THE NEW PROHIBITIONISM

The oddest thing about the current national crusade against tobacco is not its frenzy--our culture lives from one frenzy to the next--but its selectivity. Of course tobacco is a great national killer. It deserves all the pummeling it gets. But alcohol is a great national killer too, and it has enjoyed an amazingly free ride amid the fury of the New Prohibitionism.

Joe Camel has been banished forever, but those beloved Budweiser frogs--succeeded by even cuter Budweiser lizards--keep marching along, right into the consciousness of every TV-watching kid in the country.

For 26 years television has been free of cigarette ads. Why? Because TV persuades as nothing else, and we don't want young people--inveterate TV watchers--persuaded. Yet television is bursting with exhortations to drink. TV sports in particular, a staple of adolescents, is one long hymn to the glories of beer.

And the sports-worshipping years are precisely the time that kids learn to drink. The median age at which they start drinking is just over 13. A 1990 survey found that 56% of students in Grades 5 through 12 say alcohol advertising encourages them to drink. Surprise!

Am I for Prohibition? No. But I am for a little perspective. We tend to think of the turn-of-the-century temperance movement as little blue-haired ladies trying to prevent people from having a good time on Saturday night. In fact, the temperance movement was part of a much larger progressive movement seeking to improve the appalling conditions of the urban working class. These were greatly exacerbated by rampant alcoholism that contributed to extraordinary levels of spousal and child abuse, abandonment and destitution.

Alcohol is still a cause of staggering devastation. It kills 100,000 Americans a year--not only from disease but also from accidents. In 1996, 41% of all U.S. traffic fatalities were alcohol related. It causes huge economic losses and untold suffering. Why, then, do the Bud frogs get to play the Super Bowl while Joe Camel goes the way of the Marlboro Man?

The most plausible answer is that tobacco is worse because it kills more people. Indeed it does. But 100,000 people a year is still a fair carnage. Moreover, the really compelling comparison is this: alcohol is far more deadly than tobacco to innocent bystanders. In a free society, should we not consider behavior that injures others more worthy of regulation than behavior that merely injures oneself? The primary motive for gun control, after all, is concern about homicide, not suicide.

The antitobacco folk, aware of this bedrock belief, try to play up the harm smokers cause others. Thus the attorneys general seeking billions of dollars in damages from the tobacco companies are claiming that taxpayers have been unfairly made to pay for the treatment of smoking-related illnesses.

A clever ploy. But the hardheaded truth is that premature death from smoking, which generally affects people in their late-middle and early retirement years, is an economic boon to society. The money saved on pensions and on the truly expensive health care that comes with old age--something these smokers never achieve--surely balances, if it does not exceed, the cost of treating tobacco-related diseases.

The alternative and more dramatic antitobacco tactic is to portray smoking as an assault on nonsmokers via secondhand smoke. Now, secondhand smoke is certainly a nuisance. But the claim that it is a killer is highly dubious. "The statistical evidence," reported the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service in 1994, "does not appear to support a conclusion that there are substantive health effects of passive smoking."

Unlike secondhand smoke, secondhand booze is a world-class killer. Drunk driving alone kills 17,000 people a year. And alcohol's influence extends far beyond driving: it contributes to everything from bar fights to domestic violence. One study found that 44% of assailants in cases of marital abuse had been drinking. Another study found that 60% of wife batterers had been under the influence. Whatever claims you make against tobacco, you'd have quite a time looking for cases of the nicotine-crazed turning on their wives with a butcher knife.

Moreover, look at the kinds of people alcohol kills. Drunk drivers kill toddlers. They kill teens. They kill whole families. Tobacco does not kill toddlers and teens. Tobacco strikes late. It kills, but at a very long remove in time. Its victims generally have already had their chance at life. Tobacco merely shortens life; alcohol can deprive people of it.

Still undecided which of the two poisons is more deserving of social disapprobation? Here's the ultimate test. Ask yourself this: If you knew your child was going to become addicted to either alcohol or tobacco, which would you choose?