July 27, 2014
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By 1973, when he took up smoking, most, if not all, of the harmful effects of smoking were well-known. I do not recall that, in my entire medical career (which started in 1974), I ever met a patient who was unaware that smoking was bad for him. The tobacco companies” various attempts to muddy the scientific waters had no effect whatsoever on the public understanding that smoking is harmful to health.
The idea that addiction is a condition that it is impossible for someone to overcome is clearly preposterous in the light of the evidence that millions of people have actually overcome it. The figure of the ex-smoker is by now sufficiently familiar. (My mother gave up smoking when she was 46 because she knew that it was bad for her, five years before Mr. Johnson took it up.) The statement by the plaintiff’s lawyer that Mr. Johnson could not quit would be true only if Mr. Johnson could not do other than he actually did, but this would be true only if it were true of humans in general, and no one believes it of himself, except possibly when trying to excuse himself for what he knows he ought not to have done.
As for the lawyer’s remark that Mr. Johnson smoked on the last day of his life, it was clearly intended to imply the strength of Mr. Johnson’s addiction. But no humane person would deny to a dying man the one pleasure or consolation that was available to him, even if it were that consolation that had caused him to be dying in the first place. There would be no point in doing so, except as a sadistic exercise in power.
What happened in Florida, then? A sentimental jury was swayed by a crooked lawyer or company of lawyers, in the process overlooking the most evident and obvious considerations. The jury has thought, “Poor innocent Mr. Johnson, victim of a large wicked company, let’s give his widow a fortune at the company’s expense.” The jury has combined the pleasure of being on the side of the small man with the pleasure of generosity for which they have personally to pay nothing. As for the lawyers, the last thing they would want is to drive tobacco companies out of business: they want no end to the golden tort that nets them millions. The actions they mount against the tobacco companies are the means by which they divert the profits of those companies from the pockets of the shareholders into their own.
I started off by saying that I wouldn”t want a world in which common sense always ruled, but that does not mean I want a world in which common sense never rules. It often seems to me that the more educated society becomes, the less able are its members to think connectedly.
