→ This article from the archives is part of a series celebrating the Platinum Anniversary — 70 years! — of the Voice. The first issue hit the stands on October 26, 1955. ←
Editor’s note January 6, 2026: Here at Archive Central, we thought we might take a break from the degradation of our democracy — as we are writing this, Venezuela has been made safe for American oil companies but Greenland has not yet accepted the benevolence of MAGA serfdom, and the Epstein files are a wagging tail momentarily detached from hideous tales of middle-aged horndogs — and take a look at the frolicsome 1980s.
Instead we found a typically nuanced and engagingly written Ellen Willis article from 40 years ago this week — January 7, 1986 — covering the then raging court battles over the health effects of cigarette smoking. Also under discussion was the efficacy of heavily regulating the advertising of what was, and remains, a legal product. That debate is toothsomely addressed in the photo that accompanied the article, Sylvia Plachy’s serendipitously discovered portrait of a healthy, cheerful, attractive young woman in an ad placard on the lower right, and, as if traveling through a time portal to the upper left, an elderly woman in close to the same posture, trapped in run-down gloom and also indulging her nicotine habit.
Of course it was our bad to forget, even momentarily, that during the age of Reagan those frolicking the most were the rich-and-getting-richer folks whose taxes had been slashed by the Gipper under the banner of “supply side” economics. It was the leading man from 1951’s Bedtime for Bonzo (the titular chimpanzee steals every scene she’s in) who nearly tripled the national debt, a percentage increase only surpassed since 1900 by Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, POTUSes during World Wars II and I, respectively. As Reagan, and now, Trump, have proved, tax cuts are easy; saddling your kids and grandkids and their kids with debt by not concomitantly cutting government spending is even easier. —R.C. Baker
Smoke Gets in Their Eyes
By Ellen Willis
January 7, 1986
Talk about contradictions of late capitalism: what are we to make of the current spate of suits against tobacco companies, seeking to hold them liable for deaths and injuries linked to smoking? These cases pit the rampant procorporatism of the Reagan era (tobacco, of course, is not only a major industry but a federally subsidized one) against its puritanical moral fervor. At the same time, they show how hard it is to disentangle the democratic idea of using the courts to make corporations accountable for their products’ impact on health and safety from the authoritarian impulse to litigate an “immoral” product to death in lieu of a hopeless attempt to ban it.
The suits (the one that’s gotten the most publicity unsuccessfully charged that the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company’s cigarettes caused a California insurance man to die of lung cancer and heart disease) represent a strategic leap by antismoke forces. Until now the emphasis has been on publicizing the dangers of smoking and defending nonsmokers’ right to breathe reasonably smoke-free air. The issues here are simpler, which doesn’t mean simple. As a lifelong non-smoker, some of whose best friends are smokers, I’m a moderate on nonsmokers’ rights. I’m glad smokers have been forced to be self-conscious about where and at whom they spew, and I like the no smoking rule in elevators and no smoking sections on trains and planes. But I’ve yet to be convinced that draconian laws banning smoke from public places (or segregating it in dank little cubbyholes where incorrigibles can choke on each other’s concentrated fumes) will result in any appreciable benefit to public health or comfort.
I don’t believe in the media devil theory, which continually pops up on both the right and the left to explain why people stubbornly refuse to do what’s good for them.
I think the basic impulse behind such proposals is punitive. Smoking (especially cigarette smoking) plays an important part in our collective moral fantasies: nonsmokers are, depending on your point of view, mature, responsible citizens or goody-goodies; smokers are daring rebels or weak-willed, self-indulgent delinquents. (Until recently these fantasies centered more on smokers, especially women and teenagers, than on nonsmokers; the teetotaler was our preeminent symbol of abstinence. But antismoking activism has changed all that.) To a non-smoker, the spectacle of people courting death for the sake of a dubious pleasure may be upsetting for more than rational reasons. It represents anarchy — if the ultimate threat can’t make people control themselves, what can? The righteous indignation of antismoking militants and the defiant nastiness of many smokers reflect a moral agenda of which smokers, at least, are well aware.
But so long as antismoking activism was directed mainly against individual smokers, it was destined to remain small potatoes. Antismokers who took their mission seriously had to figure out how — beyond the frustrating indirectness of advertising restrictions and compulsory warnings, but short of a futile prohibition campaign — to attack the tobacco industry. The Reynolds suit and others like it not only serve this purpose, they also change the terms of the underlying moral drama by redefining smokers as victims rather than villains. Plaintiffs are arguing that advertising manipulated them into smoking, and that the addictive properties of tobacco prevented them from quitting. They deny that 20 years of publicity about the risks of smoking or the surgeon general’s warning on cigarette packages and advertisements make them in any way responsible for their situation: for those who were already addicted the publicity came too late, and anyhow dry warnings are no match for the seductive power of the ads. In short, the tobacco company, like the heroin pusher, is the devil tempting people into a life of sin — and if the wages of sin is death, shouldn’t the tempter pay?
It’s not often you get to take the devil to court, but this is certainly the time for it. Though fundamentalist thinking about good and evil has always been a strain in the American character, it’s been a while since the opposition was so weak. One symptom is the rise of neoprohibitionism; the abhorrence that has in recent decades been reserved for outlaw drugs like heroin threatens to fix once again on tobacco and alcohol. But since the culture of secular liberalism — particularly in the courts and the media-is still powerful enough to resist open moralism, this sentiment remains latent. Instead people talk about lung cancer and drunk driving.
People stay addicted because they want what their habit provides — immediately, reliably — more than the benefits of giving it up, which are generally deferred (at least till after the withdrawal period) and often abstract (like lowering your chances of getting cancer in 20 years).
I don’t mean to be dismissive. Cigarettes do kill an appalling number of people, and so do drunks on the road. Making smokers face what they’re doing to themselves, redefining drunk driving as a serious offense rather than a benign folk crime will surely save lives. But concern with health and safety, alone, does not explain why these issues have surfaced with such intensity right now. The moral subtext has already influenced how these concerns are expressed, and will help shape their impact on public policy.
A blatant example is the political response to statistics showing a disproportionate number of drunk drivers under 21. The federal government has pressured most of the states into raising the legal drinking age, but so far as I know no one has suggested raising the legal driving age, which would be more to the point: it’s cars that kill, not cans of beer, and teenagers, drunk or sober, have more accidents than older drivers. As for the tobacco liability suits, their essential premise is that education makes no difference, that people are incapable of taking responsibility for their risky or self-destructive behavior. And their prohibitionist intent parallels that of the antipornography “sex discrimination” ordinances; they mean to exploit the fact that the power to sue is the power to destroy.
It’s not that I feel sorry for the tobacco industry. If I had my way, the growers’ subsidies would end tomorrow (dream on). But the product they sell is legal, and the social consensus is that it should remain so, despite its well-publicized consequences. Which means the community agrees — whether on libertarian or simply on practical grounds — that in this instance, at least, people have a right to choose their poison. It makes no sense to turn around and say, in effect, that the sellers of the poison are liable for damages because the buyers, however well-informed, have no real choice.
I don’t believe in the media devil theory, which continually pops up on both the right and the left to explain why people stubbornly refuse to do what’s good for them. Ads portraying smoking as glamorous and sexy may influence people’s attitudes and fantasies about smoking, but they don’t force anyone to light up; lack of advertising hasn’t hurt the marijuana and cocaine markets. In any case, people have been smoking and chewing on various leaves for centuries. And the popular view of addiction — to nicotine or anything else — as passive enslavement to the diabolical pusher is equally simpleminded. Addiction is an active process, though rarely an unambivalent one. People take drugs for plea-sure-including the pleasure of experiencing new sensations or states of consciousness — and for relief of physical or psychic pain. (This, quite aside from any health considerations, is anathema to a culture that’s suspicious of any pleasurable sensation not strictly necessary for reproduction and is always on the lookout lest someone “escape,” even for a moment, the earnest claims of “reality.”) If they find that the pleasure or relief gets too important, that it fills a vacuum and helps them get through otherwise impossible days, they may come to depend on it and seek it compulsively. The process is the same, it seems to me, whether the dependence is on drugs, or sex, or shopping, or (my own favored jones) food.
Physiological craving, in itself, does not keep people hooked. It’s not true that addicts can’t quit. Smokers quit all the time — some even permanently. Heroin addicts often quit and suffer through withdrawal just to get their habits down to financially manageable size. People stay addicted because they want what their habit provides — immediately, reliably — more than the benefits of giving it up, which are generally deferred (at least till after the withdrawal period) and often abstract (like lowering your chances of getting cancer in 20 years). To complicate matters, the desire to risk or play with death has its own powerful appeal; some people indulge it with drugs, others go in for skydiving or fighting wars.
Of course, the anxiety, boredom, and self-hatred that lead to suicidal choices have social as well as personal meaning. The diabolical pusher is a scapegoat for the larger failures of the social system as well as a projection of our own internal demons. But scapegoating is always diversionary and dishonest. The spectacle of cancer/emphysema/heart disease victims taking the devil to court reminds me of a story my father tells about his high school days. A friend of his begged him for a loan of five dollars to visit a prostitute. My father was reluctant, but his friend pleaded so hard he finally gave in. Afterward the guy refused to pay him back on the grounds that he had lent the money for immoral purposes. ❖