Taunter Media

Marc Ambinder and Crooked Timber reflect on the oddest aspect of tobacco regulations: they work.

I would have predicted that the ban would never work in pubs. But it did – pretty well instantaneously as best as I could tell. If it hadn’t been for the Irish example, I would have bet even larger amounts that the ban would never have taken off in Italy (…where the general attitude to large swathes of civil and criminal law seems best characterized as a kind of amiable contempt). But again, it appears to have worked.

I suspect three forces are at work:

• Smoking norms turned out to be incredibly complicated views of public and private space, and the bans fit nicely inside them;
• Widespread acceptance of the harm of environmental tobacco smoke empowered nonsmokers;
• The bans – and, indeed, the significant increases in tobacco taxes – were not complete, and gave smokers a feeling of agency.

It was not that long ago that cigarette smoke was everywhere.  Restaurants, bars, cafes, and yes, airplanes.  The idea that someone would think smoking an acceptable practice for a narrow, crowded aluminum tube 36,000 feet above ground seems as absurd as the notion that a sick person should apply leeches, yet there was a time I would have thought an American firearm ban about as likely.  I remember a flight attendant asking a passenger who was sitting on the armrest of a smoking section seat to put out his cigarette and, the passenger, after a few more defiant drags, putting out the lit cigarette on the aisle carpet (while we are at it, add airborne confrontations that did not make you fear for group safety to the list of antiquated concepts).

Who would ever ask someone in a bar to put out a cigarette, or go outside on a cold night to smoke?  The smoker is addicted, he is enjoying a right he has taken for granted.  And as my friends in the tobacco industry explained to me before the bans moved out of California, smoking in bars is particularly important for women; our liberated, modern society still frowns on women who approach men in bars, but a good girl could always walk up to a guy and ask for a cigarette.  What is she going to do, went the argument, go up to some stranger and say “can I have a bite of your sandwich?”

As it turned out, the sky did not fall when Mike Bloomberg banned smoking in restaurants and bars.  The smokers in office building entryways may have looked like the cool kids in back of the gym for a little while, but a cluster of people sucking down one last one before heading up to work on a sleeting late November morning has as much style as an OTB shop.

Not only that, we got used to the new norms amazingly quickly.  The smoker in a morning elevator might as well have bird flu for the way he is treated; a decade ago, it would not even have been noticeable, since everyone reeked of smoke.

And surely, surely the Europeans would never go along with the ban.  The French, with their Gitanes and existential obsessions – would a cafe owner really enforce a restriction?

Italians, who view red lights and one-way designations as mere suggestions, just the government’s way of saying “if you would like to drive in this direction at this point in time, it might be helpful, but of course, if you don’t, by all means…” – were they going to do something about smoking?  How would a government that cannot reliably collect income taxes have any hope of balancing its affairs without excise taxes?

Yet it all came to be.

At around the time the tobacco folks were telling me the reasons a ban would never work, the American mobile phone industry was facing a challenge.  Penetration had grown to roughly 35%, but studies showed that people were embarrassed to get phone calls in front of other people.  Many left their phones off and only placed outgoing calls, some going so far as to leave it in the glove box for use along with highway flares.  More concerning to the phone companies was the social habit of stepping outside or going into a pay phone booth to make a call.  Meanwhile, Italy had double the mobile penetration, and one hypothesis (apart from the obvious fact that the landline system was atrocious) was that the more chaotic table manners welcomed the habit; you could frequently pass gatherings of Italians at outdoor tables where each person was on his phone – presumably not with the other people at his table.

At some point, the ingrained social norm tipped, and tipped quickly.  Mobile penetration grew to the point where people expected phones to be on, not off.  Calls became so frequent – and pay phone booths so rare – that people stopped going outside.  Text and mobile email crept in; while there was a stigma against talking to a third party, we had no rules for typing, and its silence made it seem fundamentally different from a call.  Grade school students, once the most isolated group from communications – in the days of pay phones, what good would it do one fourth grader to make a phone call, when none of his friends would receive it – now had phones provided by parents in the name of safety and a proud tradition of passing notes and discovering social networks.  I suspect that if that social norm had not changed, none of the trends to live in public – Facebook, Twitter, etc – would have had such amazing traction.

I wish I knew the next norm that seems solid but will prove fleeting.  One thing to look for is a strong sense of rights on the other side of the behavior.  Going up to someone and asking him to put out his cigarette used to be rude at best and, depending on the venue, the prelude to a fight.  The growth in concern about environmental tobacco smoke took some of the sting out of complaining.  Look, I’m not trying to tell you what to do, I’m just scared about what this is doing to me.

Similarly, one aspect of mobile phone etiquette that changed was the sense – no doubt encouraged by increasing penetration – that I could be missing something by not checking my phone.  A ski instructor once told me that he and his fellow instructors used to have nothing but contempt for the guy going up a lift on the phone or pulled over to the side of the run.  Then he had a client who told him at the beginning of the morning that he would get a call.  They go hard, and then at some point, as promised, the guy gets the call.  Stops, talks for half an hour, standing there on the side of the mountain.  They get on the next lift, and the instructor feels comfortable enough to give him some grief.  Client says “yeah, I know it looks ridiculous.  But the thing is, it’s only half an hour.  So either I sit in my room all day waiting for the call so I don’t look ridiculous, or I get a whole day of skiing minus half an hour.”  That made sense to the instructor, and I suspect as that view got into society, people understood that there was no reason not to combine being reached with having a good time.  It’s a lot easier to feel confident expressing your discomfort when it’s your quality of life on the line.

Finally, I cannot help but note one thing the various restrictions were not: a ban on tobacco.  Indeed, tobacco remains just about as widely available as ever (vending machines were banned), and even in a high-tax place such as New York a cigarette is only about fifty cents.  Asking someone not to smoke was not particularly aggressive; just go out the door and light up.  The guy who takes offense seems crazy; how can you begrudge compliance with such a minor imposition, when it makes other people so happy and it’s a rule?  You get your cigarette, they get their rule, move on.

Over the weekend I went to a concert at an outdoor amphitheater.  During the show, there were groups of smokers clustered on the concourses just outside the seating area, having a quick smoke before going back to their seats.  The tobacco restrictions were obeyed to the letter.

In the seats, however, large numbers of people were smoking joints.  There is no designated marijuana smoking area, and since there is no legal avenue, people who want to smoke joints do so in the anonymity of a darkened arena, not the more considerate smoking areas.  Furthermore, because everyone knows that there is no designated marijuana smoking area, no one wants to be the asshole who complains about someone smoking a joint – is it worth ruining the guy’s time, or turning a norm debate into a legal matter?

My view of drug policy is clear: I think it is a terrible mistake.  I think we should fully legalize marijuana; it is the rare policy that can simultaneously cut off the oxygen to the Mexican drug cartels, reduce our prison population and allow us to refocus on violent criminals, allow us to redeploy military and Border Patrol assets, support American business, shrink the black market, and generate much-needed tax revenue.  Beyond the big gains from legalization comes the soft power reason: humans are social animals, and there is far more leverage using group pressure than fighting it.  By making something legal but expensive, or legal but restricted in venue, we regain the high ground of making reasonable requests.