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A Modest Proposal

Monday, February 28th, 2005

Given the nationwide success of public smoking bans, I submit that we should return to alcohol prohibition.

Here’s why:

Australian medical researcher Raymond Johnstone looked at epidemiological data and determined that the rate of death from cancer among the wives of non-smoking men was 6 per 100,000. The rate of death among the wives of smoking men was 8 per 100,000. That means that the absolute risk of cancer due to the kind of prolonged exposure to secondhand smoke endured by a spouse is 1 per 50,000.

Now if you’re an alarmist, you’d phrase that statistic like this: “SECONDHAND SMOKE CAUSES 33% MORE CANCER DEATHS.”

If you’re a realist, you’d phrase it as Johnstone does:

“The most one can say about the alleged link between passive smoking and lung cancer is that if there is one, the it is so small that it is difficult to measure it accurately and the risk, if any, is well below the level of those to which we normally pay attention.”

In the swell book The Tyranny of Health, Michael Fitzpatrick notes that you’re more likely to get cancer from eating Japanese seafood (six times more likely), drinking tap water (two and a half times more likely), or eating mushrooms (fifty percent more likely) than you are from being the nonsmoking spouse of a heavy smoker.

Let’s take this a little further. What else goes on in bars that nanny-statists tell us affects the “public health?” Drinking, of course! And how does drinking affect the “public health?” The most obvious way is with drunk driving fatalities.

The NHTSA says that in 2003 (the latest year data is available) just under 17,000 people died in “alcohol-related traffic fatalities” (it’s an inflated statistic, but let’s play by the healthists’ rules for a moment). According to the Census, the U.S. population stands at 295 million. Plug the two numbers into a calculator, and your risk of getting killed by a drunk driver stands at one in 17,352. As noted above, your risk of getting cancer from secondhand smoke is about one in 50,000.

Seems pretty cut and dry to me. If we’re going to invoke prohibitions to promote public health, seems to me the case is clear. We should be banning alcohol, not cigarettes.

Even the limitations in this admitedly clunky calculation favor banning booze:

  • The secondhand smoke figures come from the nonsmoking spouses of smokers. Not employees. Not customers. These are people exposed to the stuff on a daily basis, for decades. Adjust for the amount of time a nonsmoking barmaid, waiter, or customer spends exposed to the stuff, and your odds drop appreciably from “statistically insignificant.”
  • People generally choose to be exposed to secondhand smoke. They could always go to another bar, or another restaurant. In any case, you know when you enter a bar that allows smoking that you’re going to be breathing in environmental smoke. That’s much less true when it comes to highways. While it’s probably true in the abstract, it’s not nearly as easy to say that by traveling the roadways — by car, foot, bike, or public transportation — you are consciously subjecting yourself to getting hit by someone who consumed alcohol, then got into a car.
  • Your odds of getting hit by a drunk driver increase significantly in the hours you’d be on the road after eating dinner at a restaurant where smoking is banned. People drink more in the evening. Even more so if you’re on the road in the hours after the bars (where smoking is banned) close, as that’s the time when drunken drivers are most likely on the road.
  • Policy made today needs to take into account what might happen down the road. In the future, medical science is more likely to decrease the odds of dying from cancer than it is to decrease the odds of dying from getting pulverized by a drunk driver.

    Seems to me the case is clear. If we’re going to ban an activity that goes on in bars in the name of public health, it should be drinking, not smoking.

    And really, why should we prefer one vice to the other? Both are legal. Both are heavily regulated. And alcohol gets you intoxicated. Smoking doesn’t.

    I know what you’re thinking. “Dammit, Balko. This is post-reductio America,” you’re thinking. “Why would you give them any ideas?”

    Because I’d like to hear them actually say it. Why not put all the cards on the table? If you’re going to ban one legal product from public consumption for reasons of public health, why wouldn’t you ban another that causes almost three times as many fatalities?

    I bring this up to point out the absurdity behind the rubric that we’re banning public smoking to save lives. That’s just shit. The real reason we’re banning smoking is what you might call the “Kevin Drum’s Drycleaning Bill” argument.

    It goes like this: Non-smokers don’t like cigarette smoke. They don’t like that it gets in their hair, and their clothes, and makes their eyes watery. But they also really, really dig bars that allow smoking. Bars they don’t own. Bars they didn’t invest in. Bars whose livelihood doesn’t depend on them. But that’s not important.

    Instead of starting or patronizing or investing in smokeless bars or restaurants, it’s just much easier to pass a law that forces the places they already like to conform to their needs, to bend to their will, to serve them on their terms, and under their conditions. In short, they want to use the state to force everyone else to adopt their cleaner, more politically correct, more fashionable habits, and at the same time rid their lives of the hassles and inconveniences they feel are caused by the people who don’t.

    Put more simply, it goes something like this: “I like to drink. So we shouldn’t ban alcohol. But I hate smoking. So let’s ban it!”

    You see “Kevin Drum’s Drycleaning Bill” reasoning all the time in newspaper articles about how well smoking bans are going. “It’s great,” Joe Lunchbucket will say, “I go home after a night of barhopping, and my clothes don’t smell like smoke anymore!”

    Classic Kevin Drum’s Drycleaning Bill.

    It’s crap, of course. Smoking bans are almost never passed to protect people from smelling funny (else they’d have to ban quite a bit more associated with the bar scene, too).

    They’re passed because of “all of the lives this will save.”

    In which case I say…

    …why don’t we ban beer, too?

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    This entry was posted on Monday, February 28th, 2005 at 6:26 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Nanny State, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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