The Politics of Tobacco

By Hugh Sidey

Jimmy Carter's sentimental journey through the tobacco lands of North Carolina the other day was a tonic for him. But despite the cheers, the line he followed took him right down the old route of confusion.

Carter was almost poetic when he talked about "the beautiful quality of your tobacco." He grew eloquent in describing his tobacco-farming ancestors, the "backbreaking labor... honest work." He mentioned God and all the church-going families, and finally he was moved to suggest that there was no incompatibility between promoting good health and promoting a good tobacco crop. He even offered the idea that the Federal Government would continue its research "to make the smoking of tobacco even more safe than it is today."

Some of those 29 million people who have given up cigarettes clutched momentarily at the hint that smoking might be safe after all and their valiant struggle was unnecessary. The Tobacco Institute, lobby for the industry, declared, "We could not have written it [Carter's statement] better than that." And almost as if on cue, Gio Batta Gori, a high official of the Government-financed National Cancer Institute, announced a short-term study showing that some of the new cigarettes were so low in toxins that they could be smoked in "tolerable" numbers without appreciable bad effects on average smokers.

At the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which runs the antismoking campaign, people muttered a few words of sympathy for a President caught up in politics and went about their job of urging the nation to give up cigarettes. But when the new report on "tolerable" cigarette smoking hit the front pages, both an alarmed Surgeon General and Gori's boss at NCI went public to repudiate Gori and make sure everyone understood that cigarette smoking was still not considered safe. The federal antismoking campaign thus rolled on, expecting an extra $10 million from Carter's new budget.

The anatomy of this whole episode is instructive. North Carolina was a state important to Carter's political rise, and it is considered pivotal to his future. He stands low there now in part because of the Government's antismoking drive. So it was natural to target North Carolina early in the President's plans for political rehabilitation. The tactics called for praise of tobacco farming, a promise of continued price supports. That North Carolina's tobacco somehow ends up in those cigarettes that Carter's Government is trying to keep people from using was buried beneath some good-natured kidding about HEW Secretary Joe Califano.

While Carter may have helped his standing in North Carolina, there was some question about what effect all this will have in the rest of the country, where three quarters of the people do not smoke, and where 80% of the 53 million cigarette smokers, says HEW, would like to quit if they could. Back in Washington, Nonsmoker Carter has put his Administration firmly behind preventive medicine. The evidence amassed by HEW stands like an Everest on this health horizon. Cigarette smoking is considered by federal authorities the biggest acquired cause of poor health. They claim that 320,000 people died prematurely last year because of cigarette smoking. Beyond that the American Medical Association has just released the results of nearly 800 studies conducted over the past 14 years that add up to one of the broadest and most damning indictments of smoking yet. Even though financed by the tobacco industry, it concludes that in addition to the well-documented dangers of cancer, cigarette smoking "plays an important role" in the development of chronic lung diseases, is a "grave danger" to anybody with a disease of the coronary arteries, may produce peptic ulcers and make smokers more susceptible to infections. Next January the Surgeon General will celebrate the 15th anniversary of the first report on smoking with a massive new report summarizing everything learned over these years. It is expected to give the antismoking campaign another big push.

In the middle, once again, is Jimmy Carter, urging his Government to spread the gospel against cigarette smoking but at the same time telling the good folks who grow the leaf how nice it is that they have such a good crop. On the cigarette, for the moment, Carter stands for just about nothing.

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