Ethics and the Tobacco Industry

Health advocates assert that tobacco is the first or second leading cause of preventable death among humans, contributing to cancer, lung disease, and coronary heart disease, among other ailments, and that the addictive properties of cigarette ingredients prevent smokers who desire to quit from doing so. While cigarettes are the primary culprit, other tobacco products, such as cigars and pipe tobacco, are potentially equally or even more dangerous, but because they are less prevalent, they do not pose public health risks on the same scale as cigarettes. Smokeless (chewing) tobacco is said to cause other health problems, such as mouth cancer. The risks of tobacco use are not limited to users of tobacco, since carcinogens, or cancercausing agents, can be passed on to others through second-hand smoke and from a pregnant or nursing mother to her child; cigarette smoking contributes to an inordinate share of building and house fires, and the health care costs associated with tobacco are borne by the public at large. As a result of these health and economic risks, governments and nongovernmental organizations have increasingly treated tobacco as a public health hazard and have sought to economically impair the tobacco industry through aggressive regulation and litigation, thus reducing its harmful impact.

For decades, the big tobacco companies sought to downplay the health risks of tobacco products and categorically to deny claims that their products were addictive. In stark contrast to the health realities, various brands of cigarettes were associated through advertisements with social sophistication and glamour, friendship, rugged outdoorsmanship, recreation, and, generally, the good life. Historically, tobacco's place in society was more complex, a traditional pleasure among the native peoples of the Americas transported by explorers to Europe and then by commercial sailors to the Middle East and Asia. In these regions, tobacco took hold among the populace but received a mixed reception among political and religious leaders, who saw it as a pagan vice. As the global market for tobacco grew, however, its economic value became clear, and it became a key commodity grown and exported by European settlers in the southern United States as well as an exotic import from afar, hence the even contemporary references to “Turkish” and “Oriental” leaf and the famous Camel brand with images of the Near East. After industrialization, tobacco became an important enough commodity for political interests to coalesce to defend it from its detractors, for if big tobacco were suddenly to falter, the consequences for tobacco-dependent economic actors would be potentially catastrophic. At stake were the livelihoods of low-paid field laborers, high-paid executives, and those within the supply and distribution chains that linked them. Also at stake were an aesthetic view promoted by proponents of the smoking lifestyle and the search among researchers and developers for the perfect flavor. In recent years, faced with mounting regulatory pressure and litigation, big tobacco companies have become more transparent [Page 795]about the health risks and have been exploring new forms of innovation in product development and social responsibility to prop up their increasingly perilous economic reality. Fascinatingly, and possibly too late to flourish again, the tobacco industry has both been the target of the full range of ethical criticism that can be directed at business and demonstrated the potential for business to engage more constructively in the ethical debate on whether there is a place for dangerous products in the good life.

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