Smoking: The Butt Stops Here

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Why is everyone suddenly jumping on the antismoking bandwagon? After all, critics have been proclaiming the dangers of smoking for hundreds of years. King James I of England in 1604 branded the habit "loathsome." Even Adolf Hitler was a fanatical opponent of tobacco; signs declaring DEUTSCHE WEIBER RAUCHEN NICHT (German women do not smoke) were posted throughout the Third Reich during World War II.

U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry in 1964 issued his landmark report linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer, and a stream of reforms soon followed. In 1966 cigarette makers were forced to put labels on their packages warning consumers about the health risks of smoking. In 1971 cigarette ads were barred from TV and radio. The medical evidence against smoking, meanwhile, continued to mount; cigarettes were linked to heart disease, emphysema and low-birth- weight babies. In 1986, when Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released one of the first widely publicized reports on the detrimental effects of passive smoke, the issue shifted from personal health (what smokers are doing to themselves) to environmental damage (what they are doing to others).

Yet nothing has galvanized today's antismoking activists as much as the / Environmental Protection Agency report released a year ago that classified environmental tobacco smoke as a class-A carcinogen and estimated that 3,000 nonsmokers die each year from lung cancer as a result of other people's smoke. The tobacco industry is currently challenging the findings in court, but the report dealt a serious blow to so-called smokers' rights that's still being felt.

"The irrefutable medical evidence on secondhand smoke," says Mark Green, New York City public advocate and a longtime supporter of antismoking measures, "has been the booster rocket launching the antismoking movement into orbit." Notes an EPA official: "We had no real sense of how big this report was going to be. But it has become the major catalyst for the reforms we're seeing all over the country."

The growing health and environmental warnings coincided with a shift in the political climate. President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton sent a message that the war on smoking was getting personal when they banned smoking in the White House on Inauguration Day. Congress, meanwhile, has seen an influx of environmentally concerned baby boomers, along with a decline in the traditional power of tobacco-state legislators. Despite continued lavish spending by the tobacco lobby to try to influence Congress, for the first time members of the antismoking Congressional Task Force on Tobacco and Health outnumber pro-tobacco House members, 58 to 42. "The tobacco industry, while still a powerful force, has lost its virtual stranglehold on Congress," says antismoking activist John Banzhaf, executive director of Action on Smoking and Health.