Adele Ferguson

Photos on cigarettes follow many warnings

SO WILL A PICTURE of a diseased lung, rotting teeth or a corpse on your cigarette package convince you to give up smoking? Because that’s what the Food and Drug Administration has ordered on every package sold after September, 2012.

The aim, of course, is to cut down on tobacco use which, according to the American Smokers’ Rights Foundation, kills about 443,000 people a year. That’s out of the 43 million Americans estimated to be smokers. They don’t call them coffin nails for nothing.

They’ve tried everything else from bans to a tax load you have to be wealthy to keep up a habit. Incidentally, I’ve never smoked because I couldn’t afford it when it was cheap. It was in 1965 that the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory committee on smoking and health issued the following statement: “Cigarette smoking is a health hazard of sufficient importance in the United States to warrant remedial action.” Result was a new law requiring the message “Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health” on every package as of 1-1-66.

U.S. Sen. Warren G. Magnuson, chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, declared that the new law “in no way interferes with American citizen’s cherished freedom of choice. Anyone who chooses to smoke is free to do so but with the full knowledge that smoking may be hazardous to him.”

THAT DIDN’T LAST long. In January, 1971, the then Surgeon General suggested that there was as much danger to people in the vicinity of smokers and urged states to ban smoking “from all confined public places such as restaurants, theaters, airplanes, trains and buses.” Ferries were included although it was already illegal to smoke on the car decks. Smoking areas were set aside on outside decks. Ferry engineers were excused from the ban because they didn’t want them leaving the engine unattended while outside smoking.

In 1987 lawmakers hassled over smoking on school grounds and decided to butt out. Leave it to the districts. At Garfield High in Seattle, you couldn’t smoke within ten blocks of the school between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. At St. Peters Catholic school in Spokane, if you were caught smoking you were sent home or down to the furnace room, told to grab your ankles and a great big nun was the designated hitter.

At Pullman High, if you were caught, you got a talking to from teachers and suspended a day or two but no paddling. At Lincoln High in Tacoma, if you were caught, you stayed after school and if you didn’t shape up, you were suspended. There was no smoking within three blocks of Puyallup High. Caught, you went to detention but no paddling.

A BAN on smoking in state buildings, vehicles and ferries was ordered by Gov. Booth Gardner as of Jan. 1, 1989. President Clinton outlawed smoking in federal buildings as of 1998 but left entrances and courtyards available.

Those were rough days and the anti-smoking crowd didn’t hesitate to confront anyone lighting up in their vicinity. They tell a story about a man who was a passenger on one of the cruise ships who parked in a chair on an upper desk and lit his cigar. A woman nearby holding a small dog told him to put it out. He refused. She walked over, plucked it from his mouth and threw it overboard. Outraged, he grabbed her dog and threw it overboard. She screamed for the crew and the man was detained until they landed and were met at the dock by the police. They would have arrested him on the spot if the dog hadn’t come swimming up to the dock with the cigar in its mouth.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)