|
COPYRIGHT 2002 Cato Institute
SMOKING IS BY FAR THE LARGEST SINGLE risk that most people take. Perhaps in part because of that prominence, smoking has been the target of a wide variety of regulations and legal actions. The controversy over tobacco products is at least four centuries old, but it has been largely over the past half-century that the diverse wave of public policy initiatives against tobacco products has emerged.
Within a standard economic framework of consumer choice, there would seem to be little impetus for broadly based government efforts to discourage smoking. The risks of smoking are largely borne by the consumers who choose those products. To the extent that smoking harms others, the externalities can often be addressed through focused policy measures such as non-smoking areas.
Over the past decade, cigarettes have been under increasing assault on two fronts. First, there have been claims that the underlying rationality of smoking decisions is in doubt and that smokers need to be protected from themselves. Second, policy concerns over exposures to tobacco smoke escalated as government agencies suggested that smoking does in fact impose considerable health harms on others.
Many anti-smoking advocates would like to prohibit smoking altogether. The prohibitionist concerns may stem from religious fervor, as some have long viewed smoking and drinking as evil. Other prohibitionist concerns stem from a sense of paternalism. The demographic distribution of smoking is more concentrated among the less well educated, such as those in blue-collar occupations rather than the white-collar professionals who tend to shape public policy. Given that policymakers themselves tend not to smoke, they often view any decision to smoke as mistaken. In their view, some form of irrationality must account for the fact that smokers' choices are different from what the policymakers would choose to do.
DO PEOPLE KNOW THE RISKS OF SMOKING?
It was not until the 1964 report by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare that the U.S. government announced a consensus that smoking does significantly increase the risk of lung cancer. Press coverage of the report was tremendous, and the U.S. Congress required that, beginning in 1966, cigarette packs had to bear on-product warnings. The mandatory warning for a consumer product was truly a watershed event; before that time, warnings were primarily restricted to products that posed imminent dangers that typically were fatal. The widespread warnings that we now take for granted simply did not exist. Rather, cigarettes were singled out as a high-risk commodity that was dangerous even if used in the manner intended by the manufacturer.
Policy efforts to inform smokers of the hazards of smoking did not end with the 1966 warnings. There have been two revisions of the cigarette warnings, and the Surgeon General and other public health officials have continued to publicize the risks of smoking over the past four decades.
Given the substantial publicity that smoking risks have received, it would be quite surprising if people had simply not gotten the message about the dangers of smoking. Indeed, even in the mid-1960s, Dr. Francis L. Blasingame, the executive vice president of the American Medical Association, observed in written testimony to the Federal Trade Commission that there seemed to be little need for the new warnings: "With respect to cigarets [sic], cautionary labeling cannot be anticipated to serve the public interest with any particular degree of success.
The health hazards of excessive smoking have been well publicized for more than 10 years and are common knowledge. Labeling will not alert even the young cigarete [sic] smoker to any risks to which he is not already aware."
Somewhat later in the 1 960s, Dr. Daniel Horn voiced a similar sentiment in his capacity as director of the National Clearinghouse for Smoking and Health. Dr. Horn, who in his work with his co-author Dr. Cuyler Hammond was primarily responsible for establishing the link between smoking and cancer, observed, "You could stand on the rooftop and shout 'Smoking is dangerous' at the top of your lungs and you would not be telling anyone anything they did not already know."
Overestimation Public knowledge of the risks of smoking is consequently not a recent development. Research on other forms of risk indicates that people tend to overestimate highly publicized risks. Given the tremendous publicity that smoking risks have received, one would expect that people would tend to overestimate the risks of smoking rather than underestimate the dangers.
The pattern of overestimation is in fact what we find. I have examined detailed data on individual risk beliefs based on national surveys from 1985 and 1997, as well as regional surveys that Iran in 1991 and 1998. The results show a consistent pattern over time. For concreteness, I will focus on the 1997 national results. Consider first the risks of lung cancer, which scientists have pegged as being from 0.06 to 0.13 for an average smoker. The public assesses the lung cancer risk to smokers as being 0.47 -- a figure that dwarfs scientists' estimates of the extent of the risk.
The perceived overall risk of death from smoking also exceeds actual scientific estimates, but not to the same extent. The public's assessment of the risk of premature mortality from smoking is 0.51. That figure exceeds the available estimates of the death risk based on reports by the Surgeon...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
