Thank you for banning smoking

So says Mythili Bhusnurmath, praising Anbumani Ramadoss, the man who is (unfortunately) “out in the cold.” Unfortunately, she’s not being sarcastic-

Anbumani Ramadoss, former health minister is out in the cold. Unsung! Unlamented! But there are two things for which the maverick minister will long be remembered: the zeal with which he fought the All India Institute of Medical Sciences director Dr P Venugopal and the equal zeal with which he campaigned against tobacco consumption. If the first showed him at his petty best, the second showed a surprisingly public-spirited side that few expect to see in our political class.

While his almost personal vendetta with Venugopal has been forgotten by all save, perhaps, Venugopal and Ramadoss, his other legacy, the battle against tobacco consumption, lives on. “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones”, lamented Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. But for once the bard was wrong! Sometimes the good does live on, as in the case of Ramadoss.

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According to the Advocacy Forum for Tobacco Control, smoking kills nine lakh Indians every year. To the extent these are in large part avoidable deaths, it is incumbent on government to use whatever means at its disposal, short of an outright ban, to curtail the consumption of tobacco.

Ramadoss as an epitome of the good. I am flabbergasted. He, no doubt, will be flattered.

Our benevolent State

The Supreme Court is deciding on a petition that challenges the forty-fourth amendment to our Constitution which deleted the “right to property” – article 19(1)(f). I had written about it, among other things, a couple of days back.

The petition is irrelevant. So is any possible favorable decision. And the answer lies in the petition itself-

Though the 1978 constitutional amendment was to permit government to acquire land for public purpose without being dragged to courts by big zamindars, the alteration of the status of the right to property never intended to harm small landholders, the petition stated.

Egalitarian constitutions have no integrity of their own. So they can be made to take any form and shape that the Will of the public demands. What is the guarantee that some socialist government that is elected in ten years time won’t have some new scheme up its sleeve; last time the targets were the zamindars – land lords, this time it could be anyone who owns more than one house? Our constitution is DEFECTIVE BY DESIGN. It cannot be repaired, or salvaged, or saved. A free India needs a constitution that is based on the idea of freedom from the State, not subservience to it. But the oldest question in the world will continue to plague us nonetheless. Who will watch the watchmen? Who will provide the guarantee that a constitution that has an integrity of its own will always be adhered to? I don’t think anyone can.

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From the Times of India again, comes the story of corruption in the income tax department. the CBI has arrested an ITO, an ACIT, and a CA. Naturally, other income tax officials are not happy. But this case is hardly surprising, as I have said before. I don’t know how many of you are aware of an incident CNN-IBN reported a couple of years ago where confidential information provided to the IT department “somehow” ended up with the Bombay underworld and income tax filers received threats from them. Our benevolent State at work.

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Another report – the cops will throw you in jail if you smoke imported cigarettes that don’t carry a warning label-

After banning smoking in public places, the Mumbai police have now decided to crack down on imported cigarettes whose packets do not carry the statutory warning. People caught selling or smoking such cigarettes will be fined. Cops also plan to request the courts to send repeat offenders behind bars.

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WHAT THE LAW SAYS
* One cannot sell or smoke cigarettes of foreign brands that do not have the statutory warning, telling people of the dangers of smoking.

THE PUNISHMENT
* Penalty for the first offence is a fine of Rs 1,000.
* The maximum punishment is a prison term of three years.

So, the State assumes that unless cigarette cases carry a warning, people have no way of knowing that smoking is injurious to health. Further, to save you from injuring yourself from lack of knowledge, the State is ready to send you to an already overcrowded prison for a period of three years. Our benevolent State at work, again.

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Murray Rothbard said-

“Instead of a bumbling and inefficient tool of society, the radical [libertarian] sees the State itself, in its very nature, as coercive, exploitative, parasitic, and hence profoundly antisocial. The State is, and always has been, the great single enemy of the human race, its liberty, happiness, and progress.”

To that I will add Voltaire’s “Crush the infamy!”

Megalomaniac

India’s billion plus population means everything we do or encounter will automatically find its way into the record books. And that’s what has happened with the nonsensical Ramadossian anti-smoking crusade – its now the world’s biggest public smoking ban. Comments on this Churumuri poll show what most people feel about it. There are a few voices of sanity (including my extremely cynical one), but they are, well, few.

The Pioneer editor Chandan Mitra, the one who demanded that Swaminathan Aiyar, Vir Sanghvi and others who wrote about the secession of Kashmir be tried for treason, writes against the smoking ban-

Besides jihadi terror, another kind of terror has just been let loose on urban India. Both the police and vigilante squads are on the prowl to satiate the megalomania of the Union Health Minister. I can’t smoke in my office premises, not even on the terrace or balcony leave alone a secluded private chamber. I can’t go to a bar to enjoy a couple of drinks with friends, nor can I light up in a restaurant while I wait for food to be served or after a satisfying meal. It is still not clear whether hotels will be allowed to earmark some smoking rooms, but I am certain that Adolf Hitler’s worthy Indian follower will think of some devious plan to prosecute hotels if they do.

I am not comparing Ramadoss to Hitler in jest. Unlike his peers in an age where smoking was the norm rather than the exception (Allied leaders Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt and Josef Stalin were all smokers), the German dictator pathologically despised the habit. Although he did not go quite so far as Ramadoss, the Nazis banned smoking at party meetings and told members to aggressively “persuade” smokers to abandon the addiction. A massive publicity blitz was launched by the Nazi Government to make people aware of the evils of smoking. How miserably Hitler failed in his mission is apparent from the fact that Germany still has rather liberal anti-smoking laws. Earlier this year, the State of Bavaria scrapped the regulation prohibiting smoking in bars and public places, citing both economic and practical reasons.

Ramadoss is a megalomaniac – no question about it; he is the nanny paternalists have always dreamed about. And after letting the law loose on smokers, he now wants to place a ban on tobacco products, but after providing “alternative employment” to the thousands of tobacco farmers. So till this unachievable goal is met, the sin taxes will keep on piling and farmers can grow the crop that “kills”. Nothing contradictory about the whole thing, right? If a ban is indeed imposed, however, the trade will go underground, prices will rise, the quality will go down, and people will be harassed just like marijuana and opium users are (BJP leader Jaswant Singh had to face the heat after being charged under the dangerous Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act).

As it is, with the present smoking ban, some cops might find it more lucrative to slap challans (or not slap them rather) on smokers instead of tackling other crimes. To their credit, some police departments have complained about having better things to do than babysitting smokers – we don’t want a repeat of the Maharashtra fiasco where RR Patil sent his cops out to grab bar girls, and a few days later bombs went off in local trains around Mumbai. Stretching things too far I accept, but shouldn’t the police concentrate on tackling violent crimes instead of harassing couples fondling each other, or swindling college kids with “pictures” on their mobile phones?

There could have been a very simple answer to the whole mess – privatize all public property. So owners will set the rules on what is and what is not permissible on their premises. Business men who smoke can even decide against hiring non-smoking crusaders – equal opportunity employer status be damned! The only problem? The Indian Government does not respect private property – how else would you explain restaurants, pubs, bars, private offices etc being termed as “public space” or “public” whatever? And Sauvik Chakraverti puts his finger on this very problem.

Update: Fixed minor errors.

The right to smoke

Anbumani Ramadoss will never give up on his crusade of forcing people to do things that they are simply not willing to do. The notification that bans smoking in “public places” is part of the same agenda. But it would be wrong to place the entire blame at his feet. The undemocratic Indian public and the framers of the Indian constitution are the guilty parties here. India is a perfect example of mob rule – what the majority demands becomes the law. The fact that the anti-smoking law will be implemented from October 2nd, Gandhi’s birthday, shows that these people are not ashamed of using Gandhi’s name in this perverse enterprise.

Gandhi, although he believed in socialism, and had his own view of ethics, stood for non-violence and his level of tolerance was astounding – something today’s Indian will neither understand nor practice-

“Gandhi is always on the progressive side of things,” India’s Socialist leader, Jai Prakash Narain, told me only a few days before the murder. “Gandhi is our mightiest force against all the most backward elements in Indian society.”

Like Marx, Gandhi hated the state and wished to eliminate it, and he told me he considered himself “a philosophical anarchist.” But he was a practical socialist in that he never opposed the state as a necessary instrument in achieving social democracy, though democracy as he understood it is certainly not to be confused with the kind of police state ruled by the Kremlin…

“Strictly speaking,” Gandhi once said, “all amassing or hoarding of wealth above and beyond one’s legitimate requirements is theft. There would be no occasion for theft, and therefore no thieves, if there were wise regulations of wealth and absolute social justice.”

He wanted social ownership of large industry combined with a co-operative agrarian economy and small industrial co-operatives such as those in China that I had told him about. But he wanted the state to take over by peaceful means, and he “would not dispossess moneyed men by force, but would invite their co-operation in the process of conversion to state ownership. There are no pariahs in society. Whether they are millionaires or paupers, the two are sores of the same disease.”

And that is why while Gandhi looks down from the walls of our courts, police stations and government buildings, injustice and the application of intolerable coercion is the standard practice, all in the name of upholding the law. There is no law greater than natural law. Any law that is based on whims and that reduces an individual to a helpless beggar is perverse. But that is how our system works – that is how democracy works.

ITC and the Indian Hotels Association have challenged the ban in the Supreme Court arguing “that the notification makes no distinction between private space and public space.” And they are right. But I am not too optimistic when it comes to the Supreme Court. It comes up with some of the strangest decisions because it is working within the confines of a self-contradictory constitution. Here is a comment a reader leaves on the Times of India website-

Is it just me or does anyone else feel that the best seats in restaurants are ‘always’ reserved for smokers? All the attention for passively engaging death to those that do not smoke. Perhaps lets just forget the candle light and breathe clean air! Ban the smoke – Just once, Ramadoss you are right! Lets ban the butts!

Its their restaurant and they have the right to allocate seats any which way they want. This person probably assumes that restaurants are some kind of public service and that they are living on people’s charity.

The answer to the argument is very simple. If you don’t want to smoke, don’t patronize restaurants that don’t practice segregation – that is the free market way of approaching things. People don’t visit non-vegetarian restaurants if they are not-interested in non-veg food, do they? But this solution will not be acceptable because it is not sadistic enough.

The perverse among us Indians (and they are in a majority) like to see the virtual blood flowing when free men are cut down using legal swords – its like watching a gladiatorial combat. That is what the ban is all about. The law is not a product of ignorance but one of pure malice. And giving those who clamor for it the benefit of the doubt is an insult to those who believe in freedom.

“Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms,” Aristotle said. India is a republic in name, an ochlocracy in practice and is merrily on its way to a despotic future. Come to think of it, the same can be said of every country in the world.

Up In Smoke

On Saturday, BBC World ran a program, Bannatyne Takes On Big Tobacco: This World (its been telecast in the UK couple of weeks back), which raised serious questions on marketing strategies followed by British American Tobacco (BAT) in developing countries like Mauritius, Malawi and Nigeria – particularly the targeting of minors. You can read about its contents in brief here. And BAT’s response here. One small item which finds no mention in either of the reports is the story of a boy (he is 10-12 years old) who makes his living selling cigarettes. He also smokes about 4 sticks a day, but since he is illiterate, he cannot read the “injurious to health” warnings that governments force tobacco companies to carry on cigarette packets. He is puffing away without being aware of the risks involved.

Most people are aware of the risks of smoking cigarettes – it can kill (my grandfather, a case in point, died of throat cancer); and the risks involved in “passive smoking”; and the addictive nature of nicotine which makes it very difficult for adults to quit the habit, leave alone children. That is why people in developed countries are giving up on the habit. And so tobacco companies are trying to encash on “uninformed” demand from developing countries before common sense catches up there. However, it would be unfair to give the entire credit of falling cigarette sales to consumers, since restrictive laws have played their own part.

Marie Brenner’s 1996 Vanity Fair article, The Man Who Knew Too Much (the basis for Michael Mann’s 1999 film The Insider), provides an in depth account of the workings of Big Tobacco. Consider this statement attributed to Jeffrey Wigand, the whistle blower who had worked with Brown & Williamson, subsidiary of BAT – “you have to look at the age somebody starts smoking. If you don’t get them before they are 18 or 20, you never get them,” – and it becomes clear why youngsters are a big market.

A lot of people might be angry at such practices – how dare they target poor kids in Africa! We need tougher laws! Etc etc. But this reaction is an emotional one – and has no sound basis. There is another danger to such blind reactions – a slow and steady movement towards an authoritarian state. Before I move on to the whats and the whys, consider this quote that was on a button Wigand once wore – IF YOU THINK EDUCATION IS EXPENSIVE, TRY IGNORANCE.

Informed choice
Informed choice does not mean that the seller has to provide you with the information. It means you should know what you are getting into. Governments exist to protect people from other people, and not to protect them from themselves. Whether I am in the market for a prostitute, a pancake, a packet of cigarettes, or for potassium cyanide, it is my choice, and therefore my headache what I intend to do with them. Each one has its own risks, and the government has no business interfering in the transaction. Unfortunately, while the editor of the Guinness Book of World Records understands the balance between choice and risk when he says – “if you put your life at risk, then fine; if you put someone else’s life at risk, not fine,” governments, don’t.

Choice – informed choice – is the strongest argument that can be used to counter any government action that subverts a free market. And banning tobacco product advertising, regulating growth and sale of tobacco in its various forms, and forcing establishments to follow laws prohibiting smoking are subversive actions. If a television channel or newspaper or comic book decides to run tobacco adverts, it is their choice. Responsible parents who have children of impressionable age will immediately stop subscribing to them – the market at work. A tobacco farmer grows tobacco because there is a demand for his produce. The moment demand plummets, he will move over to some other alternative – the market at work. If a restaurant or bar wants to have a smoking area, or they want to become 100% smoking establishments, it is their prerogative. Customers patronizing them can make a choice, If they choose to enter an environment that they know is smoke-filled, it is their choice. The market works, again.

Government intervention
The kid who sells cigarettes and smokes them too, without knowing the risks is an unfortunate case. But that does not in any way give governments the authority to play around with the market. Laws cannot be based on whims, and they cannot be based on emotions. If these were sufficient reason enough to justify action, why have laws in the first place – the Salem witch hunt trials and similar kangaroo courts worked just as fine.

While a lot of big businesses, particularly those which we pejoratively address using the adjective Big do play hardball, governments are not any less guilty. They are infact the deadliest trustees of unimaginable power ever invented by man. Governments (and parliament) have the power to make laws and hence when you deal with them, you are always playing against an opponent who uses loaded dice. And the US government is one of the worst when it comes to such tactics. Consider the decade old US Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, which on the face of it probably is the biggest extortion in world history, and government was party to it.

The US government spends hundreds of billions of dollars on subsidizing health care costs. Many people who took advantage of the subsidy fell prey to tobacco related diseases. So various US state governments banded together and sued the tobacco companies who then signed an agreement to pay out 206 billion US dollars as penalties over a period of time. But things are not that simple. A few state governments changed their laws so that tobacco companies could no longer defend themselves in court. Lawyers who engineered the deal pocketed fees in tens of billions of dollars for work that is suspect. The payment over a period of time is being recovered by raising cigarette prices – basically a tax. What did the tobacco companies get in return? A virtual monopoly. Read Walter Olson’s January 2000 Reason Magazine article Puff, the Magic Settlement for more information.

How does this help the consumer in anyway? It does not. The addict will always be smoking, paying high prices all the time. Some will quit, some will die, the others will go on. The tobacco companies now have a government sanctioned monopoly. And governments have plenty of money to fund their brain dead schemes; the sale of tobacco is controlled so that vocal sections of the population are mollified, but it is not banned altogether because it is a huge revenue source. Government intervention helps? Whom?

Rise of the Nanny State
This BBC report presents a worldwide picture of government attitude towards the “smoking menace”. And it is not a good sign. The “nanny virus” is spreading. In New York, restaurants are now compelled to post calorie counts on menus. So consumers can now know how many calories they are taking in. But here’s the thing – if I really want to know about it, I will do my own research, won’t I? If people feel governments are justified in looking into matters concerning their citizens personal health, surely they won’t mind if governments introduce mandatory morning yoga classes. All citizens who don’t make an appearance should be fined heavily. After all governments are doing it for their own good. The “calorie count” law is not the only thing. Governments are also into “ban the trans fat” game. And things are only going to get worse.

You may not like smoking cigarettes, or drinking alcohol, or any of those things. But if you consider your dislike for them or the harmful nature of those products reasons enough to ask for their regulation or ban, you dismantle yet another barrier that protects you from the Government. And once Government enters a territory, it does not cede control. If you have read the Mahabharata or seen its TV adaptation, you know that Bhishma fought against his favorite grandsons because he had pledged his allegiance to the throne of Hastinapur. Now you probably understand why he did what he did – it was a matter of principle.