Where There's Smoke

By Jill Smolowe

Trends have a way of getting started in California, sneered at by the rest of the world, then adopted overseas with rigor. Such has been the case with the war on cigarettes, for years dismissed by Europeans as petty, provincial and puritanical. Nowadays France and other nations are fast catching up with serious no-smoking curbs of their own.

In the land of Gauloises, where 40% of the populace lights up, a law that went into effect this month restricting smoking in most public places led to predictions of angry bistro battles. Instead, hostile encounters have been rare and the ban is shaping up as an exercise in politesse. At a crowded pizzeria on the Champs Elysees, a Parisian woman puffed away peacefully until a man at the next table blurted, "Excuse me. Can you please put out your cigarette? You are disturbing me." As the man later explained, "Before this law was instituted, I never dared to ask anyone to put out a cigarette. Now that I have the right to, I will raise my voice."

"It's an educational effort," says Nathalie Nottet, spokeswoman for France's National Police. "Smokers are being asked to discipline themselves." As the ban entered its second week, no one had yet demanded that an errant smoker be fined up to $260. The police are under instructions not to enforce the law unless they receive a complaint.

That suits the French preference for treating such laws as a general guideline, and no one expects the restrictions to be observed strictly for some time to come. But as antismoking campaigns in the U.S. and Singapore have demonstrated, tough laws and peer pressure can fast reduce the smoker from a sophisticate to a social pariah. Throughout Europe and Asia, a growing body of laws, policies and guidelines is confining smokers to ever smaller zones. In January, France will prohibit all tobacco advertising. And in the developing countries of Asia, a mounting awareness of the ill effects of smoking is prodding governments to act.

Because of their centralized authority and tradition of social legislation, European nations can enact antismoking laws more easily than the U.S. Nevertheless, the change has come fitfully. Britain was among the first to ban advertising on television, in 1965, and to require health warnings on packs, in 1971. Yet Britons, who loathe anything that smacks of a nanny state, have never progressed beyond polite arm twisting. Neither have the Germans, who provide nonsmoking train cars and smoke-free areas in restaurants but rely more on consensus than legal sanctions.

In Italy legislators tried in 1975 to enact stiff bans in public places. The results have been mixed in a country that rarely takes any good-for-you legislation seriously: while theaters and public transportation are smoke- free, hospitals and schools are not always, and restaurants are decidedly not. Parliament will soon try again to pass a law that will so reduce public smoking areas that Bruno Simoncelli, a two-pack-a-day government filing clerk, frets, "I'll have to go back to smoking in the bathroom the way I did when I first started at 16." Even so, restaurants that must install special air conditioning will be given a three-year grace period.

Not surprisingly, Singapore is striving to become the world's first smoke- free city. In this socially engineered ministate, where smoking has been under assault for two decades, cigarettes are strictly banned in nearly every public place, vending machines are outlawed, and tobacco companies are not allowed to sponsor public events. To tame the 16% of the adult population that still smokes, the government may even end the practice in bars.

As the economies of other Asian nations thrive, citizens are paying more attention to their health and pushing for tougher smoking restrictions. "They're doing a lot of things at once, not small steps over 30 years as in the West," says Dr. Judith Mackay, the region's leading antismoking crusader. Even China, the world's largest producer and consumer of tobacco, now restricts smoking in public places and bans advertising.

Hong Kong has matched Singapore's low smoking rate by relying primarily on market forces: a 300% tax in 1983 and an additional 100% tax last year have brought the price of a regular pack to $2.60. In Japan politeness prevails: 61% of adult males smoke, and little has been done beyond recommending the establishment of no-smoking areas in workplaces. This has led to a small outcropping of carefully marked places where smokers can congregate.

None of this means that smokers need fear extinction anytime soon. Cigarettes are still highly profitable, as the governments of France, Italy and Japan know, since they monopolize or control state tobacco industries. France's SEITA earned $2.3 billion in sales revenues last year. Cigarette consumption generated $6.1 billion in tax revenues -- a clear disincentive for enforcing the new ban too zealously.

U.S. tobacco companies are making up for dwindling domestic sales by expanding sales abroad. Asian health officials complain that the influx of fancy foreign brands hurts their efforts to control the habit, particularly among the young. The most fertile ground for new exports is Eastern Europe and Russia, where Marlboro and other brands are relatively expensive -- and often smuggled -- status symbols. In these former communist countries, the idea of state control over private lives is decidedly more ambivalent these days, and the antismoking crusade is just beginning.

With reporting by Jay Branegan/Hong Kong and Farah Nayeri/Paris