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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 6KB | 125 lines

                                                                                HEALTH, Page 59

Where There's Smoke


Following America's lead, Europeans and Asians join the war
on smoking

By JILL SMOLOWE -- With reporting by Jay Branegan/Hong Kong and
Farah Nayeri/Paris


    Trends have a way of getting started in California,
sneered at by the rest of the world, then adopted overseas with
rigor. Such has been the case with the war on cigarettes, for
years dismissed by Europeans as petty, provincial and
puritanical. Nowadays France and other nations are fast catching
up with serious no-smoking curbs of their own.

    In the land of Gauloises, where 40% of the populace lights
up, a law that went into effect this month restricting smoking
in most public places led to predictions of angry bistro
battles. Instead, hostile encounters have been rare and the ban
is shaping up as an exercise in politesse. At a crowded pizzeria
on the Champs Elysees, a Parisian woman puffed away peacefully
until a man at the next table blurted, "Excuse me. Can you
please put out your cigarette? You are disturbing me." As the
man later explained, "Before this law was instituted, I never
dared to ask anyone to put out a cigarette. Now that I have the
right to, I will raise my voice."

    "It's an educational effort," says Nathalie Nottet,
spokeswoman for France's National Police. "Smokers are being
asked to discipline themselves." As the ban entered its second
week, no one had yet demanded that an errant smoker be fined up
to $260. The police are under instructions not to enforce the
law unless they receive a complaint.

    That suits the French preference for treating such laws as
a general guideline, and no one expects the restrictions to be
observed strictly for some time to come. But as antismoking
campaigns in the U.S. and Singapore have demonstrated, tough
laws and peer pressure can fast reduce the smoker from a
sophisticate to a social pariah. Throughout Europe and Asia, a
growing body of laws, policies and guidelines is confining
smokers to ever smaller zones. In January, France will prohibit
all tobacco advertising. And in the developing countries of
Asia, a mounting awareness of the ill effects of smoking is
prodding governments to act.

    Because of their centralized authority and tradition of
social legislation, European nations can enact antismoking laws
more easily than the U.S. Nevertheless, the change has come
fitfully. Britain was among the first to ban advertising on
television, in 1965, and to require health warnings on packs,
in 1971. Yet Britons, who loathe anything that smacks of a nanny
state, have never progressed beyond polite arm twisting. Neither
have the Germans, who provide nonsmoking train cars and
smoke-free areas in restaurants but rely more on consensus than
legal sanctions.

    In Italy legislators tried in 1975 to enact stiff bans in
public places. The results have been mixed in a country that
rarely takes any good-for-you legislation seriously: while
theaters and public transportation are smoke-free, hospitals and
schools are not always, and restaurants are decidedly not.
Parliament will soon try again to pass a law that will so reduce
public smoking areas that Bruno Simoncelli, a two-pack-a-day
government filing clerk, frets, "I'll have to go back to smoking
in the bathroom the way I did when I first started at 16." Even
so, restaurants that must install special air conditioning will
be given a three-year grace period.

    Not surprisingly, Singapore is striving to become the
world's first smoke-free city. In this socially engineered
ministate, where smoking has been under assault for two decades,
cigarettes are strictly banned in nearly every public place,
vending machines are outlawed, and tobacco companies are not
allowed to sponsor public events. To tame the 16% of the adult
population that still smokes, the government may even end the
practice in bars.

    As the economies of other Asian nations thrive, citizens
are paying more attention to their health and pushing for
tougher smoking restrictions. "They're doing a lot of things at
once, not small steps over 30 years as in the West," says Dr.
Judith Mackay, the region's leading antismoking crusader. Even
China, the world's largest producer and consumer of tobacco, now
restricts smoking in public places and bans advertising.

    Hong Kong has matched Singapore's low smoking rate by
relying primarily on market forces: a 300% tax in 1983 and an
additional 100% tax last year have brought the price of a
regular pack to $2.60. In Japan politeness prevails: 61% of
adult males smoke, and little has been done beyond recommending
the establishment of no-smoking areas in workplaces. This has
led to a small outcropping of carefully marked places where
smokers can congregate.

    None of this means that smokers need fear extinction
anytime soon. Cigarettes are still highly profitable, as the
governments of France, Italy and Japan know, since they
monopolize or control state tobacco industries. France's SEITA
earned $2.3 billion in sales revenues last year. Cigarette
consumption generated $6.1 billion in tax revenues -- a clear
disincentive for enforcing the new ban too zealously.

    U.S. tobacco companies are making up for dwindling
domestic sales by expanding sales abroad. Asian health officials
complain that the influx of fancy foreign brands hurts their
efforts to control the habit, particularly among the young. The
most fertile ground for new exports is Eastern Europe and
Russia, where Marlboro and other brands are relatively expensive
-- and often smuggled -- status symbols. In these former
communist countries, the idea of state control over private
lives is decidedly more ambivalent these days, and the
antismoking crusade is just beginning.