Of Puff Jobs And Smokescreens

Is the WHO-World Bank campaign against tobacco puffed up? A certain section of economists in Delhi certainly believes so. Any war is expensive and the war against tobacco, if you weigh the costs against the benefits, is a senseless one, so goes their argument.

The occasion was the book release of War Against Tobacco: At What Cost? by Deepak Lal and Roger Scruton, the former an economist, ironically earlier with the World Bank, and the latter a philosopher-writer based in London.

The panel discussion was chaired by economist Bibek Debroy, who, as a smoker, said he had a vested interest in the proceedings, while the book was released by management guru turned bestselling-author Gurcharan Das, airing his views here "as an ordinary citizen." The other panelist besides the author Lal was Dr Shreekant Gupta of the Delhi School of Economics. The anti-smoking lobby, which was to have been represented by a doctor from ICMR, stayed away, thereby robbing the meet of whatever fire it might have attracted.

 

Published by Delhi-based Liberty Institute, the book seeks to promote awareness and appreciation of the four institutional pillars of a free society, namely individual rights, rule of law, limited government and free market.

The book was sparked off after reading World Bank's report: `Curbing the Epidemic: Governments and the Economics of Tobacco Control.' Lal argues that the report is a smokescreen and warns the Bank against making unjust economic claims.

The Bank proposes increasing taxes on tobacco, but Lal finds that the economic welfare losses from existing taxes are huge. "For India, the per smoker loss from current taxation is nearly twice per Capita GDP, and the aggregate loss from current and future taxation (of say, a 10 per cent per annum increase in taxes for 10 years) would be a massive 80 per cent of current GDP." As for the health "claims" against the use of tobacco, Lal questions most of the findings especially the one on secondary smoking. "It's statistical witchcraft," he alleges, pulling out data to the contrary, citing a test done on passive smoking where 1,000 people in a controlled group were kept away from cigarette smoke and 1,000 others exposed to normal circumstances. "Forty-one of those in the intervention group died whereas in the non-intervention group only 40 died!" "I didn't know the data on secondary smoking was that ambiguous," said Gurcharan Das, clearly amused by Lal's witty speech as well as his original line of thinking.

Lal does acknowledge that tobacco use is harmful, but he feels that to place a ban on it because it is addictive is stretching the point. "Then ban bungee jumping, ban sex," he counters, saying that "Both are equally addictive."

The calculation used by WHO is that for every packet of cigarette consumed, 157 minutes of your life is cut short. According to Lal, the WHO has used the long living Japanese to calculate their life expectancy average. But as everyone knows, he points, tobacco related diseases _ heart attacks and lung cancer _ usually affect the elderly, by which time most Indians would have died of other causes _ perhaps cholera, malaria or any epidemic.

An indignant Lal concluded his arguments: "The attempt to inflict the estimated large losses of economic welfare on poor people is wicked, when for so many of these poor the noxious weed is one of the only sources of pleasure in lives which remain nasty, brutish and short." That found a ready taker in Bibek Debroy who summed up: "People who smoke may live shorter but if I stop smoking, life may seem longer."