>The most recent evidence of the link between smoking and liberation is
>visible in the struggle women have waged in this century for their freedom.
>It is probably no accident that in April 1945 women received the right to
>vote in France, two weeks after they had received cigarette rations for the
>first time since the war. They were allotted, however, only one-third of the
>rations men received - "a long way, baby," but not yet there. in the
>Conclusion, I will review the results of a European Community health
>investigation showing that European women are much more likely to smoke in
>those countries where they are the most liberated from traditional places
>and roles. This fact lends credence to the suspicion that some of the
>current impetus for the wave of antitabagism derives from its concealed
>misogyny, or antifeminism.
>
>Americans today, as always forgetting their own history, aroused to
>paroxysms of antismoking sentiment, think they invented it. At the turn of
>this century, as well as in the 1920s and 1930s, powerful political forces
>combated the "demon weed." Then, as now, protests on behalf of the health
>of the citizenry masked moral objections, just as censors always defend
>their interdictions by adducing the harm that some form of expression or
>pleasure may inflict on society as a whole.
>
>The beauty and benefits of cigarettes have been repressed and forgotten in
>America, where the climate of opinion ranges in abstractness from implicit
>forms of social disapproval to laws banning smoking on all domestic
>flights. The last is a sign of the dangerous lengths to which antismoking
>impulses will go to deny others the freedom to enjoy the consolation and
>the mastery cigarettes provide in moments of stress or fear. Many people
>who do not normally smoke take up smoking during times of personal or
>public crisis, at moments of great anxiety when self-control and
>concentration are required. Nowhere these days does one hear voices lifted
>to praise cigarettes, as one often does in wartime, for their multiple
>psychological and social benefits, for their cultural value, or for their
>aesthetic power. But as time goes by, the circle turns. This book proceeds
>on the hunch that the present climate may change, perhaps gently as the
>result of something like fashion-an effect of the turning of an obscure
>process of cyclical historical development-perhaps violently, under the
>pressure of widespread social tensions. The United States does not need to
>await a vast calamity in order to rediscover the social benefits of
>cigarettes or to appreciate their remarkable contribution to modernity-and
>to resume its love affair with cigarettes, America's gift to the world. It
>could come suddenly, with a vengeance, in a moment when the society needs
>all the collective control over anxiety that it can muster.
>
>To evoke a climate of opinion other than the current one, we need only
>recall the value that was assigned to a carton of cigarettes, for example
>in Europe in 1945. Cigarettes served then, as tobacco had for the earliest
>settlers in Virginia, and later for Lewis and Clark, as a universal token
>of exchange-the "Gold Token," as good as gold. George Washington wrote to
>the Continental Congress: "If you can't send money-send tobacco" (Rival
>188). Lewis and Clark used it as their principal token of exchange with the
>Indians. In Drancy, the French concentration camp, on the eve of departures
>a puff on a cigarette was worth to francs; 100 francs bought two whole ones.
>
>The world can only be grateful for the precision and insistence with which
>doctors remind it of the dangers of smoking poison; that is their job. But
>the suspicion here is that the passions and the uses to which that
>information is being put are wildly disproportionate to the danger that
>tobacco poses-particularly other people's smoke. For the moment, cigarettes
>have become the focus or fetish of puritanical prohibitions like those
>that, in the past, periodically constrained freedom and censored pleasure
>in the name of protecting the collective well-being from harm, but always
>under the darker suspicion of wishing to increase state control or to
>conceal other interests. Not long ago, the secretary of health castigated
>cigarette marketing during the very week that the White House chief of
>staff weakened the clean air bill. The passionate excess of zeal with which
>cigarettes are everywhere stigmatized may signal that some more pervasive,
>subterranean, and dangerous passions are loose that directly threaten our
>freedom. The freedom to smoke ought to be understood as a significant token
>of the class of freedoms, and when it is threatened one should look
>instantly for what other controls are being tightened, for what other
>checks on freedom are being administered. The attitude of a society toward
>the freedom to smoke is a test of the way it understands the rights of
>people at large, for at any time, all the time, a quarter to a half of all
>the adults in the world are puffing away at cigarettes. The question of the
>connection between the freedom to smoke and general freedoms in the society
>is hard to prove, but this book will suggest that it ought never to be
>disimplicated.