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I’ve written hundreds of letters to newspapers over the years, and always invited the letters editor of the Sydney Morning Herald to come and talk to my public health advocacy students each year. The letters page of newspapers is one of the most read. I didn’t keep most of those I wrote, but here are a few I did and which I’m pleased were published.
M.J. Kay’s concerns about community gun armouries in urban areas are baseless (Letters, 5 November). If governments can ban the importation of firecrackers and radar detectors, they can certainly restrict the importation and manufacture of guns to those that can be easily disarmed by removal of the firing mechanism. Most guns already come apart. This way, community armouries would store only the firing mechanisms, thus saving space, reducing costs and negating concern about thefts (stealing a piece of a gun would be pointless). It would also allow shooters to retain their precious guns in their homes for purposes of cleaning, fondling and full dress rehearsals of their paranoid fantasies about dispelling the invading hordes from the north. When the invasion is announced or when they want to kill a few bunnies or shoot at human silhouettes down at the gun club, they can slip down to their local police station and check out their missing bit. This proposal will not stop all gun deaths, but it will put a critical pause between the rage of a domestic violence episode, or the despair of a potential suicide, and the final, bloody consequence that happens some 700 times year in Australia when guns are in the next room.
At the cricket on Saturday the camera lingered on a shirtless, hatless couple, both smoking. Richie Benaud commented, “While it’s their own business I know, they would be much more sensible if they wore hats” and then went on to talk about the preventability of melanoma.
With lung cancer killing many more Australians annually than skin cancer, Benaud’s very pardonable excursion into other people’s business might well have mentioned the couple’s smoking as well. But then, the sun doesn’t sponsor the cricket.
It is getting more and more amusing to follow the antics of the tobacco industry and its “independent” economic advisers (20 May). Professor Robert Tollison, a long-time friend to the international industry and apparently their intellectual “big gun”, has come all the way from Kentucky to give us the following beauties. First, tobacco taxation is regressive. Ummm, well . . . yes . . . all sales taxes are regressive when all people don’t earn the same. The corollary of his argument is presumably that the price of cigarettes should be lowered. What a perverse way to help the poor. Next, smokers don’t get sick from smoking (sound familiar?) and even if they did, according to Tollison, would “be penalised by labour markets for excessive absenteeism with lower wages.” Oh, really? Perhaps while he’s here, he should stop by and tell all those duffers in the life insurance industry that their own figures on smokers dying younger and having higher health costs are all wrong. And finally, $9.1 billion out of the estimated $12.5 billion annual benefits of smoking are accounted for by . . . ready?. . . the $9.1 billion that smokers spend on their addiction. And I suppose this means that if they didn’t smoke, it would all be put in jam tins forever with not a cent spent elsewhere in the economy!
The truth about the economics of smoking that the industry dares not mention is that the 60 percent of lung cancer deaths that occur before age 70 assist in pruning what some economists refer to as the “unproductive sector” of the population. This is the same sort of thinking that the Nazis used in their death camps, where human life was valued only while it could contribute to the German war effort. The frail, the aged and the sick were simply killed. Tobacco serves the same purpose but the industry can’t bring itself to point out this benefit because it involves admitting that smoking kills.
So Nick Greiner is “relaxed” about chairing W.D. & H.O. Wills (22 June), rationalising that tobacco is a legal product. The same base expediency of course was used by those in Victorian England who sent children down mines and up chimneys, and by those who profited from the entirely legal slave trade before the bleeding hearts ended those nice little earners. No matter that smoking kills 19,000 Australians a year, with about 55 percent of these dying before age 70. If it’s legal, there’s little more to be said it seems.
Greiner says that smokers have “full information” about the risks of smoking. This is from the chairman of a company that has always refused to tell consumers which chemical additives it uses in cigarettes and has spent a public relations fortune over the years trying to muddy public awareness that smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer – it’s only a “statistical association”.
Nick Greiner does not smoke himself – a phenomenon not uncommon among tobacco barons. Doubtless he would argue that he chooses not to smoke. While the male head of a lingerie company would not be expected to “choose” to wear women’s underwear, smoking is a choice open to all. It is scarcely imaginable that the chairman of Ford would drive a Toyota or the head of the Meat Marketing Board would be a vegetarian. Such lack of personal confidence in their products would probably see them not long in their jobs. The tobacco industry does not seem to mind such an irony.
Your correspondent John Harvey (22 March) uses an argument that is depressingly common among the gun lobby. It runs, “There are far larger causes of death than guns . . . why don’t people arguing about gun control turn their attention (for example) to road carnage? This is about as sensible as saying to a heart specialist, “Why don’t you try to cure cancer?” or to an environmentalist, “What are you doing about unemployment?”
He argues that gun deaths are as rare as shark attack deaths. In 1994, 522 Australians were killed by guns. No one died from shark attack that year. And he caps it all by calling gun registration “discredited”. Why is it, then, that we have maintained such a discredited system for handguns in this state since 1927? And why is it, Mr Harvey, that the UK, which has three times Australia’s population and crime rate to match, had only 72 gun deaths in 1993? The UK has some of the world’s toughest gun laws, and yet I can just hear Mr Harvey saying, “And that didn’t stop Dunblane.” This is like saying, “If you can’t fix every problem, don’t try to fix any of them.” Tougher gun laws, including registration, will not eliminate gun violence, but there is plenty of evidence that they will reduce it.
The IPA’s Alan Moran’s views on “sin taxes” like those on tobacco (13 September) will have earned him a pat on the back if not the wallet from one of his board, Nick Greiner, down at W.D. & H.O. Wills. Moran’s gripe is tobacco tax is regressive, therefore making low-income smokers spend a higher proportion of their income on tobacco than the wealthy. He thinks it “remarkable” that voices preoccupied with equity have not gone into bat for this heinous burden on the poor.
What is truly “remarkable” is the extent to which Moran and his ideological ilk have the gall to appropriate concern for the poor in full knowledge that international evidence has repeatedly shown that the lowest socioeconomic groups have the highest responsiveness (both cessation and reduction in number of cigarettes smoked) to cigarette price increases.
Because these groups have the highest smoking rates and the highest rates of smoking-caused diseases, price policy is of enormous importance in any efforts to narrow these socioeconomic differentials and reduce diseases like lung cancer. This is of course why the tobacco industry and its apologists have become born-again social welfare advocates. They want the poor and the other main price sensitive group, children, to smoke more.
The corollary of Moran’s position is presumably that the price of cigarettes should be lowered. What a perverse way to help the poor. Killing with kindness comes to mind.
Philip Morris’ decision to recall cigarette lighters because they posed “a potential risk” is like White Star line recalling the Titanic because it had splinters in the handrails.
Several weeks ago the National Health and Medical Research Council called for professional boxing to be banned because of the brain damage it causes nearly all participants. This well-motivated but unrealistic proposal seems to have disappeared without trace. Might I suggest instead that the NH&MRC, in a spirit of compromise, lobbies for the rules of boxing to be reversed? The main objective under the present rules is to hit your opponent’s head so hard that his brain sloshes with such force against the skull that unconsciousness occurs. By contrast, a foul stroke is recorded when the boxer hits his opponent in the testicles. This can be very painful, occasionally dangerous, but never life-threatening. Under the reversed rules, a foul stroke would become one that strikes the head and the crowd-pleaser redefined as a lusty blow flush to the orchestra stalls. Think of the new impetus to the development of evasive footwork. Think of new generations of young men with bruised egos but intact brains. With the search on for new demonstration sports for the 2000 Olympics, “cod-walloping” could be Australia’s responsible entry.
Kathryn Greiner’s analogy suggesting the University of Sydney may as well refuse tobacconists’ children places because the Senate voted against endorsing her BAT chairman husband is quite facile. Unlike Nick Greiner, tobacconists’ children have no fiduciary responsibility to promote transnational tobacco company policy that if successful results in the early and painful deaths of thousands of Australians. Mrs Greiner’s moral support for her beleaguered husband is touching but please, spare us such nonsense.