Cigarettes @ Co-op a Human Rights Issue?

Here's a recent post, from someone called "Mosaic Thump," from the smoking cessation blog of the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society, on whose board I serve. Pursuant to a policy the board adopted last year, the Co-op has stopped selling tobacco products and will ban the use of tobacco at its facilities as of January 1, 2010.

Mosaic Thump's post bore the title "Human Rights Advocate" and the title was hyperlinked to the web site of a major tobacco company.

"Smoking is bad for you. I have smoked, i know many smokers and quite a few non-smokers too. It has taken lives in my family, it has crippled the lives of people I’ve loved. Why tobacco hasn’t been criminalized is beyond my apprehension… BUT IT HASN’T BEEN.

It is still your right as a citizen of the United States over the age of 18 to consume tobacco products. Until the day it becomes illegal to smoke a cigarette outside in a designated area, an employer should have no right to tell it’s employees that they can’t smoke on a break or on unpaid time.

I believe that the board members/doctors/(selective) co-op members that came up with this plan have probably never worked at a low wage job in their adult lives and therefore could not possibly understand the emotional, social and financial hardships that many smokers face. How could it be their decision what working class employees what to do with their bodies concerning a completely legal and non-mind-altering substance?

Doesn’t sound like the policy of a growing progressive co-operative to me.
-Mosaic Thump

Here's my reply:

I am one of those "board members/doctors/(selective co-op members," referenced by the anonymous blogger "Mosaic Thump" above, who played a role in coming up with the Co-op's tobacco policy. I thought, therefore, that it might be helpful if I weighed in with a response.

Thanks entirely to my good luck, I have indeed had to endure few emotional, social and financial hardships. My forbears, particularly my grandparents, rose to those challenges so that I didn't have to.

But I think it is important in this context to distinguish the challenges faced by people who work in relatively low-wage jobs from the challenges confronted by people who are addicted to tobacco. Not every working class person smokes cigarettes and not every cigarette smoker earns an hourly wage.

I admit to some tempation to be paternalistic and patronizing. It seems to me that working class folks, and everyone else, are well-served by social policies that are designed to help free them from oppression and exploitation by tobacco companies. Cigarettes were invented by those companies with reckless indifference to their then-suspected and since-proven deadly effects, but with the certainty that cigarettes would enslave their users via addiction and thus always have lots of customers. But, I concede, in the end it is up to cigarette users, whatever their niche in the economy, to decide for themselves whether they agree with my perspective on what is, as M. Thump points out, a perfectly legal product.

Thus the Co-op does not purport to tell its employees, its members or its non-member customers whether they can or cannot use tobacco. The tobacco policy does not prohibit employees from smoking in their free time, whether during the work day or otherwise. It simply makes clear that the Co-op will not participate in tobacco-related commerce nor, in the interest of making the Co-op's facilities pleasant and health-promoting for all, permit the use of tobacco at the Co-op's facilities. The policy is no more reasonable or unreasoanble, and no more or less restrictive of personal freedoms, that a policy of not allowing alcohol use -- or bare feet -- at the Co-op.

Above I alluded to the good fortune bequeathed to me by my ancestors. Unfortunately I did not return the favor to my daughter, who suffers from a chronic illness (cystic fibrosis). CF kills its patients, slowly over time, by inflicting permanent damage to their lungs. (A picture of my daughter, during her two-week hospital stay last fall, appears at the top of this post.) It seems to me, from knowing my daughter and well as other people who struggle with this disease, that if God blessed you with a perfectly healthy pair of lungs you should resist the efforts of the tobacco companies to make you defile them. That's not the basis of the Co-op's tobacco policy, but it does explain my passion about this issue -- and my strong belief that the Co-op's tobacco policy advances, rather than conflicts with, the Cooperative Principles.

To avoid difficulties later I feel obliged to stress that the above sentiments are mine and mine alone. I am not authorized to speak on behalf of the Co-op or its Board of Directors.