Smokefree

A Social, Moral and Political Atmosphere

Simone Dennis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000189711
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Although tobacco is a legal substance, many governments around the world have introduced legislation to restrict smoking and access to tobacco products. Smokefree critically examines these changes, from the increasing numbers of places being designated as 'smokefree' to changes in cigarette packaging and the portrayal of smoking in popular culture. Unlike existing texts, this book neither advances a public health agenda nor condemns the erosion of individual rights. Instead, Simone Dennis takes a classical anthropological approach to present the first agenda-free, full-length study of smoking. Observing and analysing smoking practices and environments, she investigates how the social, moral, political and legal atmosphere of 'smokefree' came into being and examines the ideas about smoke, air, the senses, space, and time which underlie it. Looking at the impact on public space and individuals, she reveals broader findings about the relationship between the state, agents, and what is seen to constitute 'the public'. Enriched with ethnographic vignettes from the author's ten years of fieldwork in Australia, Smokefree is a challenging, important book which demands to be read and discussed by anyone with an interest in anthropology, sociology, political science, human geography, and public health.

PART ONE

The lay of the smokefree land

1

The difference between tobacco and tomatoes

Introduction

In what follows, I've tried to draw up a kind of feeling of the smokefree legislation in Australia, what it aims to accomplish, and something of its force. The reader who desires a historical account of its emergence will no doubt be disappointed by my own amorphous and rather affectively rendered offering, but, luckily, it is easily supplemented with one of the numerous more structured historical accounts available.¹

It is important to note at the outset of this chapter that in this book I make an especial meaning of smokefree. Technically speaking, the particular legislation properly called 'smokefree' describes only those locations and environments that are free from exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke. When I deploy the term 'smokefree', or 'smokefree atmosphere', I mean to refer to something much broader than just the smoking bans enacted by Commonwealth, state, territory and municipal levels of government to deal with smoke in the air in specific places. Within the confines of this book, 'smokefree' means all efforts on the part of the state designed to curtail smoking prevalence, including the designation of increasing amounts and categories of space 'smokefree', point-of-sale presentation rules and packaging laws, as well as anti-smoking campaigns. This use of the term 'smokefree', then, refers to Australia's comprehensive package of tobacco control measures, including:

• the world's first tobacco plain packaging legislation, which took full effect from 1 December 2012;
• the new health warnings Competition and Consumer (Tobacco) Information Standard 2011, which commenced on 1 January 2012 and took full effect from 1 December 2012 and which requires health warnings to cover at least 75 per cent of the front of most tobacco packaging, 90 per cent of the back of cigarette packaging and 75 per cent of the back of most other tobacco product packaging;
• record investments in anti-smoking social marketing campaigns;
• the 25 per cent tobacco excise increase which began in April 2010;
• a four-stage increase in excise and excise-equivalent customs duty on tobacco and tobacco-related products: the first 12.5 per cent increase commenced on 1 December 2013, a further 12.5 per cent happened on 1 September 2014 and two more are scheduled for 1 September 2015 and 1 September 2016;
• a reduction in duty-free concessions for tobacco products and
• stronger penalties for tobacco smuggling offences.

These 'smokefree' actions and intentions indicate Australia's dedication to reducing Australians' exposure to tobacco. In Australia, it was not until 1997 that a truly national campaign was launched, and it remains the case that responsibility for developing legislation around tobacco is still largely devolved to the states and territories. While this has at times made for a fairly uneven terrain of tobacco control, in 2008, all state and territory governments in Australia signed the National Healthcare Agreement that has the goal of reducing adult daily smoking prevalence from 14 per cent to 10 per cent in the general population, and halving the adult daily smoking rate, of around 40 per cent, among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders by 2018. Australia became a signatory to the World Health Organization (WHO) FCTC on 5 December 2003, almost immediately after the convention opened for signature. It was among the first forty countries to ratify the FCTC, and so became a full Party on 27 February 2005, the date on which the FCTC came into force. Australia is thus legally bound to perform, in good faith, the full range of obligations set out in the convention.

Beyond this, I mean also to refer to a 'smokefree anthropology', an anthropology, as I described it in the Introduction, just as wedded to the accomplishment of smokefree as is the Australian state. It is with this comprehensive definition of 'smokefree' in mind that I turn to a discussion of 'the smokefree atmosphere'. This atmosphere is tense and heavy, thick with tension - one can feel its force pressing down. This affective atmosphere seems composed of tensions between oppositionary pairs - pro-tobacco interests and notions are, for instance imagined as the polar opposites to anti-tobacco interests and notions. While they are certainly mutually antagonistic, they are, however, only ostensibly oppositionary. However much certain kinds of paradigmatic (pro- or anti-) smoking knowledges, principles and practices are desired to be held apart, the poles of the smokefree atmosphere look remarkably similar.

On ‘atmospheres’

I've chosen to characterize the desire to reduce smoking prevalence in Australia, as it is expressed in the NTS (2012-18) (see Intergovernmental Committee on Drugs (Standing Committee on Tobacco) 2012) and the bundle of legislative and other techniques that have been deployed in its service with the term 'atmosphere': the smokefree atmosphere. 'Atmosphere' is a term sufficiently elastic as to capture the prevailing tone and mood of this intention; but I might well have chosen another term - say, 'environment', or 'aerosphere'. I rejected 'environment' very early on, for its inability to indicate the affective qualities that attend 'smokefree', about which I shall say more shortly. I did for a time seriously consider the possibilities presented by 'aerosphere', which has the advantage of capturing the idea that we live (on earth) in an envelope of gases. This is an attractive prospect, because, as I will argue later in the book, 'smokefree' becomes a presence on the basis of its intention to foreground some elemental gases and to banish others that interfere with its (illusory) pure state.

The choice of atmosphere was one I finally made on the basis of the capacity of 'atmosphere' to exert pressure, to push down, to be heavy and 'felt'. This is, of course, a technical, meteorological, definition of atmosphere, but it is metaphorically most ready for application to smokefree - where the pressure exerted, I will argue in this chapter (and indeed throughout this book), is great, heavy and uneven, but never absolute.

Anthropologically speaking, atmospheres are themselves characterized by their capacity to hold within them opposed things. As Rabinow (2007) says, 'atmosphere' conveys a sense of juxtaposition (of word, referent object and/or concept). And Anderson notes, 'The concept of atmosphere is good to think with because it holds a series of opposites - presence and absence, materiality and ideality, definite and indefinite, singularity and generality in a relation of tension' (2009: 80). Some further remarks Anderson made on atmosphere - in the course of making his own case for the affective atmosphere - will be useful at the outset to orient my discussion about the smokefree atmosphere in particular.

Anderson begins his 'Affective Atmospheres' with Marx's profoundly materialist imaginary of the 'revolutionary atmosphere', made as he marked the fourth anniversary of the Chartist People's Paper with an address to a London audience in April 1856. Marx drew up his 'revolutionary atmosphere' with geographical metaphors:

The so-called revolutions of 1848 were but poor incidents small fractures and fissures in the dry crust of European society. However, they denounced the abyss. Beneath the apparently solid surface, they betrayed oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock. Noisily and confusedly they proclaimed the emancipation of the Proletarian, i.e. the secret of the 19th century, and of the revolution of that century. The atmosphere in which we live weighs upon every one with a 20,000-pound force, but do you feel it? No more than European society before 1848 felt the revolutionary atmosphere enveloping and pressing it from all sides'. (Marx [1856] 1978: 577)

It is obvious already that my own discussion of the smokefree atmosphere will be much more caught up with the gaseous than it is with the rocky, more with the air than with the hardness of the fissured ground; more with the air's silence than with the loud cracking and crashing of rocks that indicate that revolution has come to pass. The differences in these natural metaphors are great, and they push thinking along different routes. Anderson recognized that Marx utilized a particular epicurean material imagination that permitted him to draw out the contrasts he saw as particularly fitting for describing matters revolutionary - the sturdiness of rock conceals an ocean of liquid matter beneath; its thrashing will soon turn little fissures in great rends in the rock. Such imagery does, certainly, seem apt for describing revolution. Its aptness is due to the contrast it supplies between ocean and rock. As Anderson, observes, whether material, as Marx imagined it, or otherwise imagined, the key to understanding atmospheres - their construction and their force - lies in appreciating the polarities they contain.

This includes an atmosphere's foundation - that it is at once real and not real. Picking up on Marx's turn of phrase, that the people could not feel the force pressing in on them from the atmosphere heavy with the imminence of revolution, Anderson draws out this element of all atmospheres:

On the one hand, atmospheres are real phenomena. They 'envelop' and thus press on a society 'from all sides' with a certain force. On the other, they are not necessarily sensible phenomena. Marx has to ask if his audience 'feels it'. He assumes not. Nevertheless atmospheres still effect with a certain force. (2009: 77)

The force of the atmosphere, whatever it is, would be affectively registered, according to Anderson. He turns to the concept of affect, regarding it as the site at which the essence of atmosphere makes its home:

Intensities take on the dynamic, kinetic, qualities of the atmos; 'affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them' (Deleuze and Guattari [1991] 1994: 164). Since 'affects are becomings' (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987: 256) that are 'experienced in a lived duration that involves the difference between two states' (Deleuze 1988: 49). The atmosphere [says Anderson] has long been associated with the uncertain, disordered, shifting and contingent - that which never quite achieves the stabiiity of form. (2009: 78, my emphasis)

I will return throughout this book to notions of 'stability of form' and 'the differences between two states' - indeed, these ideas together provide one main analytic foundation for the entire work. For now, though, I want to pick up on another of Anderson's observations about atmospheres, in order to introduce the legislative aspects of Australia's smokefree atmosphere.

Some thoughts on an uninsurable monkey

Anderson notes that atmospheres often bear down upon or gather up those who are not directly entailed in it, 'albeit in a way that may be only tangentially related to the subject' (Anderson 2003: 78). One way in which the smokefree atmosphere asserts a kind of pervasiveness is in its control of tobacco products and how they appear to people in the public domain. In the early 1970s, some extremely discreet and nondescript gold-coloured text about smoking being a health hazard appeared on cigarette packs, and Australian television audiences witnessed the disappearance of direct cigarette advertisements (in 1975). Since 2012, cigarette advertising has not permitted on packets manufactured expressly to contain cigarettes, a legislative move designed to sever communicative relations between smokers and tobacco companies, and to dissuade potential smokers from being enticed by slick advertising into taking up the practice. But these target audiences are not the only ones that might feel the weight of the smokefree atmosphere: there are much more tangential relations afoot. The force of the smokefree atmosphere might be felt by those who enjoy candy, too - indeed by everyone.

Section 106A of the Tobacco Products Control Act 2006 (Western Australia) prohibits any 'food, toy or other product' looking like a cigarette or cigar. Originally pressed into service to prevent the sale of 'Fags' candy sticks to children,² the law states:

A person must not sell any food, toy or other product that is not a tobacco product but is,

• (a) designed to resemble a tobacco product or a package; or
• (b) in packaging that is designed to resemble a tobacco product or a package. (State of Western Australia 2006)

Anderson's observation has quite some purchase around this sort of vigorous elimination, of anything that resembles a tobacco product or package (and so communicates the intolerance for tobacco to a wider audience than just smokers or potential smokers with direct contact with packets). However, his words struck me with significantly more force one afternoon as I happened to pass the television set at home and heard a familiar tune playing. It was a Kmart advertisement, set to Shirley Ellis' catchy The Clapping Song'.³ The version utilized in the advertisement replaces the word 'tobacco' with 'tomato'. The original words are as follows:

3, 6, 9
The goose drank wine
The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line
The line broke, the monkey got choked
And they all went to heaven in a little rowboat.

In the Kmart version, 'wine' is changed to 'lime', tobacco becomes 'tomato', 'choked' turns into 'woke', and instead of going to heaven, the monkey and the goose 'go together' in their little row boat.

Perhaps it is not going too far to suggest that the smokefree atmosphere is so pervasive that it presses down to ensure that a song penned in the 1950s cannot bring its uncritical inclusion of tobacco into the new smokefree atmosphere. The catchy tune emitting from the television set also disseminates the pervasive politics of smokefree: the smokefree atmosphere is certainly present in the lounge room, present among those who might have no direct relation to its force. Everyone can sing along to it, and those who sang the word 'tobacco' where 'tomato' is now present, like me, might have been prompted to think about why the word had changed. Singing along to the tune with original words, I was brought up sharp by 'tomato', and alerted, right away, to the fact that tobacco is now an unsingable word in advertising. It's a bad word. Others, who might be too young to know that the original word was 'tobacco', will never hear the word uttered in relationship to that public-transport-savvy monkey. They will know his predilection for tomatoes, but will never suspect that he used to much prefer tobacco. The atmosphere has changed.

The changes in lyrics promoted well-known marketing blogger Steven Downes to remark on his blog, 'I can only guess that advertiser and agency are trying to avoid any possibility of complaints to the Advertising Standards Board about inappropriate references to alcohol and tobacco consumption and a fatal public transport accident' (see Downes 2014). While Downes may well have meant his remarks in jest, it would certainly be reasonable to think that Kmart would attend with the greatest possible care to the standards relating to tobacco advertising, not least because amendments made in 2012 to the original 1992 Tobacco Advertising Prohibition Act dramatically extended existing restrictions on tobacco advertising to the internet, a key advertising site for the company.

Under the Tobacco Advertising Prohibition Act 1992 Cth. (Australian Government 1992), it is an offence for a corporation to publish or broadcast a tobacco advertisement. The act defines 'advertisement' much more broadly than the everyday meaning of the term; section 9 defines a 'tobacco advertisement' to be any writing, still or moving picture, sign, symbol or other visual image that gives publicity to, or otherwise promotes or is intended to promote, smoking or the purchase or use of tobacco products. An advertiser would do well, indeed, to err on the side of caution, and turn tobacco into tomato.

While, as Downes' remarks suggest, the advertisement as a whole makes a nod to a series of sensitivities pertaining to alcohol and religion, as well as tobacco, tobacco is in a league of its own. Another bit of television might make the point: in 2014, the World Series Cricket championships, which gripped and held the nation for the summer, made sponsorship arrangements with alcohol franchise Beer Wine and Spirits. Arrangements with the purveyors of alcohol remain legal, but the days of the Benson and Hedges World Series Cup are long gone.⁴

Just these few snippets about packs, candy, cricket and tomatoes might indicate that tobacco control is on its way to a hitherto unknown zenith. Certainly, this has produced at least rehearsals of speculation about how far things might go. For instance, the notion that legislation is building to unprecedented levels of intervention was recently depicted in the popular Australian sitcom Kath and Kim. In one episode made in the early 2000s, lead character and light-but-regular smoker Kath Day-Knight speculates on how smoking will be treated twenty years in the future. She envisages police raids on the homes of smokers conducted by officers with the power to confiscate tobacco that has become contraband in this version of the future, and to arrest those found with cigar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Acknowledgements of persons
• Orienting notes: Ethnographic vignettes from a fascinating atmosphere
• Introduction: There's something in the air
• PART ONE The lay of the smokefree land
• PART TWO First, second, third and fourth hand smoke
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index