Much effort and many resources have been expended in enacting smoking bans for private businesses catering to adult-only clientele. Although the arguments in favor of bans leave much to be desired, many people believe that banning smoking in the hospitality industry is justified.What is puzzling is the lack of attention on banning smoking around children in cars, houses, and other private property. After all, if such prohibitions are justified for autonomous adults, then they must be for non-autonomous minors as well. (...) A good case can be made out for banning smoking around children in the best interests of their health. (shrink)

While there are legal regulations prohibiting smoking in indoor areas in Turkey, there is none for outdoor areas. Many non-smokers are exposed to environmental tobacco smoking against their will in Turkey. Numerous research efforts have documented the fact that environmental tobacco smoke poses risks to human health because it pollutes the environment by releasing dangerous chemicals into the air that non-smokers breathe. This means that tobacco smoking poses risks to a safe environment and people’s (...) lives. People have a right to the environment, as guaranteed by the Turkish Constitution. Since Stockholm Declaration, many countries have recognized that people have a right to a safe environment or that a safe environment is essential to the enjoyment of human rights, including Turkey. However, how non-smokers perceive of the impacts of environmental tobacco smoke on the enjoyment of the right to the environment enshrined within the Turkish legal system has not been studied to date. Accordingly, this research aims to explore how issues relating to environmental tobacco smoke can be approached from an environmental human rights perspective. To achieve this purpose, a qualitative case study was conducted in Istanbul. The results of this analysis show that non-smokers do not enjoy the right to the clean environment guaranteed by the Turkish Constitution due to the ETS. (shrink)

The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. These scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers. -/- Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of (...) high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly-some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it. -/- Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era. (shrink)

It is axiomatic that tobacco smoking is hazardous to health. The statistics are well documented and often very grim. For example, the 2008 World Health Organization Report on the global tobacco epidemic presented the following statistics: a hundred million people died of tobacco-related diseases globally in the 20th century; there are approximately over five million tobacco-related deaths every year; and an estimated one billion could die of tobacco-related diseases in this 21st century.Significantly, no other risky, (...) self-indulgent addictive behaviors such as cocaine abuse directly endanger bystanders as much as cigarette smoking or tobacco use endangers nonsmokers through secondhand tobacco smoke or inhaled environmental tobacco smoke. Environmental tobacco smoke comprises sidestream smoke and mainstream smoke. About 85 percent of environmental tobacco smoke is sidestream smoke, while the remainder is mainstream smoke. (shrink)

This article considers how legislators should respond to evidence that identifies a common and widely accepted parental practice as a potential source of harm to children, using domestic exposure to environmental tobacco smoke as a test case. It is claimed that children are parties to the Harm Principle, and that the State has an obligation to protect children from exposure to harm. Parental prerogative is limited by the need to avoid harming children. That said, there is considerable (...) uncertainty about what is harmful to children. Several sources of uncertainty, both empirical and conceptual, are explored, in order to demonstrate the complexity of the task legislators face. Seven considerations that are relevant to decisions about legislation of harmful parental practices are outlined, and these considerations are then employed to assess the case in favour of legislating to prohibit the exposure of children to environmental tobacco smoke in domestic settings. (shrink)

Most of the discussion in bioethics and health policy concerning social responsibility for health has focused on society’s obligation to provide access to healthcare. While ensuring access to healthcare is an important social responsibility, societies can promote health in many other ways, such as through sanitation, pollution control, food and drug safety, health education, disease surveillance, urban planning and occupational health. Greater attention should be paid to strategies for health promotion other than access to healthcare, such as environmental and (...) public health and health research.Lifestyle plays a major role in most of the illnesses in industrialised nations.1 Six of the 10 leading factors contributing to the global burden of disease are lifestyle related: unsafe sex, high blood pressure, tobacco use, alcohol use, high cholesterol and obesity.2 Lifestyle-related illnesses also contribute to the rising costs of healthcare. Spending on healthcare accounts for about 16% of the gross domestic product in the USA, or US$1.9 trillion.3 Although smoking has declined steadily there since the 1960s, smoking-related medical expenses are still about US$75.5 billion per year.4 Obesity, which has been climbing in the past two decades, accounts for about US$75 billion in healthcare costs there each year.5 Alcoholism and drug addiction in the USA account for annual healthcare costs of about US$22.5 billion and US$12 billion, respectively.6,7 Federal government spending on healthcare relating to HIV/AIDS is over US$13 billion per year.8Given the well-documented relationship between lifestyle, disease burden and healthcare costs, it makes economic and medical sense to hold individuals morally responsible for their health-related choices. While this view has a great deal of intuitive appeal, it also faces numerous objections.9–12 First, holding individuals entirely responsible for their own health conflicts with medicine’s obligation to treat the sick and society’s obligation …. (shrink)

In August 2001, the Israeli Ministry of Health issued its Limitation of Smoking in Public Places Order, categorically forbidding smoking in hospitals. This forced the mental health system to cope with the issue of smoking inside psychiatric hospitals. The main problem was smoking by compulsorily hospitalized psychiatric patients in closed wards. An attempt by a psychiatric hospital to implement the tobacco smoking restraint instruction by banning the sale of cigarettes inside the hospital led to the development of a black (...) market and cases of patient exploitation in return for cigarettes. This article surveys the literature dealing with smoking among psychiatric patients, the role of smoking in patients and the moral dilemmas of taking steps to prevent smoking in psychiatric hospitals. It addresses the need for public discussion on professional caregivers’ dilemmas between their commitment to uphold the law and their duty to act as advocates for their patients’ rights and welfare. (shrink)

A spate of legislations prohibiting cigarette smoking in enclosed public spaces, mainly on grounds of public health protection, recently swept across cities around the world. This is in tandem with a raft of increasingly restrictive national laws that emerged on the back of the ratification of the WHO Framework for Tobacco Control by more than one 168 countries in 2005. The central debate on the increasingly restrictive tobacco laws revolves on the extent to which public health interests justification (...) should ground political intervention in a private right as basic as tobacco smoking, which interestingly is often lumped in the food and beverage category. The pertinent legal and ethical questions therefore are the following: Is or should there be a general unrestricted right to tobacco smoking? If there were such a right, should public health or ethical considerations trump private right to smoke in enclosed public spaces? And if public health interests were so paramount, should they go farther and ground tobacco smoking proscription in all private and public spheres? Using ethical principles and rights-based arguments, the paper critically examines the legal and ethical ramifications of public health justification for tobacco smoking proscription in enclosed public spaces. (shrink)

Involving children in research studies requires obtaining parental permission. A school-based intervention to delay/prevent waterpipe use for 7th and 8th graders in Qatar was developed, and parental permission requested. Fifty three percent (2308/4314) of the parents returned permission forms; of those 19.5% of the total (840/4314) granted permission. This paper describes the challenges to obtaining parental permission. No research to date has described such challenges in the Arab world.

The tobacco industry has used corporate social responsibility tactics to improve its corporate image with the public, press, and regulators who increasingly have grown to view it as a merchant of death. There is, however, an intractable problem that corporate social responsibility efforts can mask but not resolve: the tobacco industry's products are lethal when used as directed, and no amount of corporate social responsibility activity can reconcile that fundamental contradiction with ethical corporate citizenship. This study's focus is (...) to better understand the tobacco industry's corporate social responsibility efforts and to assess whether there has been any substantive change in the way it does business with regard to the issue of exposure to secondhand smoke. The results show that the industry has made no substantial changes and in fact has continued with business as usual. Although many of the tobacco companies' tactics traditionally had been defensive, they strove for a way to change to a more offensive strategy. Almost without exception, however, their desire to appear to be good corporate citizens clashed with their aversion to further regulation and jeopardizing their legal position, perhaps an irreconcilable conflict. Despite the switch to offense, in 2006 a federal judge found the companies guilty of racketeering. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, “Big Tobacco” has spread its tentacles across the developing world with devastating results. The global incidence of smoking has increased exponentially in Africa, Asia and South America and it is leading to an equally rapid increase in the incidence of smoking-induced morbidity and mortality on these continents. The World Health Organization (WHO) has tried to respond to this crisis by devising a set of regulations to limit the spread of smoking, and many countries have (...) bound themselves to follow the WHO’s guidelines. This article provides an overview of these regulatory measures and the authors attempt to defend them from the perspective of liberty and autonomy. Their motivation is to countermand any attempt by the tobacco industry to attack the regulations on the grounds that they infringe the liberty rights of producers and consumers. It is also argued, however, that a blanket ban of the production, sale and consumption of tobacco cannot be justified on the grounds of autonomy alone. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility has become a potential path to legitimacy and improved public relations for both companies that produce mainstream products and those that sell vice, such as the tobacco industry. Since the early 1990s, the tobacco industry has sought to bridge the gap between the public perception it has earned as a merchant of death and its goal of gaining corporate legitimacy and normality by promoting programs, positions, and policies it hopes the general public will believe are (...) aimed at preventing or mitigating some of the societal ills that smoking causes, such as youth smoking. There is, however, an intractable problem that corporate social responsibility efforts can mask but not resolve: the tobacco industry’s products are lethal when used as directed, and no amount of public relations or funding of ineffective youth smoking prevention programs can reconcile that fundamental contradiction with ethical corporate citizenship. The focus of this study is to better understand the tobacco industry’s corporate social responsibility efforts and to assess whether there has been any substantive change in the way it does business with regard to the issue of exposure to secondhand smoke. (shrink)

Due to the ethical breaches of tobacco companies over a 50-year period, a U.S. Court ruled in United States v. Philip Morris USA, Inc. that major U.S. tobacco companies had misled consumers and the government about tobacco’s addictiveness, effects of environmental smoke, marketing targeted at adolescents, and deceptive practices related to harmfulness of smoking. We address the actions of the tobacco companies based on the consumer’s right to be informed and values for ethical corporate (...) behavior, and we draw from psychological theories and the smoking literature to develop our conceptual framework and test the effectiveness of the ensuing corrective advertising campaign mandated in the Court decision. We use a quota sample of 470 smokers and non-smoker participants in a longitudinal study to test the impact of the corrective advertising campaign on key antismoking beliefs from the campaign. Results reveal that the corrective ad campaign has not been successful in affecting smokers’ or non-smokers’ antismoking beliefs. However, differences are found between smokers’ and non-smokers’ beliefs about the adverse health effects of smoking, effects of secondhand smoke, and tobacco company deceptiveness, with these beliefs being stronger for non-smokers. Smokers’ weaker beliefs about the effects of secondhand smoke are viewed as particularly problematic, given the established health risks. We address the implications of the ethical breaches and the corrective advertising attempt to address the deception identified by the Court. (shrink)

Cigarette smoke is the most dangerous of the toxic elements in our environment. Smoking is responsible for almost 500 000 deaths each year in the United States — more than any other environmental toxin. The medical evidence is clear, mainstream and sidestream smoke kills people, and anyone who participates in the spreading of this smoke is acting unethically. Yet, when there are no governmental laws that ban smoking in public, most business-people allow smoking in their places (...) of business. These businesspeople are acting in an unethical manner, a manner which endangers customers and employees. This paper examines the impact on the environment of smoking in public and concludes that businesses must move quickly to ban smoking, or we will need nationwide, uniform legal restrictions to force ethical action in this critical area. (shrink)

Using panel data from three Canadian provinces, this article examines the relationship between the de-marketing of tobacco products through provincial-level price increases and consumers’ attempts to quit smoking as measured by the uptake of tobacco replacement therapies. We ground our hypotheses in the rational addiction model and the theory of planned behavior. Our analyses suggest a positive, one-month lagged effect of a price increase of tobacco products on the uptake of tobacco replacement therapies. This effect dissipates (...) 3 months later, suggesting that there is a critical period for aggressive de-marketing of tobacco products. We discuss the implications of these results for theory and future research into de-marketing harmful consumer products. (shrink)

Through interviews and photographs the author shows real persons whose lives have been affected by tobacco-related diseases.

Considering recent theoretical discussions about the concept of moral legitimacy, this study advances our understanding of its performance consequences. Specifically, it uncovers the mediating role of moral legitimacy in the relationship between regulations and industry performance. Our analysis of the U.S. state-level data on regulations in a controversial industry between 1994 and 2010 yields four significant findings. The results show that regulations not only decrease performance but also negatively impact moral legitimacy. Moreover, this study provides empirical evidence that moral legitimacy (...) is positively related to industry performance, providing much-needed direct support for this premise. Importantly, the results indicate that moral legitimacy mediates the effect of regulations on performance, but only when regulations are aligned with moral values. Overall, this study extends our understanding of how regulations influence moral legitimacy, and in turn impact industry performance. (shrink)

Smoking is disproportionately common among the disadvantaged, both within many countries and globally; the burden associated with smoking is, therefore, borne to a great extent by the disadvantaged. In this paper, I argue that this should be regarded as a problem of social justice. Even though smokers do, in a sense, ‘choose’ to smoke, the extent to which these choices can legitimise the resulting inequalities is limited by the unequal circumstances in which they are made. An analysis of the (...) empirical literature reveals a variety of factors—such as targeted advertising, unequal dissemination of information about the health risks of smoking and inequalities in smoking norms—that make the disadvantaged more likely to become smokers and less likely to quit successfully. The paper then considers a range of common tobacco control policies from the perspective of social justice. The social justice perspective developed here poses a challenge for policy-makers: on the one hand, social justice concerns strengthen the case for tobacco control policies because such policies disproportionately benefit the health of the disadvantaged. At the same time, however, we must be particularly sensitive to any harms associated with such policies because such burdens, too, will fall largely on the disadvantaged. (shrink)

The tobacco industry first began to promote the idea that a minority of smokers are 'genetically predisposed' to lung cancer in the 1950s. We used tobacco industry documents available as a result of litigation to investigate the role of the tobacco industry in funding the 'scientific bandwagon' described by Fujimura, in which genetics has come to dominate the cancer research agenda. From 1990-1995 inclusive, 52% of the project funding allocated by British American Tobacco's Scientific Research Group (...) went to genetic research, mainly based in universities and at one cancer charity. The largest project involved a pharmacogenetic research unit, based in a UK medical school, which was established with the help of tobacco industry PR consultants in 1988. The unit received half its project funding from the industry in 1992. Its main aim was to identify a minority of smokers who are supposedly 'genetically susceptible' to lung cancer, so that smoking cessation measures could be targeted at them. This aim was adopted and promoted by influential scientists at the US National Institutes of Health and the UK Medical Research Council in the late 1980s, in the run up to the Human Genome Project.BAT's research funds were also used to counter claims by others to have identified a unique 'genetic fingerprint' for tobacco smoke in lung cancer cells. We conclude that the tobacco industry has played a significant role in shaping research agendas, in particular, by promoting the idea that individual genome screening would be of benefit to public health. (shrink)

I investigate whether tobacco health warnings’ interference with autonomy is ethically justifiable in order to deter people from smoking. I dissociate first the informational role and the persuasive role of tobacco health warnings and show that both roles enable typical addicted smokers to better rule themselves, fostering their autonomy. The fact that some messages address people’s non-deliberative faculties is therefore compensated by a larger positive influence on their autonomy. However, misleading messages are not ethically justified and should be (...) avoided. Tobacco health warnings’ effect on autonomy highlights an important difference between libertarian paternalism and classical paternalism. (shrink)

Tobacco, divine, rare superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all panaceas, potable gold and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases.Although most of the toxicity, including cancerogenicity, of tobacco is related to a mix of components other than nicotine present in cigarettes (U.S. Surgeon General 2010), it is indeed nicotine that causes addiction to smoking (Benowitz 2010; Russo et al. 2011).In 1988, the U.S. Surgeon General's Report concluded that cigarettes and other forms of tobacco are (...) addictive as a result of their nicotine content, and that the processes determining tobacco addiction "are similar to those that determine addiction to drugs such as heroin and cocaine." Previously, in .. (shrink)

Cigarette smoke is by far the leading preventable cause of death and disease in the United States. It has been estimated to kill between 419,000 and 589,000 smokers and up to 65,000 non-smokers each year. This premier status is hardly a new development, having been true for most of the last century, and known to be true at least since the first Surgeon General’s Report in 1964.Why then are tobacco products exempt from any significant federal oversight or control? (...) Why do cigarette advertisements, pitched to young smokers and non-smokers, continue to be plastered on every available surface inside and outside many convenience stores and to adorn the pages of popular magazines? Why, decades since the makers of far less dangerous products began to be held accountable in tort law, was the first payment by a cigarette company on a products liability judgment not made until 2001? (shrink)

Should tobacco be banned? The answer depends largely on two further questions. How much are smokers benefitted by being made to stop, or to not start? And what is the moral cost of their being made to stop by their government, as opposed to stopping due to the influence of policies that fall short of coercion? Grill and Voigt provide one answer to the first question. They argue that the benefits of cessation are high enough to justify a ban (...) on tobacco products.1 I partly agree: I share their view that the harms of tobacco consumption are great enough to justify at least some policies that force (rather than merely encourage) people to not smoke.i But the differences between policies of this sort are large enough that any general conclusion in favour of ‘a ban’ is incomplete.ii By not elaborating on what a ban might come to, Grill and Voigt leave the second question rather unaddressed. Of course, the authors hardly mean to say that anything goes when it comes to forming policies that force people to not smoke. Nevertheless, it is appropriate to build on their defence of the benefits of forced cessation by comparing different sorts of bans, and by comparing bans with other sorts of coercive policies. I will pick up, therefore, where they leave off: granting that a ban's effects on well-being would be overall positive, a principal moral cost of a ban can be measured in terms of its infringement of smokers’ autonomy. Comparisons, then, can be sought in terms of how different policies infringe autonomy in different ways. What exactly might it mean, however, to speak of smokers’ autonomy? According to Grill and Voigt, autonomy should be thought of as a sort of ‘self-direction’ which obtains given ‘the absence of external …. (shrink)

Cigarette smoke is by far the leading preventable cause of death and disease in the United States. It has been estimated to kill between 419,000 and 589,000 smokers and up to 65,000 non-smokers each year. This premier status is hardly a new development, having been true for most of the last century, and known to be true at least since the first Surgeon General’s Report in 1964.Why then are tobacco products exempt from any significant federal oversight or control? (...) Why do cigarette advertisements, pitched to young smokers and non-smokers, continue to be plastered on every available surface inside and outside many convenience stores and to adorn the pages of popular magazines? Why, decades since the makers of far less dangerous products began to be held accountable in tort law, was the first payment by a cigarette company on a products liability judgment not made until 2001? (shrink)

Tobacco consumption is believed to be one of the world’s greatest preventable health problems. According to the World Health Organisation, 1.1 billion people worldwide are addicted to nicotine with tobacco causing an estimated four million premature deaths every year. The development of a nicotine conjugate vaccine suggests that immunisation may hold promise as a future therapeutic and preventive strategy for tobacco smoking and nicotine addiction. Allowing parents to immunise their children against smoking could be an infringement of (...) children’s right to an open future, however, and is not ethically unproblematic. (shrink)

Previous research showed that fear-inducing graphic warning labels can lead to cognitive dissonance and defensive responses. Less threatening, social-related warning labels do not elicit these defensive responses, making them more effective in preventing smoking in adults. Given that smoking numbers are still too high among youngsters, it is crucial to investigate how warning labels should be designed to prevent teenagers from starting smoking in the first place. In two studies, we investigated whether comparable effects of social-related warning labels could be (...) observed in a group of teenagers (14-17 years) who are not yet legally allowed to smoke. In addition, we tried to replicate earlier findings with smoking and non-smoking adults. Participants were presented with either health warning labels, social warning labels, or no warning labels. Subsequently, their explicit cognitions (i.e., risk perception, attitude towards smoking) and their implicit associations of smoking with healthiness/unhealthiness (Study 1a and Study 1b) and with positivity/negativity (Study 2a and Study 2b) were assessed. Results showed that in both studies, adult smokers had a higher risk perception and a more positive attitude towards smoking than adult non-smokers. Additionally, social warning labels lead to stronger implicit associations between smoking and negativity in Study 2 in the adult groups. In the teenage group, social warning labels lead to more positive attitudes than health warning labels in Study 2. No further effects on risk perception or implicit associations were found in the teenage group. Possible explanations are discussed. (shrink)

Despite governmental and private antismoking initiatives, tobacco smoking remains a significant public health and economic challenge. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that for each year between 1997 and 2001, cigarette smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke caused approximately 438,000 U.S. residents to die prematurely, resulting in 5.5 million years of potential life lost, and in $92 billion dollars of lost productivity. Also, despite convincing scientific data that laws against indoor smoking protect people from the negative (...) health effects of cigarette smoke, not all states have afforded their residents this protection. As of July 2007, 16 states neither restricted nor banned indoor smoking in restaurants, private worksites, or government worksites, and many state statutes only required separate rooms for smokers rather than eliminating all smoking inside buildings. In several states, local governments have attempted to fill this gap by adopting their own antismoking measures. (shrink)

There is perhaps no area of law that so effectively protects human health and thereby advances the right to the highest attainable standard of health, as tobacco control. Globally, tobacco is responsible for 1 in 10 adult deaths, and is on track to kill 10 million people per year, mostly in developing countries, representing a US$200 billion drain on the global economy. Yet experience in recent decades has shown that a range of tobacco control measures, such as (...) comprehensive bans on smoking in public places, tobacco taxes, and limits on tobacco advertising, can greatly reduce smoking prevalence. These measures have slowly curtailed the epidemic, despite strong opposition from various sectors led by the tobacco industry. It is fitting that tobacco control is the focus of a recent, widely ratified global treaty and of increasing national litigation, often directly linked to countries’ human rights commitments. (shrink)

The evidence linking tobacco product advertising to adolescent smoking initiation and resulting long-term addiction, premature death, and disability is well established. Each link in the causal chain has been substantiated: children and adolescents are especially vulnerable to advertising; point-of-sale advertising comprises 92.1% of cigarette advertising and marketing expenditures by manufacturers and 71.3% of smokeless tobacco advertising; tobacco companies have targeted youth through advertising; advertising exposure causes adolescents to start and to continue smoking; among adults who become daily (...) smokers, nearly all first use of cigarettes occurs by 18 years of age; adolescents who smoke are at high risk for long-term addiction because their brains are still developing; and long-term addiction results in the tremendous personal, social and financial costs of tobacco-related illnesses. (shrink)

Although the effectiveness of some tobacco programs and policies has been clearly demonstrated in reducing the overall population smoking prevalence, the health benefits are not equally distributed across all socio-economic classes; a situation that clearly runs against the equalitarian ethos of most modern states. In this article, we evaluate the benefits of using Sen’s Capability Approach as a theory of social justice to guide public health program and policy development in a way that would prevent the further increase of (...) inequalities in health outcomes. Starting from four consensual goals of tobacco control practice (i.e. that individuals live a smoke-free life, that smokers quit smoking, that non-smokers are protected from exposure to second-hand smoke and that smoking cessation support is accessible) we found that besides the standard interventions (e.g. education on the harms of smoking, policies to reduce exposure to SHS) an iniquity-proof tobacco control program needs also to address the lack of options of underprivileged people in affordable smoke-free settings and in leisure activities. We conclude that an ethical tobacco prevention program needs to address the broader social determinants of health such as the socio-economic policies that put a strain on people’s capacity to shun or quit smoking. (shrink)

Decades of tobacco control initiatives have turned public opinion against cigarette smoking. Smokers, once considered glamorous, are now stigmatized in domains including the workplace. Extant literature lacks scrutiny of smoker stigmatization and devaluation within the job selection process, and mechanisms that lead to such outcomes. Using an experimental design, we empirically examine initial reactions to job applicants’ smoking behaviors within two samples. We show that initial impressions are significantly worse when job applicants smoke versus do not in a (...) store-based context. Moreover, this effect occurs indirectly through perceived likelihood of engaging in counterproductive work behaviors, and is conditional upon respondents’ own attitudes towards smoking. These relationships—similar for customer service and inventory management jobs—are indicative of potential biases within the hiring process. Implications of these findings, and the moral dilemmas they raise around the treatment of smokers, are discussed from the ethical perspective of human resource management. (shrink)

There is no more striking public health triumph than the demise of the “brown plague.” The cigarette was once the accoutrement of a good life, but smoking is now a tragic habit of the poor. By the mid‐1960s, half of all men and a third of women in the United States smoked. Today the national prevalence is 18 percent, with rates in major cities below 15 percent. A suite of policies drove down smoking rates—antismoking campaigns, taxation, clean air laws, package (...) labeling, and marketing curbs. These policies, and the resultant behavior changes, however, have diminishing returns. Is it possible that tobacco rates will remain relatively stagnant? If so, what “endgame” strategies might drive rates to negligible levels, say, lower than 5 percent? And if society does achieve such an audacious goal, how attentive should it be to the problems of social justice? (shrink)

The author defends himself against an attack by Smith and Bopp on his views on smoking and taxation. The theory that, on the grounds of equity and/or fairness, smokers should pay via taxation on tobacco for the health care costs of treating smoking-related medical conditions is discussed and shown to be defective. It is argued that the fundamental mistake that Smith and Bopp make is to confuse and conflate the separate issues of whether particular taxes are fair and whether (...) they are justifiable. The conclusion is reached that an excise duty on tobacco is a good tax. It is a non-fair or even an unfair tax but it is justified on grounds other than fairness. (shrink)

This case describes the background of cigarette product placement in commercial movies and the emergence of the Smoke Free Movies Initiative. It draws onresearch by tobacco control activists on the impact of smoking in movies on youth smoking initiation. Voluntary and mandated restrictions on the use of cigarettes in film productions are discussed. Historic documents from tobacco industry archives reveal the explicit goals and intentions of tobacco companies to use films to market their products to unsuspecting (...) observers. (shrink)

As resident physicians practicing Internal Medicine in hospitals within the USA, we are confronted on a daily basis with patients who wish to leave the hospital floor to smoke a cigarette. While many physicians argue that hospitals should do everything in their power to prevent patients from smoking, we argue that a more comprehensive and nuanced approach is needed. In part 1 of this perspective piece, we outline the various forms of smoking bans in hospital settings, applauding the development (...) of indoor smoking bans while questioning the move towards stricter, campus-wide smoking bans. In part 2, we turn to traditional biomedical ethics to guide our approach to the hospitalised patient who smokes. This approach, which is informed by our backgrounds in harm reduction and medical anthropology, takes into account the lived realities of patients and acknowledges the complicated sociohistorical contexts of tobacco use. (shrink)

In this paper, I am going to explore some of the moral considerations relating to smoking licences. And I shall offer a limited defence of licences as a replacement for sales tax on tobacco products. This defence will include some moral arguments in favour of one particular licence design over others.

This chapter contains sections titled: Moral Argument Science and Health Argument Social Policy Argument.

In many countries around the world, the mechanisms of civil society have become very commonplace. Large companies are under constant pressure from civil society organizations to change their policies, strategies and approaches. The tobacco industry in particular is under heavy pressure in many parts of the world. Smoking has been prohibited in many public as well as private or semi-private areas in a large number of countries. However, while smoking as an addiction seems to be declining in some countries, (...) in others it is not. This paper presents an example of a country (Indonesia) in which smoking is still on the rise. We discuss how mechanisms of civil society are a chance to at least improve the situation and effectively combat a grave social problem. (shrink)

Freedom to smoke is part and parcel of overall freedom. The former cannot be abrogated without violating the latter. The present paper applies this insight to the regulations placed on the tobacco industry and smoking in general. We find that government interventions into people’s lives regarding smoking are highly incompatible with libertarian principles. We examine many regulations such as prohibiting youths from smoking, preventing second hand smoke, restrictions on advertising, taxing the industry, and liability issues.