“Big Brother.” The phrase conjures up an overbearing omnipresence that watches, disparagingly, everybody. Totalitarian states are big brothers; so are the “nanny states” that preach, ad nauseam, the party line for all us little people to toe.
Not surprisingly, many Americans, schooled to admire the renegade Pilgrims, want to demarcate a “no pass zone” for private citizens, a terrain free from government intrusion. We Americans value privacy, and with privacy comes the right to make personal decisions outside the spotlight of a Big Brother, however well-intentioned he may be.
Sometimes, though, Big Brother is benevolent. Sometimes we should acknowledge – even thank – him.
Big Brother’s scourge of the past decade has been tobacco. Billboards, advertisements, the ever-rising taxes – all preach “no,” as do the “thank you for not smoking” signs that crop up everywhere, even in friends’ houses.
The government’s insistence on smoking bans in public places ratcheted up Big Brother’s oversight: in certain spots, people who lit up would not be considered just boorish, or offensive. They’d be breaking the law.
Two impulses spurred this edict. First, it complemented the larger initiative to get smokers to stop smoking. More crucially, Big Brother wanted to protect the nonsmokers among us.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that each year secondhand smoke kills 46,000 Americans of heart disease. Libertarians faced a dilemma: a smoker’s freedom to warp his lungs was his license to warp other people’s lungs. A murky philosophical zone.
In this murky zone, Big Brother forged ahead. Today, more than half the states prescribe nosmoking zones in public spots, including restaurants, airports, state parks and government buildings. Without government prodding, many workplaces have banned smoking.
Initially the evaluation data on these bans were too spotty, too inconsistent, to justify the edict.
So the news from two medical journals is refreshing (Circulation and the Journal of the American College of Cardiology). Scientists amassed data from a collection of studies to report: the bans do lower heart disease. One study looked at 13 communities throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. One year after the ban, the number of heart attacks plummeted by 17 percent; three years post-ban, the number fell to 36 percent. The second study tracked bans in 10 communities: heart attacks dropped 26 percent.
Researchers estimate that a nationwide ban would lead to 145,000 fewer heart attacks.
The thousands of people whose lives were spared, thanks to smoking bans, should thank Big Brother. •
Joan Retsinas is the managing editor of Medicine & Health/Rhode Island, a monthly journal of the Rhode Island Medical Society.
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