The tobacco industry has launched a multi-million dollars advertising campaign centred on personal rights following the Federal Government’s watering down legislation that had earlier prevented them from engaging in any advertising whatever _ even to the extent of advertising a safety recall of a cigarette lighter that contained a cigarette brand name. The new law takes account of the High Court’s recent ruling that the Constitution contained an implied freedom of political communication.
The gist of the tobacco industry’s advertisements will be that governments affect personal rights too much and they are affecting smokers “”rights” too much. The Canberra Times disagrees with what they are saying, but will defend their right to say it. Indeed, the final result will probably be worthwhile. Vigorous testing of ideas in an open society is one of the best ways for the truth to emerge. A similar result emerged from the earlier health argument about tobacco. For a long time, the tobacco industry asserted that smoking was not injurious to health or failing that it asserted that the case had not been proven. As a result health researchers had to continually re-test the ground against the onslaught of misleading counter-propaganda. The result is now that if there is no other epidemiological link more soundly demonstrated than that between tobacco and ill-health.
As the tobacco industry attempts to champion the “”rights” of smokers, the counter-arguments will similarly be put. The result will be gloriously counter-productive for the tobacco industry. More people will agree with the proposition that smokers infringe people’s rights, not the other way around. Eventually, smoking will only be tolerated outdoors, and even then where there is reasonable distance from others. Smokers will rightly be confined to outdoors. If the tobacco industry is going to argue that recent restrictions on smoking in public places or work places are restrictions of personal freedom, it will be rebutted. Rather it is an act of balancing the personal freedom of two groups: smokers and non-smokers. Very reasonably, governments have said the rights of non-smokers in these places are infringed by smokers.
As smokers are doing the active, polluting act, they should give. The tobacco industry has chanted the mantra that if something is legal it should be legal to advertise it. It is an argument of logical form over good sense. Tobacco contains fearsomely addictive nicotine. No ban on its possession and sale will work _ just a prohibition has not worked with other drugs. That does not mean to say that those who sell it should be allowed to actively encourage its use. Rather, nicotine addicts should be encouraged to give up and if they can’t be tolerated provided they do not harm others with their smoke. As the tobacco industry uses its legitimate freedom of political speech to oppose additional taxes on tobacco and to oppose government money being spent on anti-tobacco education, the counter-arguments will be put with equal or greater force.
Tobacco-induced illnesses like lung cancer, emphysema, stroke, heart disease and so on are a huge drain on the public-health resources of the nation. The counter-argument is that many taxpayers are happy to see governments responsibly conserving those resources by discouraging smoking or making smokers pay through higher taxes. History shows that the tobacco industry will use whatever means it can to continue to make money out of its dangerous, health-destroying product. In the past it has advertised, misled and lied. It has taken an enormous amount of public effort to slowly turn attitudes away from this dangerous habit. Sometimes that effort has been unnecessarily heavy-handed. In particular, the 1992 legislation prohibiting tobacco advertising was framed too widely because aside from rightly precluding virtually any publication of a tobacco band name, it precluded the tobacco industry from engaging in political debate.
Such censorship was not healthy in a democracy. No doubt the tobacco industry will use its new found freedom of political communication to the utmost limit and as a backdoor method of promoting its product. None the less, censorship has never been an effective weapon. Censoriousness does not sit well in a mature democracy like Australia It will be far more healthy to allow the tobacco companies to come out and put their demonstrably hypocritical and self-serving arguments up to public exposure. Free speech is likely to be a far more potent force than the tobacco industry imagines.