Mr. Fudens' email address: mfudens@schools.nyc.gov
Due Date: 4/20/15
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Read the Context, Task and Prompt FIRST. Then proceed to write your essay after reading the article.
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Context:
The sale and use cigarettes is a very controversial topic. Despite the fact that the use of cigarettes has so many dangerous and life threatening effects, they are still legal to use in all 50 states. While some people feel that the sale of cigarettes should be banned, others feel everyone has the right to choose to smoke or not.
Task:
Read the following articles that discuss both the dangers of and why smoking should be banned. Then, using information from the text, write an argumentative paper addressing the prompt below. Please feel free to do additional research on this topic, but if you do, be sure to properly cite your resources.
Prompt:
Considering the fact that cigarette smoking has so many negative effects, do you feel that the sale of them should be banned, or does everyone (over the age of 18) have the freedom to choose whether to smoke them or not?
In your essay, be sure to
- establish a precise and credible position that responds appropriately to the prompt.
- explain your position with claim(s), reasons, and evidence from the texts.
- analyze explicit ideas/information from texts and interpret the authors’ meaning and purpose.
- refer to sources when appropriate.
- discuss and respond to counterclaim(s) or alternate claims and/or evidence.
- represent content from reading materials accurately.
- order ideas and information within and across paragraphs and uses appropriate transitional words/phrases in a way that allows the audience to follow the argument.
- include a conclusion that supports the position.
- use language and tone appropriate to the audience and purpose.
- demonstrate a command of standard English conventions.
ARTICLES:
Why ban the sale of cigarettes? The case for abolition
Abstract
The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. Most of the richer countries of the globe, however, are making progress in reducing both smoking rates and overall consumption. Many different methods have been proposed to steepen this downward slope, including increased taxation, bans on advertising, promotion of cessation, and expansion of smoke-free spaces. One option that deserves more attention is the enactment of local or national bans on the sale of cigarettes. There are precedents: 15 US states enacted bans on the sale of cigarettes from 1890 to 1927, for instance, and such laws are still fully within the power of local communities and state governments. Apart from reducing human suffering, abolishing the sale of cigarettes would result in savings in the realm of healthcare costs, increased labor productivity, lessened harms from fires, reduced consumption of scarce physical resources, and a smaller global carbon footprint. Abolition would also put a halt to one of the principal sources of corruption in modern civilization, and would effectively eliminate one of the historical forces behind global warming denial and environmental obfuscation. The primary reason for abolition, however, is that smokers themselves dislike the fact they smoke. Smoking is not a recreational drug, and abolishing cigarettes would therefore enlarge rather than restrict human liberties. Abolition would also help cigarette makers fulfill their repeated promises to ‘cease production’ if cigarettes were ever found to be causing harm.
Six reasons to ban
The cigarette is the deadliest object in the history of human civilization. Cigarettes kill about 6 million people every year, a number that will grow before it shrinks. Smoking in the twentieth century killed only 100 million people, whereas a billion could perish in our century unless we reverse course.1 Even if present rates of consumption drop steadily to zero by 2100, we will still have about 300 million tobacco deaths this century.
The cigarette is also a defective product, meaning not just dangerous but unreasonably dangerous, killing half its long-term users. And addictive by design. It is fully within the power of the Food and Drug Administration in the US, for instance, to require that the nicotine in cigarettes be reduced to subcompensable, subaddictive levels.2 ,3 This is not hard from a manufacturing point of view: the nicotine alkaloid is water soluble, and denicotinised cigarettes were already being made in the 19th century.4 Philip Morris in the 1980s set up an entire factory to make its Next brand cigarettes, using supercritical fluid extraction techniques to achieve a 97% reduction in nicotine content, which is what would be required for a 0.1% nicotine cigarette, down from present values of about 2%.5 Keep in mind that we're talking about nicotine content in the rod as opposed to deliveries measured by the ‘FTC method’, which cannot capture how people actually smoke.5
Cigarettes are also defective because they have been engineered to produce an inhalable smoke. Tobacco smoke was rarely inhaled prior to the nineteenth century; it was too harsh, too alkaline. Smoke first became inhalable with the invention of flue curing, a technique by which the tobacco leaf is heated during fermentation, preserving the sugars naturally present in the unprocessed leaf. Sugars when they burn produce acids, which lower the pH of the resulting smoke, making it less harsh, more inhalable. There is a certain irony here, since these ‘milder’ cigarettes were actually far more deadly, allowing smoke to be drawn deep into the lungs. The world's present epidemic of lung cancer is almost entirely due to the use of low pH flue-cured tobacco in cigarettes, an industry-wide practice that could be reversed at any time. Regulatory agencies should mandate a significant reduction in rod-content nicotine, but they should also require that no cigarette be sold with a smoke pH lower than 8. Those two mandates alone would do more for public health than any previous law in history.5
Death and product defect are two reasons to abolish the sale of cigarettes, but there are others. A third is the financial burden on public and private treasuries, principally from the costs of treating illnesses due to smoking. Cigarette use also results in financial losses from diminished labor productivity, and in many parts of the world makes the poor even poorer.6
A fourth reason is that the cigarette industry is a powerful corrupting force in human civilization. Big tobacco has corrupted science by sponsoring ‘decoy’ or ‘distraction research’,5 but it has also corrupted popular media, insofar as newspapers and magazines dependent on tobacco advertising for revenues have been reluctant to publish critiques of cigarettes.7 The industry has corrupted even the information environment of its own workforce, as when Philip Morris paid its insurance provider (CIGNA) to censor the health information sent to corporate employees.8Tobacco companies have bullied, corrupted or exploited countless other institutions: the American Medical Association, the American Law Institute, sports organizations, fire-fighting bodies, Hollywood, the US Congress—even the US presidency and US military. President Lyndon Johnson refused to endorse the 1964 Surgeon General's report, for instance, fearing alienation of the tobacco-friendly South. Cigarette makers managed even to thwart the US Navy's efforts to go smoke-free. In 1986, the Navy had announced a goal of creating a smoke-free Navy by the year 2000; tobacco-friendly congressmen were pressured to thwart that plan, and a law was passed requiring that all ships sell cigarettes and allow smoking. The result: American submarines were not smoke-free until 2011.9
Cigarettes are also, though, a significant cause of harm to the natural environment. Cigarette manufacturing consumes scarce resources in growing, curing, rolling, flavoring, packaging, transport, advertising and legal defense, but also causes harms from massive pesticide use and deforestation. Many Manhattans of savannah woodlands are lost every year to obtain the charcoal used for flue curing. Cigarette manufacturing also produces non-trivial greenhouse gas emissions, principally from the fossil fuels used for curing and transport, fires from careless disposal of butts, and increased medical costs from maladies caused by smoking5 (China produces 40 percent of the world's cigarettes, for example, and uses mainly coal to cure its tobacco leaf). And cigarette makers have provided substantial funding and institutional support for global climate change deniers, causing further harm.10 Cigarettes are not sustainable in a world of global warming; indeed they are one of its overlooked and easily preventable causes.
But the sixth and most important reason for abolition is the fact that smokers themselves do not like their habit. This is a key point: smoking is not a recreational drug; most smokers do not like the fact they smoke and wish they could quit. This means that cigarettes are very different from alcohol or even marijuana. Only about 10–15% of people who drink liquor ever become alcoholics, versus addiction rates of 80% or 90% for people who smoke.11 As an influential Canadian tobacco executive once confessed: smoking is not like drinking, it is rather like being an alcoholic.12
The spectre of prohibition
An objection commonly raised is: Hasn't prohibition already been tried and failed? Won't this just encourage smuggling, organized crime, and yet another failed war on drugs? That has been the argument of the industry for decades; bans are ridiculed as impractical or tyrannical. (First they come for your cigarettes.…)13
The freedom objection is weak, however, given how people actually experience addiction. Most smokers ‘enjoy’ smoking only in the sense that it relieves the pains of withdrawal; they need nicotine to feel normal. People who say they enjoy cigarettes are rather rare—so rare that the industry used to call them ‘enjoyers’.14 Surveys show that most smokers want to quit but cannot; they also regret having started.15 Tobacco industry executives have long grasped the point: Imperial Tobacco's Robert Bexon in 1984 confided to his Canadian cotobacconists that ‘If our product was not addictive we would not sell a cigarette next week’.12 American cigarette makers have been quietly celebrating addiction since the 1950s, when one expressed how ‘fortunate for us’ it was that cigarettes ‘are a habit they can't break’.16
Another objection commonly raised to any call for a ban is that this will encourage smuggling, or even organized crime. But that is rather like blaming theft on fat wallets. Smuggling is already rampant in the cigarette world, as a result of pricing disparities and the tolerance of contraband or even its encouragement by cigarette manufacturers. Luk Joossens and Rob Cunningham have shown how cigarette manufacturers have used smuggling to undermine monopolies or gain entry into new markets or evade taxation.17 ,18 And demand for contraband should diminish, once the addicted overcome their addiction—a situation very different from prohibition of alcohol, where drinking was a more recreational drug. And of course, even a ban on the sale of cigarettes will not eliminate all smoking—nor should that be our goal, since people should still be free to grow their own for personal use. Possession should not be criminalized; the goal should only be a ban on sales. Enforcement, therefore, should be a trivial matter, as is proper in a liberal society.
Cigarette smoking itself, though, is less an expression of freedom than the robbery of it. And so long as we allow the companies to cast themselves as defenders of liberty, the table is unfairly tilted. We have to recognize that smoking compromises freedom, and that retiring cigarettes would enlarge human liberties.
Of course it could well be that product regulation, combined with taxation, denormalization, and ‘smoke-free’ legislation, will be enough to dramatically lower or even eliminate cigarette use—over some period of decades. Here, though, I think we fail to realize how much power governments already have to act more decisively. From 1890 to 1927 the sale of cigarettes was banned virtually overnight in 15 different US states; and in Austin v. Tennessee (1900) the US Supreme Court upheld the right of states to enact such bans.19 Those laws all eventually disappeared from industry pressure and the lure of tax revenues.20 None was deemed unconstitutional, however, and some localities retained bans into the 1930s, just as some counties still today ban the sale of alcohol. Bhutan in 2004 became the first nation recently to ban the sale of cigarettes, and we may see other countries taking this step, especially once smoking prevalence rates start dropping into single digits.
Helping the industry fulfill its promises
One last rationale for a ban: abolition would fulfill a promise made repeatedly by the industry itself. Time and again, cigarette makers have insisted that if cigarettes were ever found to be causing harm they would stop making them:
- In March 1954, George Weissman, head of marketing at Philip Morris, announced that his company would ‘stop business tomorrow’ if ‘we had any thought or knowledge that in any way we were selling a product harmful to consumers’.21
- In 1972, James C Bowling, vice president for public relations at Philip Morris, asserted publicly, and in no uncertain terms, that ‘If our product is harmful…we'll stop making it’.22
- Helmut Wakeham, vice president for research at Philip Morris, in 1976 stated publicly that ‘if the company as a whole believed that cigarettes were really harmful, we would not be in the business. We are a very moralistic company’.23
- RJ Reynolds president Gerald H Long, in a 1986 interview asserted that if he ever ‘saw or thought there were any evidence whatsoever that conclusively proved that, in some way, tobacco was harmful to people, and I believed it in my heart and my soul, then I would get out of the business’.24
- Philip Morris CEO Geoffrey Bible in 1997, when asked (under oath) what he would do with his company if cigarettes were ever found to be causing cancer, said: ‘I'd probably…shut it down instantly to get a better hold on things’.25 Bible was asked about this in Minnesota v. Philip Morris (2 March 1998) and reaffirmed that if even one person were ever found to have died from smoking he would ‘reassess’ his duties as CEO.26
The clearest expression of such an opinion, however, was by Lorillard's president, Curtis H Judge, in an April 1984 deposition, where he was asked why he regarded Lorillard's position on smoking and health as important:
A: Because if we are marketing a product that we know causes cancer, I'd get out of the business…I wouldn't be associated with marketing a product like that
.Q: Why?
A: If cigarettes caused cancer, I wouldn't be involved with them…I wouldn't sell a product that caused cancer
.Q: …Because you don't want to kill people? … Is that the reason?
A: Yes.
Q: …If it was proven to you that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer, do you think cigarettes should be marketed?
A: No…No one should sell a product that is a proven cause of lung cancer.27
Note that these are all public assurances, including several made under oath. All follow a script drawn up by the industry's public relations advisors during the earliest stages of the conspiracy: On 14 December 1953, Hill and Knowlton had proposed to RJ Reynolds that the cigarette maker reassure the public that it ‘would never market a product which is in any way harmful’. Reynolds was also advised to make it clear that if the Company felt that its product were now causing cancer or any other disease, it would immediately cease production of it.28To this recommendation was added ‘Until such time as these charges or irresponsible statements are ever proven, the Company will continue to produce and market cigarettes’.
What is remarkable is that we never find the companies saying privately that they would stop making cigarettes—with two significant exceptions. In August 1947, in an internal document outlining plans to study ‘vascular and cardiac effects’ of smoking, Philip Morris's director of research, Willard Greenwald, made precisely this claim: ‘We certainly do not want any person to smoke if it is dangerous to his health’.29 Greenwald had made a similar statement in 1939, reassuring his president, OH Chalkley, that ‘under no circumstances would we want anyone to smoke Philip Morris cigarettes were smoking definitely deleterious to his health’.30 There is no reason to believe he was lying: he is writing long before Wynder's mouse painting experiments of 1953, and prior even to the epidemiology of 1950. Prior to obtaining proof of harm, Philip Morris seems honestly not to have wanted to sell a deadly product.
Abolition is not such a radical idea; it would really just help the industry fulfil its long-standing promises to the public. The cigarette, as presently constituted, is simply too dangerous—and destructive and unloved—to be sold.
Health Effects of Cigarette Smoking
Overview
Smoking:1,2
· Harms nearly every organ of the body
· Causes many diseases and reduces the health of smokers in general
Smoking and Death
Smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States.
· Cigarette smoking causes more than 480,000 deaths each year in the United States. This is about one in five deaths.1,2,3
· Smoking causes more deaths each year than all of these combined:4
o Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)
o Illegal drug use
o Alcohol use
o Motor vehicle injuries
o Firearm-related incidents
· More than 10 times as many U.S. citizens have died prematurely from cigarette smoking than have died in all the wars fought by the United States during its history.1
· Smoking causes about 90% (or 9 out of 10) of all lung cancer deaths in men and women.1,2 More women die from lung cancer each year than from breast cancer.5
· About 80% (or 8 out of 10) of all deaths from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are caused by smoking.1
· Cigarette smoking increases risk for death from all causes in men and women.1
· The risk of dying from cigarette smoking has increased over the last 50 years in men and women in the United States.1
Smoking and Increased Health Risks
Smokers are more likely than nonsmokers to develop heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer.
· Smoking is estimated to increase the risk—
o For coronary heart disease by 2 to 4 times1,6
o For stroke by 2 to 4 times1
o Of men developing lung cancer by 25 times1
o Of women developing lung cancer by 25.7 times1
· Smoking causes diminished overall heath, such as self-reported poor health, increased absenteeism from work, and increased health care utilization and cost.1
Smoking and Cardiovascular Disease
Smokers are at greater risk for diseases that affect the heart and blood vessels (cardiovascular disease).1,2
· Smoking causes stroke and coronary heart disease—the leading causes of death in the United States.1
· Even people who smoke fewer than five cigarettes a day can have early signs of cardiovascular disease.1
· Smoking damages blood vessels and can make them thicken and grow narrower. This makes your heart beat faster and your blood pressure go up. Clots can also form.1,2
· A heart attack occurs when a clot blocks the blood flow to your heart. When this happens, your heart cannot get enough oxygen. This damages the heart muscle, and part of the heart muscle can die.1,2
· A stroke occurs when a clot blocks the blood flow to part of your brain or when a blood vessel in or around your brain bursts.1,2
· Blockages caused by smoking can also reduce blood flow to your legs and skin.1,2
Smoking and Respiratory Disease
Smoking can cause lung disease by damaging your airways and the small air sacs (alveoli) found in your lungs.1,2
· Lung diseases caused by smoking include COPD, which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis.1,2
· Cigarette smoking causes most cases of lung cancer.1,2
· If you have asthma, tobacco smoke can trigger an attack or make an attack worse.1,2
· Smokers are 12 to 13 times more likely to die from COPD than nonsmokers.1
Smoking and Cancer
Smoking can cause cancer almost anywhere in your body:1,2 (See figure above)
· Bladder
· Blood (acute myeloid leukemia)
· Cervix
· Colon and rectum (colorectal)
· Esophagus
· Kidney and ureter
· Larynx
· Liver
· Oropharynx (includes parts of the throat, tongue, soft palate, and the tonsils)
· Pancreas
· Stomach
· Trachea, bronchus, and lung
If nobody smoked, one of every three cancer deaths in the United States would not happen.1,2 Smoking increases the risk of dying from cancer and other diseases in cancer patients and survivors.1
Smoking and Other Health Risks
Smoking harms nearly every organ of the body and affects a person’s overall health.1,2
· Smoking can make it harder for a woman to become pregnant and can affect her baby's health before and after birth. Smoking increases risks for:1,2,5
o Preterm (early) delivery
o Stillbirth (death of the baby before birth)
o Low birth weight
o Sudden infant death syndrome (known as SIDS or crib death)
o Ectopic pregnancy
o Orofacial clefts in infants
· Smoking can also affect men's sperm, which can reduce fertility and also increase risks for birth defects and miscarriage (loss of the pregnancy).2
· Smoking can affect bone health.1,5
o Women past childbearing years who smoke have lower bone density (weaker bones) than women who never smoked and are at greater risk for broken bones.
· Smoking affects the health of your teeth and gums and can cause tooth loss.1
· Smoking can increase your risk for cataracts (clouding of the eye’s lens that makes it hard for you to see) and age-related macular degeneration (damage to a small spot near the center of the retina, the part of the eye needed for central vision).1
· Smoking is a cause of type 2 diabetes mellitus and can make it harder to control. The risk of developing diabetes is 30–40% higher for active smokers than nonsmokers.1,2
· Smoking causes general adverse effects on the body. It can cause inflammation and adverse effects on immune function.1
· Smoking is a cause of rheumatoid arthritis.1
Quitting and Reduced Risks
· Quitting smoking cuts cardiovascular risks. Just 1 year after quitting smoking, your risk for a heart attack drops sharply.2
· Within 2 to 5 years after quitting smoking, your risk for stroke could fall to about the same as a nonsmoker’s.2
· If you quit smoking, your risks for cancers of the mouth, throat, esophagus, and bladder drop by half within 5 years.2
· Ten years after you quit smoking, your risk for lung cancer drops by half.2