The No Smoking Garden
The crusade against tobacco has depended on shameless propaganda.

In 1932, eleven men strode onto an exposed steel beam on the sixty-ninth floor of what would become the Radio Corporation of America’s New York headquarters. A photo was taken of the group that hangs behind bar counters across the nation. The picture evokes a nostalgia for an America that citizens now the age of those portrayed have never known.
Not least because they’re smoking cigarettes.
The RCA photograph portrayed workers as they were, complete with wife beaters, flat caps, a glass bottle filled with water or some other clear liquid, and the whispering stimulants of the age tucked between their fingers.
Then in 1964, the Federal Trade Commission promulgated a rule limiting tobacco distributors from associating cigarette smoking “with such positive attributes as contentment, glamour, romance, youth, happiness.”
Since then, enormous scientific and regulatory energy has gone into the question of tobacco advertising, how to limit media that promotes smoking, and how to make effective media that discourages it.
The scientific literature distinguishes between two strains of anti-smoking mass communications: “utilitarian consumers responded better to positive messages, whereas hedonic consumers responded better to negative messages,” one journal article on smoking habits among Korean college students claims.
In the world of cigarettes, there are apparently two types of customers: those who ask Why? before taking a puff, and those who take a puff and say Why not?
The utilitarians who responded to positive messaging included one interviewee who spoke of the romance of expanding smoke-free zones: “I expanded my garden, it broadened my mind. We expanded no smoking zones, health spread wider across our land. Thank you. Thanks to your thoughtfulness, better health is spreading across Korea.” Maybe it sounds better in Korean.
The hedonists, on the other hand, were more receptive to an announcement showing people collapsing from cigarette smoke blown by a smoker. The message, according to the article, “is that smoking is an invisible violence.” Recalling the recovering hedonists I’ve met, none come to mind who have modulated their behavior based on a perceived harm to others (especially those who know that secondhand smoke, and the even more tenuous thirdhand smoke, is a myth). Again, maybe it’s different in Korea.
In 1622, Gregory XV formalized the Vatican’s Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, a body now less aptly referred to as the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. The “propagation” in the former rendering has an etymological brother in “propaganda,” which, if I recall correctly from my days in classical education, is a gerund loosely meaning “those things to be propagated.”
There is a certain self-assurance in the syntax that says the noun will be made real in the future. It’s baked into the word’s construction that the propagandist knows a thing and will go to great lengths to ensure that others know it too.
What are the principles motivating anti-smoking propagandists? Again, from the 1964 FTC rule:
To avoid giving a false impression that smoking [is] innocuous, the cigarette manufacturer who represents the alleged pleasures or satisfactions of cigarette smoking in his advertising must also disclose the serious risks to life that smoking involves.
Lurking behind this instruction is the thought that life is about maximizing physical health and mitigating risk. Personal finance gurus subscribe to the same ideology with money. What’s missing from this vision, which never asks whether bodily health should sometimes be subordinated to other goods, is prudence. This mother of the natural virtues puts them in their proper place.
On March 17, 2020, the Food and Drug Administration issued a rule mandating new warning labels for cigarettes, complete with “photo-realistic color images depicting some of the lesser-known but serious health risks of cigarette smoking.” WARNING, one label reads, Tobacco smoke can cause harm to your children. Another: Smoking causes Type 2 diabetes, which raises blood sugar. And then the showstopper: Smoking reduces blood flow, which can lead to erectile dysfunction.
From the abstract augury threatening children to the prediction of weakened virility, it is clear the agency is not above employing classically pathetic appeals to communicate scientific observations to a mass audience.
One advertisement with “photo-realistic color images” published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2014 includes photos of seven Americans, including one who smoked while she was pregnant, another who developed gum disease, and another who underwent a surgical stoma for throat cancer. The photos also include one man with few teeth keeping his mouth ajar and a woman inserting dentures.
The agency published a guide in 2011 called “Communicating Risks and Benefits: An Evidence-Based User’s Guide.” In it, the authors contend that sociological data supports a method they informally call “fighting fire with fire”: “Emotional communications, especially those that are fear-based, can be used to increase risk perceptions and change behaviors. An example of this might be requiring the use of particularly graphic warning labels on cigarette packages.”
The study goes on to say that fear warnings are the “primary mechanism and context for warnings,” which is supported by “almost 60 years of research and theory development.” The guide claims “considerable evidence” suggests that the correlation between fear intensity and persuasiveness is a “positive linear relationship, with stronger fear-arousing conditions producing greater message acceptance.”
What’s excluded from the photos and graphics are a few details: the duration of their smoking habit, how often they smoked, what they smoked. Were the photographed suffering from another illness? Did they continue smoking while they were sick?
When we asked the CDC about those portrayed in their 2014 infographic, they directed us to a page on their website called “Tips from Former Smokers.” The story of each of the seven portrayed is described in a one-page biography with accompanying brief YouTube video. Terrie started smoking in high school, Brett when he was 16, Shawn and Brian when they were 14, Amanda and Rose when they were 13, and Felicita when she was 12. Each of them, except for Shawn, said they used to smoke a pack per day, with Rose and Terrie having smoked two packs per day. Many of them kept up their habit for at least thirty years.
I don’t envy them or the hardships they’re facing now because of their past addiction. But it is clear the CDC has accounted for the compounding factors (starting age, frequency, and duration) and portrays examples of clear excess as the norm.
The anti-smoking bureaus don’t allow for an inch of room for those interested in exploring the world of tobacco outside of cigarettes. “Cigars are not a safe alternative to cigarettes and cigar smoke is at least as toxic as cigarette smoke, if not more,” the FDA announces on its website. The CDC warns that “marketing efforts promote cigars as symbols of a luxurious and successful lifestyle,” and lists product placement in movies and Cigar Aficionado magazine as “strategies” used to “contribute to the increased acceptability of cigar smoking.”
The agencies are notably quiet on the issue of pipe tobacco, which provides further corroboration, especially for the health-conscious, of Michael P. Foley’s 1997 First Things essay on “Tobacco and the Soul.” Foley, now a patristics professor at Baylor University best known for his efforts to sanctify the natural pleasures of eating and drinking through his books Drinking with the Saints and the recently published Dining with the Saints, argues that a hierarchy exists among the tobacco products of cigarettes, cigars, and pipes that indicates something about their respective natures and ends.
The author draws a connection between Plato’s tripartite soul—composed of the appetitive, spirited, and rational powers—and the three common forms of tobacco delivery. Cigarettes fulfill a desire for instant gratification with their quick expiration and attendant buzz; cigars signal prestige and, in a more romantic age, the capacity to curb the risks of excess by indulging in the showy clouds of billowy smoke; and pipes demand the natural virtues of patience and delicacy, reserved only for those willing to preserve the equipment necessary for their maintenance.
The argument seems like a stretch at first, but then again, instincts can sometimes get you further than facts. Foley’s critique of cigarettes, though, should not go unnoticed: Both the appetitive power generally and cigarettes in particular, he says, “are indifferent to health in their quest for satisfaction, and both, when they reach addictive levels, become hostile to it.”
Foley’s metaphorical assignment of each product to the powers of the soul seems to be more of a fitting generalization than a hard and fast rule. I suspect he would admit that individual cases would allow a cigarette to be enjoyed in accord with the rational—or even the spirited—power, and that a cigar or pipe could be debased to a lower quality.
For the moderate user, a perception of risk is weighed against the other goods of sociality, tradition, and just simply liking it. For men, especially, sharing tobacco in any form exists as the sort of unspoken, gratuitous currency that makes the natural world make sense in the way the sacraments do with the supernatural. If “love languages” exist in any real way, which seems unlikely, and if men experience these languages, which seems less likely, then a man hoping to discover which language he speaks should hand another a cigarette.
Our capacities to weigh these competing goods vary by person but are particularly limited for children. It should not come as a surprise, then, that every participant in the CDC’s 2014 campaign started smoking during or before high school; the line between risk and reward blur, peer pressure pushes, and the frequency of smoking becomes a matter of cash instead of choice. The hedonistic paradox—the idea that someone pursuing pleasure for its own sake will never be satisfied—comes to the fore when adolescent smoking becomes the end of a social engagement instead of the inverse.
The anti-smoking propaganda machine is where scientism, rationalism, and emotivism collide. Science tells us smoking is bad, and you should consult the science before taking another puff. Smoking does immediate harm to your body, therefore you should not smoke. Stop smoking: do you want to kill your children?
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What a blessing it is that only some think this is an appropriate way to address their fellow citizens.
Like the temperance movement before it, the anti-smoking movement undermines its position by investing in a moral puritanism, refusing to allow for any exceptions to the rule. For this reason, it encourages the smoker to engage in self-deception. Nicotine focuses my mind and I like smoking a cigar with my old college friends, the smoker says to himself. But the FDA and CDC have warned us that cigars are not a safe alternative to cigarettes, no smoker ever said to himself.
Therein lies the reactionary impulse to smoke. The eleven men sitting on a steel beam hundreds of feet above the ground is hard competition with the cold sterility of an FDA advert. There was risk in their position, risk in their coming and going to work, risk briefly in their lungs. Whether they were hedonists or utilitarians, the FDA was not on their mind; the bureau’s communications, persuasive or not, bothered them not because they had a country to build. While FDA committees draft plans to minimize nicotine levels in cigarettes, the memories of how the nation was and the imagination of how it could be will continue to be recalled over a cigarette and ruminated over a cigar. Not everywhere can be like Korea.