sherid: I recall seeing a "manifesto" that described tactics to use against smokers, such as turning them into social outcasts. Do you know where a copy of that document is located? It was written long ago and seems to have been adopted by the Tobacco Control Industry.
This one that you posted is very telling, too. But the old one gives us the "Master Plan."
I think you may mean this one.
THE SPOILED IDENTITY OF SMOKERS
Smoking is a personal practice often conducted in public, social settings and redolent with diverse cultural meanings. While smoking has always had its detractors, in the past smoking in Australia connoted a seemingly unlimited range of mostly desirable attributes, framing it an enticing behaviour for those seeking to affect a variety of presentations of self, particularly youth developing their public identities. Smoking has been imbued with a wide range of significations, forged in public consciousness through advertising, cinema portrayals and other popular cultural representations and their subsequent reproduction in everyday discourse. Richard Kleins Cigarettes are sublime24 remains the most comprehensive, if often laudatory, analysis of the polysemic meanings of smoking, which for at least the first 60 years of the 20th century were overwhelmingly positive.
But with the exponential escalation of news about smoking and disease that rose from the 1960s with the publication of two historic reviews of the evidence in the UK25 and the USA,26 the meaning of smoking began to transform radically. Today, around 75% of smokers want to stop.27 With daily adult smoking prevalence at 13.9% in New South Wales,2 only 3.5% of adults therefore smoke and want to continue. In most communities in Australia, smoking is evolving into a remarkable activity, and the remarks about it are nearly all negative.
Smoking by Australian teenagers has also fallen to unprecedented levels, with only 6.2% of 17 year olds in Western Australia having smoked more than 100 cigarettes.28 This fall has occurred in the absence of any significant mass reach anti-smoking program targeted at youth,29 suggesting that the movement away from smoking by youth has been stimulated by factors far wider than ostensibly youth oriented interventions. Increasingly from the early 1980s onwards, mass reach health campaign advertising in Australia has colonised public perceptions of smoking by showing often unforgettable images of blackened lungs, amputated limbs and bedridden, regretful smokers surrounded by grieving families.30 Today, it is rare to find a magazine item or television program dealing with health improvement that does not condemn smoking.
This relentless tide of bad news about smoking has carried numerous subtexts that have compounded smokers spoiled identities, which we highlight below.
Smokers as malodourous
Smoking has long been popularly described as a filthy habit. Smoking detritus such as overflowing ashtrays, discarded tar-stained butts and the smell of rooms previously occupied by smokers have all come to connote distinct unpleasantness. Hotels commonly declare whole floors smoke free and give notice that a cleaning fee will be added to the bill if smoking occurs. Many holiday guesthouses advertise that guests must not smoke indoors. Popular anti-smoking slogans in the early 1980s said Kiss a non-smoker. Enjoy [or taste] the difference31 and Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray. Advertising appeals used to sell air fresheners, oral hygiene products and chewing gum often refer to overcoming the smell of smoking. Google searching of various expressions for malodour combined with smoking return many examples, such as 716 000 hits for smoking [and] bad breath and 384 000 for smoking [and] halitosis.
Smokers as litterers
High profile educational and clean-up anti-littering campaigns routinely highlight cigarette butts and packs as a major component of total litter.32 Australias 2.9 million smokers consume an average of 6200 annual cigarettes33 with many of these 17.98 billion butts discarded as litter. Several local governments have banned smoking on beaches, citing litter concerns. In bushfire seasons, outraged callers to radio stations describe witnessing smokers tossing lighted butts from cars into roadside bush litter. Billboard campaigns have shown photographs of charred wildlife killed by cigarette caused fires.34 Smokers are thereby framed as mindless, even criminal antisocial polluters, selfishly discarding their waste, seemingly indifferent to thesometimes seriousconsequences of their actions. In 2002, the New South Wales Premier urged the public to report .... littering from cars if you observe someone tossing a cigarette .... from a car, do not ring the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) to make a complaint about littering, ring Crime Stoppers because we regard it as a criminal offence.35
Smokers as selfish and thoughtless
Smoke-free laws were introduced because of widespread recognition that promoting courtesy and consideration to smokers was often futile in preventing smoking near others.36 When smoking was allowed in restaurants, many witnessed smokers indifference to the effect of their smoking on others and occasional aggression when asked to be more considerate. Before the law required smoking to occur outside, many smokers did not refrain from smoking around others, despite extensive health promotion efforts about the harms of second-hand smoke. Smokers were long presumed to be indifferent to their own health, but smoking also became a much-discussed symbol of indifference to others.
Smokers as unattractive and undesirable housemates
Those advertising on dating websites overwhelmingly specify that they are looking for non-smokers.37 In 1992, shared rental accommodation advertisements listed non-smoking as a requirement more than any other attribute.38 Today Australias largest internet flatmate finding site, Flatmate Finders (
Flatmate Finders Share Accommodation - 4500 House Share & Housemates), requires three mandatory descriptors: sex, age range and smoking status. As of 9 April 2007, table 1 shows that while the smoking status of advertisers mirrored the non-smoking prevalence in the community, a negligible number of advertisers named themselves as either wanting accommodation where they could smoke indoors or willing to accept indoor smokers.
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Table 1 Smoking status of advertisers for shared accommodation, Sydney, April 2007
Smokers as undereducated and a social underclass
News reports on declining smoking rates often note wide socioeconomic and educational differentials: smoking is increasingly a badge of unemployment, low socioeconomic status and low educational attainment.39 Those aspiring to upwardly mobile socioeconomic status would be unlikely to see smoking as a good fit with their ambitions.
Smokers as addicts
94.1% of Australian smokers agree that they are addicted to nicotine.40 Large budget advertising for nicotine replacement products, also seen by non-smokers, typically address their audiences as people repeatedly struggling against the bonds of addiction, and use language redolent with clinical accounts of narcotic use. Nicotine replacement nasal sprays look like apparatus normally used as decongestants and inhalers like asthmatic puffers. Their relative unpopularity compared to patches and gum perhaps suggests that few smokers relish displaying their attempts at quitting to others. Smoking has become increasingly medicalised as a condition framed as needing treatment and causing biochemical changes to neuroreceptors. News reports of developments with vaccines and nicotine antagonists further position smokers as people somehow out of volitional control, needing medication.
Smokers as excessive users of public health services
The cost of smokers excess health care use is regularly the subject of news reports following the release of economic reports.41 Recent public debate about whether smokers should be given lower priority than non-smokers in surgical waiting lists or even denied elective surgery paid for by the public health system42 have drawn on implications that smokers are somehow unwilling to assist in improving their own prognosis. Those trying to counter such harsh accounts tend to frame smokers as victims of addiction, undeserving of such opprobrium. Either way, the image of sick, helpless smokers is unflattering.
Smokers as employer liabilities
Smokers are absent from work more than non-smokers.43 For years, smokers have been a feature of urban landscapes, seen taking repeated smoking breaks outside workplaces. This has caused resentment among many non-smokers who are not accorded similar breaks. An online poll conducted by a television station in 2005 asking Should smokers work longer hours to make up for cigarette breaks? attracted 93 820 votes, with 70% agreeing (as of 17 June 2005 at
http://www.ninemsm.com.au). While many smokers do not take excess sick leave or work breaks, a nascent debate is slowly fomenting about whether employers might be legally and morally justified in refusing to hire smokers44 because of their excess absence from work. Some childminding and nanny employment agencies appear to be already exercising discrimination in this regard (for example,
Nanny, Babysitting, Babysitter, Baby sitter - Find A Babysitter).
Markers of the denormalisation of smoking and the tobacco industry -- Chapman and Freeman 17 (1): 25 -- Tobacco Control
