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PAUL COOPER for TIME
PARIS MATCH: It's now illegal to smoke on a Métro platform, but no one has ever been cited
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Posted Sunday, Jan. 5, 2003; 2.02 p.m. GMT
Like a nicotine-stained wretch making his twentieth New Year's resolution to quit, Europe is once again trying to get serious about its problem. And maybe — just maybe — this could be the year that the promise sticks. Greece has rolled out tough new curbs on tobacco use and advertising, and the Italian senate has recently approved similar legislation to bolster the country's earlier, marginal rules. And years of foot dragging by national governments have galvanized the European Commission into action. Last month the European Court of Justice — the E.U.'s highest judicial body — upheld rules set to take effect over the next two years that will force manufacturers to reduce levels of tar and nicotine in cigarettes, increase the size and darken the language of health warnings, and stop the use of terms like mild and light in packaging — meaning that R.J. Reynolds' best seller will no longer be called Marlboro Lights. Eight days before, E.U. health ministers approved a measure that will ban print tobacco advertising within months, and prohibit cigarette brands from sponsoring international spectator sports like Formula One racing, beginning in 2005. Such actions may seem modest, but they could prove to be important steps in the long, slow struggle to change Europe's deep cultural acceptance of ambient smoke as acceptable, habitual and harmless. Ironically, people in statist European societies have generally resisted legislative efforts to modify smoking behavior, while government-wary Americans have embraced restrictive laws and tort challenges. Indeed, many Europeans disdain America's trailblazing policies — such as New York City's new ban on all public smoking — as overly severe and puritanical.
The result is that both smokers and nonsmokers now portray themselves as victims. And with social norms in flux, smoking wars are breaking out all over Europe. So far, the smokers appear to be winning. The door of the Paris power-lunch restaurant Le Pichet carries a defiant message: nonsmokers tolerated. A patron at one of London's oldest restaurants asks a waiter to stop the smokers at the next table, and the waiter chides him: "Smoking is encouraged here, to enhance the enjoyment of the meal." At the interval of a children's musical in the West End of London, five-year-olds charge through a lobby filled with the blue haze of their parents' cigarette smoke. In Denmark, there is no minimum age for purchasing tobacco, so 10-year-olds are free to light up just about anywhere except the classroom. And even Europe's outdoor stadiums offer no haven for nonsmokers, who routinely exit matches reeking from the forest of cigarettes kept blazing in the grandstands throughout games.
But slow, painful, grudging progress is being made. Around 80% of British companies have voluntarily applied bans or restrictions on workplace smoking — a revolution that has also swept France, and that's now coming to Greece as well. On the sidewalks outside Athens office buildings and hospitals in which smoking was banned last October, puffing workers stand together and the cigarettes pile up like heaps of macaroni. But the air inside is clean. And though Greece's new antismoking laws generate consistent rebuke — "Whoever wants to smoke here can do so, and if people don't like that, they can go to McDonald's," warns Athens taverna owner Dimitris Papageorgiou — they are being enforced. Even Papageorgiou's taverna has a no-smoking section. Similarly, though Paris Métro platforms, train station floors and airport waiting areas are still littered with spent butts (ashtrays have been removed from these no-smoking sites), antismoking activists say they're far happier seeing 10 smokers break the law than the 100 who used to puff away legally.
Laws can never completely stamp out smoking, of course, because Europe's craving for cigarettes goes so deep — tapping into impulses that are political as much as physical or cultural. Telemaque Maratos, a writer and spokesman in Athens for smokers' advocates group Eleftheria ("Freedom"), condemns Greece's new smoking restrictions as a mix of governmental meddling and misplaced moralizing, rather than a workable health policy. "These measures assume Greeks are naive and in need of a nanny state to guide them down a politically-correct path," says Maratos. "We're a live-and-let-live lot." Or die-and-let-die. After all, the essence of community is an agreement that personal freedoms must be limited when they begin to harm others. And the harm of secondhand smoke is no longer in dispute.
If the philosophical argument against smoking restrictions is weak, the influence of those who profit from the weed is not. Estimates put the tobacco industry's annual sales between $300 billion and $400 billion, 12% of that in Europe. And despite the spread of antismoking legislation and increased tobacco taxation across Europe, industry profits remain solid — around €134.8 billion in 2001 for the six largest firms alone. Those dissuasive measures have helped reduce smoking levels from 47% of the E.U.'s adult population in 1987 to around 30% today, but the levels increase to 35% and 40% among the heavy-puffing Eastern European nations set to join the Union in 2004.
And with smoking rates declining fastest among adult males, tobacco companies are now successfully roping in women and young people. The percentage of women who smoke is on the rise throughout the E.U., and now averages around 27%. The smoking population of people aged 15-24, meanwhile, is a dizzying 36.8%. In France, the overall number of smokers is in decline, but the ranks of young tobacco fiends have expanded to include 6% of all 13-year-olds, 36% of 16-year-olds, and a whopping 51% of 19-year-olds. The teen-smoking fad, French authorities forecast, will inflate the nation's annual smoking deaths from around 55,000 today to 165,000 by 2025.
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