Yes, smoking kills – but not everyone wants to be saved

Despite knowing each puff takes us closer to the grave, Big Tobacco keeps its nicotine-stained grip on millions of users

• 
• • Tanya Gold
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 31 May 2011
  • Article history

Before smoking was bad ... a 1932 cigarette advertisement. Photograph: Blue Lantern Studio/Corbis
It's World No Tobacco Day and I'm on the Ash (Action on Smoking and Health) website, gathering material to beat up Big Tobacco, even as I have a fag in my hand – my 146,000th, I think – and my chest rattles as if Radio 4 were playing inside it, but far away. I'm aware of the irony, but who is to do the deed but a 20-year smoker? I'm the victim of Big Tobacco, not you. Despite wailing about NHS resources, which I think my fag tax repays, and complaining about smoke pollution – usually while choosing to live in cities – all non-smokers actually have to do is watch us die. But at some point during my research I look down at the cigarette – my 146,001st, I think – and I find that I'm not angry with Big Tobacco. I'm angrier with the woman in the street, who saw my cigarette, and invited her children to insult me, even though I insincerely apologised, and she probably owns a car the size of a medium elephant. I'm aware I sound like a frontwoman for Big Tobacco and I do not mind; sometimes allies are unpalatable and sometimes people are self-destructive. Obviously Big Tobacco is evil; due to the anti-smoking lobby, the smoker is no longer gifted denial. My pusher, Philip Morris, maker of Marlboros, is a comic monster in my eyes, a sort of cartoon character of greed, floundering in the face of regulation, trying to push a murderous drug responsibly. It is a monster even among monsters; Exxon is fluffy in comparison to British American Tobacco (BAT), because destruction is a side-effect of its business, not the actual point of it. If Big Tobacco does its job properly, its customers simply die; and every time it loses a customer it needs to find another to replace it. It even killed Beryl Bainbridge. When I think of Big Tobacco I usually imagine Ned Beatty playing the corporate mouthpiece in the 1976 masterpiece Network – "There are no third worlds. There is no west. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars" – strangling a leftwing novelist in her Camden flat, and then coming back for me. The evil is ongoing, and historic. Big Tobacco lied for years about the true effects of its product, even as its executives wrote crazed notes to each other – "The customers are dying!" I don't think they were actually happy that the customers were dying; they just weren't unhappy enough to stop trading. Big Tobacco has resisted every threat to its profits in its history, and continues to do so. The current battle in the UK is against unbranded "plain" packets. This panics Big Tobacco and so they have assembled a barrage of conflicting arguments. Plain packets make no difference, they say. Or they might make a difference. They aren't sure, but they don't want plain packets; how like addicts they sound, with whirring, irrational brains, seeking every possible way to use, or earn. Their PR methods are pitiful – British American Tobacco's short film Who's in Control? shows cackling eastern European gangsters partying at the idea of plain packets. "It's good for the economy," says one, stroking his sub-Spooks leather jacket. "My economy." Someone should do them for racism. I may be failing in my role as BAT mouthpiece, but what the anti-tobacco lobby fails to understand is that some people like to smoke. They've done their job well; everyone who can read now knows smoking kills. I know it, Big Tobacco knows it, even the cigarette packet, which is amazingly self-aware, knows it. You can't get much clearer than Smoking Seriously Harms You and Others Around You, written in a black box, like a Victorian letter of condolence, sent slightly too early. Even Big Tobacco admits it now. "PM [Philip Morris] USA agrees with the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and other serious diseases in smokers," says Philip Morris. "Smoking is a cause of various serious and fatal diseases," says BAT, likewise opening a vein. Of course, it was the anti-smoking lobby that made them say it and I thank them, as I draw out my 146,002nd cigarette. Even on World No Tobacco Day, non-smoker, not everyone wants to be saved.