Winning the War on Tobacco-and Public Cynicism, Too.

Abstract

O ne of my favorite scenes from “All The President’s Men,” the 1976 dramatization of Watergate and The Washington Post, comes early in the film—when the Post’s Bob Woodward (played by Robert Redford) confronts his colleague Carl Bernstein (played by Dustin Hoffman) for surreptitiously rewriting an article. When I saw that clip recently, I saw something I’d never really noticed before. Bernstein is sitting at his desk and taking drags from a cigarette. You wouldn’t see anything like that today—not in the real-life Washington Post newsroom and not in almost any other public indoor environment around the country. That’s because local, state, and federal governments have eradicated indoor smoking from just about everywhere except bars and restaurants. It’s only a matter of time before smoking is gone from those places, too. Roughly two-thirds of US states have already banned smoking in eating and drinking establishments, and within the outliers, which are mostly in the deep South, big cities are taking action on their own. The spread of indoor smoking bans is just one visible byproduct of America’s war on tobacco, a war that has been going on for more than 50 years. By any reasonable account, the forces fighting tobacco have been winning. As of 2014, just 16.8% of American adults smoked, down from 42.4% in 1965.1 All signs point to that number going down more in the future. Of course this war is far from over. Smoking is still more prevalent among the poor. In many developing countries, where US companies are increasingly focusing their efforts, smoking is actually on the rise. Big Tobacco has to look abroad precisely because selling cigarettes here has become harder and harder. It’s an excellent case study in the efficacy of public health campaigns, and maybe in the efficacy of government itself. And yet it gets