they are right, if you get my drift. It can be bewildering — and it’s meant to be.

This is all relevant now because Parliament is discussing the Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Control Bill for a second time to try to get it passed. The contents of the legislation have been canvassed often before in the media — the legislation has been around for ages — and it is draconian. Almost laughably draconian.

The legislation bans the display of tobacco products and branding on cigarette packets, and introduces plain packaging with graphic health warnings and pictorials. It also regulates vapes and vaping. This is all now run of the mill internationally, and IMHO, completely defendable.

However, the legislation goes further, banning smoking in certain private enclosed places. You can’t smoke in your own home in front of a child or a housekeeper. You can’t smoke in a car if there is someone in the car who doesn’t smoke. You can’t smoke in “hospitality establishments”, so no more “smoking sections” in bars, unless they are enclosed. And so on.

The legislation is so typical of our age and of our government. It’s unrealistic and passes as an act of fiction. Whatever relationship exists between the legislation and reality is entirely accidental. South African law enforcement cannot stop foreigners from legging it out of the country with billions of rands they have stolen from taxpayers. But we are meant to believe that they are going to walk into people’s houses and arrest them for smoking. Really?

The lack of a grip on reality is one aspect of the issue. But there is another concern: what it doesn’t do. The big problem in SA is obvious to anyone who takes even the slightest notice. Recently, a judge declared the SA Revenue Service (SARS) was not permitted to monitor cigarette manufacturers via remote TV. Incredible, but it does point to the fact that SARS was trying to implement something desperate because around 60% of cigarette sales are now made by tax dodgers who are eating up the market through the simple expedient of not paying the huge excise tax on cigarettes.

All the research demonstrates that the way to reduce smoking is not by reducing advertising or putting disgusting lung photographs on cigarette packets. It’s by making cigarettes more expensive. So if the Department of Health wants to reduce smoking, it could support legislation that closes down cigarette factories that don’t pay tax — which is most of them. This is obvious because “loosies” are now sold in every shebeen and cafe across the country at a fraction of the international price. As a result, as far as we can tell, smoking in SA is no longer declining, it may even be increasing. And nothing in the Bill addresses that issue.

Instead, we get virtue-signalling legislation that deliberately avoids attacking the problem in a way that might work. It’s almost as though the health department has adopted the mischievous, shape-shifting rhetoric that was so well illustrated in Thank You for Smoking.

Quite an achievement. DM