This is a speech I gave on March 29th at Toastmasters, for which I ended up receiving the vote for "best prepared speaker" of the evening by those present.
A Lesson in Futility
"If you spend your time arguing with an idiot, you now have two idiots."
This is the phrase that comes to mind when I think about the subject of smoking cigarettes. Fifty years ago, trying to explain to someone that smoking was a health hazard would have been a lesson in futility - something that results in no significant benefit, i.e. a waste of time. At the time, smoking a cigarette was a sign of glamor and intelligence. Back then, people who claimed “I’m a smoker” merely meant that they had a habit of lighting cigarettes on fire, but so did half the people around you. In other words, it was socially acceptable, if not encouraged, due to the commonality of it and the ubiquity of cigarette ads fifty years ago.
I was surprised when I first came to Japan in the late-90s to find smokers still enjoyed a similar status, as sophisticated individuals that could handle rolled tobacco set on fire in one hand and peruse important documents or hold a book using the other hand. Smokers were also seen as the fun people who knew how to drink and have a good time at social gatherings. There was nowhere in Japan you couldn't smoke, it seemed, from the office to the department store, even on many airplanes and trains. It was certainly no problem in restaurants, bars and coffee shops, where the non-smoking area was usually a dingy corner in the back.
Oh, how times have changed! For those smokers in the room, you will look back on those times as "the good 'ol days" where you were allowed to enjoy a simple pleasure. Now people want to tell you it's not only bad for your health, but it's bad for their health if you smoke. The argument of passive smoking, or inhaling second-hand smoke, has changed the way society looks at and thinks about smoking and turned the debate on its head.
In America, things started to change around 1964, when the Surgeon General first released a report about the health hazards of smoking. The link to lung cancer was firmly established and the risk of heart disease was becoming apparent, but still, most people didn’t pay much attention. At first, physicians and dentists began to kick the habit, and as more and more evidence mounted that showed smoking cigarettes caused premature death, a greater number began to join them in giving up the habit. Then, in the mid-1990s, there was a real sign that the tables had turned. In America, civil lawsuits against tobacco companies had been happening since the 1950s, but Big Tobacco won every time. All of a sudden, cases were being awarded to individual smokers or the families of dead smokers. Now it was the tobacco companies that started coughing. On a larger scale (i.e. big flashing neon sign that times had changed), in 1994, the State of Mississippi sued the tobacco firms to recover Medicare costs, and eventually Big Tobacco agreed to pay a total of $246 billion to the 50 states over the next 25 years.
Today, the health risks of smoking tobacco are widely publicized and well-known by most of the developed world. This includes Japan where you can’t buy a pack of cigarettes without seeing a warning label about the risk of disease from lighting up. In addition, the dangers of second-hand smoke are also being paraded in campaigns to ban smoking in public areas; a well-known example being the Chiyoda Ward in Tokyo. Back in October, 2002, this was the first public ban on smoking in Japan and has encouraged people to cease smoking in such places as department stores and theaters as well. Even the popularity of Starbucks, a smoke-free establishment, is testimony that times have changed. Nonetheless, you may or may not be surprised to know that statistics from the World Health Organization as recent as 2003 state that 48% of males and 12% of females in Japan over the age of 15 smoke cigarettes. It has been over fifty years since the dangers of smoking were made clear, but still, we can find cigarettes in many convenience stores and even vending machines throughout Japan (and apparently underage teenagers smoking them!).
On the other side of the world, back in the United States, the public outcry against smoking is almost overwhelming, and over 50% of the population is covered by some form of smoke-free ordinance. In California, you can’t even smoke in the prisons! Yet, many people insist that it is their right to smoke, and 24% of males and nearly 20% of females in America continue to smoke cigarettes (WHO 2003). Because much of the basis for public smoking bans comes from the idea that “passive smoking” is putting non-smokers at the same risks as those who are lighting up, the debate may just be heating up. It has become a struggle between individual needs of smokers and non-smokers.
..."If you spend you time arguing with an idiot, you now have two idiots."
The most interesting thing about this debate to me is it’s similarity to another debate that is heating up these days. It is also a sensitive issue to many and challenges the survival of the human race. Since the early Nineties, climatologists have been warning about the effects of greenhouse gases on global temperatures and the risk of melting the ice caps. Thanks to the 3rd Assessment Report by the IPCC, the Stern Review on the economics of climate change and the popularity of Al Gore’s recent documentary, some would say the proof is there, the evidence has been provided, and now it’s time to do something about it. The website for “An Inconvenient Truth” even provides “10 simple things you can do” to help stop global warming. The list does indeed give simple suggestions, but sadly, stopping global warming won’t be that simple.
Consider the theoretical simplicity of quitting smoking. To do so, one must stop lighting tobacco and smoking it. To simply stop "cold turkey" may be more complicated to someone who enjoys smoking and derives pleasure from the act, resulting in nicotine gum or patches adhered to various place on the body. They say withdrawal from nicotine can be unpleasant. Alas, over 20% of American find nicotine withdrawal so unpleasant they would rather declare war on non-smokers. Now consider the percentage of the world that has grown dependent on oil to maintain their lifestyles. Consider the energy we consume in our homes, at our offices and moving from place to place. It’s explicitly linked to the way we live so much so that we are the smokers of the 21st Century.
To "smoke" today is not about tobacco, it's about the amount of greenhouse gas emissions you are responsible for. Like a nicotine addiction, our withdrawal from our oil dependent lifestyle promises to be a painful one if we can manage to do so. The hope is in the fact that, in recent years, there is no glamor or intelligence in driving a gas guzzling vehicle or being ignorant about the melting ice caps. The Supreme Court has recently ruled that greenhouse gases are pollutants subject to federal regulation (a landmark similar to the fall of Big Tobacco in the courts 15 years ago). We have entered the stage where we can decide if we will argue about our liberties to smoke, or - aware of the problem - we can do our best to kick the habit. So it is my hope that, looking back at all the idiotic arguments over whether or not smoking was bad for your health fifty years ago will be a lesson in futility that we can finally learn something from.
Thank you.
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