TOBACCO AND HUMAN WILL

There is something unbalanced about a country that compares cigarette manufacturers to Nazis but refuses to pass judgment upon child abusers (provided they are the child's biological parents). The war on smoking seems to consume all of the moral energy our society cannot muster on subjects like crime, unwed parenting and vulgarity.

Mike Luckovich is a splendid editorial cartoonist and, based upon a brief introduction years ago, I'd say a splendid fellow. But he chose in a recent cartoon to compare tobacco companies to Pol Pot.

Have we been so thoroughly propagandized on the evils (the word that's always used) of smoking that we cannot see the offensiveness of such a comparison? In saner times, we understood that smoking was a vice, like drinking or gambling, not a sin. Sin connotes an offense against another human being (or God). Have we become so self-worshipping that we now think the worst crimes are those we commit against our own health?

There is an almost hysterical edge to our national obsession with health. Night after night, no matter what is happening in the political, economic or international sphere, the leading item on the evening news is health-related. A new breakthrough in treating some disease or, more often, the newest study showing a connection between X (jogging, ice cream, cold cream) and cancer of Y will dominate the news. Even a new study showing no connection -- like the recent conclusion that power lines do not, in fact, increase the likelihood that your child will get leukemia -- is trumpeted as big news.

Health is seen not just as desirable but as admirable. A person who works out and has a low cholesterol level often speaks of it in moral, not just practical, terms. The body is a temple. As for those who lack excellent health credentials, they are lost souls. "I was so awful," a woman friend confesses about a particular food indulgence. "I felt like a bad person." Those who are overweight feel as if they've sinned and are aching to discover a gene that will absolve them of moral culpability for their condition (though the likelihood that any one gene controls such a complex characteristic as body weight is very small). Smokers themselves, the ultimate sinners, seek absolution by claiming that demon advertising forced them to light up and irresistible nicotine kept them hooked.

This is not to suggest that smoking is benign. We know it increases the risk of contracting about 25 diseases, and roughly one in three lifelong smokers gets lung cancer. But any smoker can quit anytime. Millions have.

To listen to the attorneys general who pummeled the tobacco companies in the recent negotiations, as well as the president of the United States, you'd conclude that smoking is the greatest evil confronting our society, and particularly our children. My friend Kate O'Bierne of National Review judges that the only way to get liberals exercised about teen sex is to argue that it leads to smoking (afterward, don't you know?).

Frankly, the greatest threat to our teen-agers is the automobile. If we were seriously looking to punish manufacturers of a product that kills, we'd be locking up the guys in Detroit. Every year, 5,000 teen-agers are killed in car accidents. How many die from smoking? None.

Shall we revoke the drivers' licenses of everyone under 25? Reduce the speed limit to 30 miles per hour? Sue the car companies?

We haven't even begun to consider other products that are legal and harmful. What about alcohol? Arguably, alcohol does as much or more damage to children and teen-agers as cigarettes. Why not sue Seagrams?

The answer is that people have a zone of free will -- even to run risks not all of us would choose. The recent tobacco settlement was premised on several offensive notions: that smokers are helpless automatons controlled by advertising, that companies should be punished for selling a perfectly legal product, and that the federal government should save us all by regulating tobacco under the FDA.

Bob Dole was ridiculed for saying that milk is bad for you. Someone has since sued the dairy industry for pushing whole milk, knowing of its association with heart disease. Under the logic of the tobacco deal, it makes perfect sense.

Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist.