What the struggle to ban cigarette advertising has to teach us about the struggle for sustainability

Dear Editor,

I have been reflecting on your obituary to Professor Sir Richard Doll, who was one of the epidemiologists to discover the link between smoking and lung cancer. So struck was he by the strength of the evidence for the link that he gave up smoking himself even before publishing his first report in 1950. That was 55 years ago!

Why then did it take so long for the results of his (and other) studies to be accepted and much longer still for the necessary consequences to be draw from them and acted upon? By exposing the dangers of smoking, Professor Doll's work is credited with saving millions of lives, yet if there had not been so much (and such well-financed) resistance to his findings, and governments had not dragged their feet for so long, millions more lives might have been saved. As it is, millions of people are still dying annually, and millions more are still taking up smoking and becoming addicted.

There is a very important lesson to be learned here, but again there is a great deal of reluctance and resistance to doing so. Why? We need to know. Millions of lives have been lost, and millions (in fact, 100's of millions, perhaps billions) more are at stake - not just because of smoking, but because of other, even more dangerous behaviours we are refusing to face up to and thus persisting in.

A simplified, but nevertheless fairly accurate, explanation is that society as a whole was addicted to cigarette smoking and for this reason found it very difficult to face up to and act against. As a consequence, millions of people have died, and continue to die.

By the time the dangers associated with smoking were recognised, it was already a "normal " part of life, upon which many people depended in a variety of ways (see Uncommon Sense vs the Insanities of Normality). Most who smoked were psychologically and/or physically dependent, i.e. addicted. The tobacco industry depended on it as a source of income, as did to some extent the media and advertising industries, who financed the resistance, employing scientists and lawyers to help fight their corner. Then there were those who depended on sponsorship or donations by the tobacco industry. I wonder how many government ministers and MP's were rewarded, in one way or another, for delaying legislation? I also wonder what role the Telegraph and other newspapers played? How long did it take before you decided (or were forced) to put readers' health and life expectancy before advertising revenue?

But there is no time now for accusations, even if they are justified. We need to face up to what happened. Why, for example, wasn't cigarette advertising banned decades ago?

A few million premature deaths a year through smoking, as tragic and unnecessary as it is, is far from being our biggest problem. Non-smokers can live with that. What we cannot live with (because it will kill us all) is our fundamentally non-sustainable, growth-dependent economy and the grossly materialistic lifestyles it engenders. This is our biggest, effectively our only problem. Only we are not facing up to it. For reasons very similar to, if not identical with, those which kept us from facing up to the dangers of smoking for so long.

To: dtletters@telegraph.co.uk Re: What the struggle to ban cigarette advertising has to teach us about the struggle for sustainability Date: Monday, 25 July 05


Dear Editor, I have been reflecting on your obituary to Professor Sir Richard Doll, who was one of the epidemiologists to discover the link between smoking and lung cancer. So struck was he by the strength of the evidence for the link that he gave up smoking himself even before publishing his first report in 1950. That was 55 years ago! Why then did it take so long for the results of his (and other) studies to be accepted and much longer still for the necessary consequences to be draw from them and acted upon? By exposing the dangers of smoking, Professor Doll's work is credited with saving millions of lives, yet if there had not been so much (and such well-financed) resistance to his findings, and governments had not dragged their feet for so long, millions more lives might have been saved. As it is, millions of people are still dying annually, and millions more are still taking up smoking and becoming addicted. There is a very important lesson to be learned here, but again there is a great deal of reluctance and resistance to doing so. Why? We need to know. Millions of lives have been lost, and millions (in fact, 100's of millions, perhaps billions) more are at stake - not just because of smoking, but because of other, even more dangerous behaviours we are refusing to face up to and thus persisting in. A simplified, but nevertheless fairly accurate, explanation is that society as a whole was addicted to cigarette smoking and for this reason found it very difficult to face up to and act against. As a consequence, millions of people have died, and continue to die. By the time the dangers associated with smoking were recognised, it was already a "normal " part of life, upon which many people depended in a variety of ways (see Uncommon Sense vs the Insanities of Normality). Most who smoked were psychologically and/or physically dependent, i.e. addicted. The tobacco industry depended on it as a source of income, as did to some extent the media and advertising industries, who financed the resistance, employing scientists and lawyers to help fight their corner. Then there were those who depended on sponsorship or donations by the tobacco industry. I wonder how many government ministers and MP's were rewarded, in one way or another, for delaying legislation? I also wonder what role the Telegraph and other newspapers played? How long did it take before you decided (or were forced) to put readers' health and life expectancy before advertising revenue? But there is no time now for accusations, even if they are justified. We need to face up to what happened. Why, for example, wasn't cigarette advertising banned decades ago? A few million premature deaths a year through smoking, as tragic and unnecessary as it is, is far from being our biggest problem. Non-smokers can live with that. What we cannot live with (because it will kill us all) is our fundamentally non-sustainable, growth-dependent economy and the grossly materialistic lifestyles it engenders. This is our biggest, effectively our only problem. Only we are not facing up to it. For reasons very similar to, if not identical with, those which kept us from facing up to the dangers of smoking for so long. www.spaceship-earth.org.