Letter to the director of NYTimes: Javier Marías and tobacco

In response to Mr. Marias' article published in your newspaper on January 22, 2006, I would like to clarify certain aspects of his personal stance. Readers are mature enough to take his article as nothing more than a personal opinion but I still feel committed to provide some brief comments to encourage a critical evaluation of his words.

Mr. Javier Marias manages well to portrait the Spanish government as a totalitarian neo-fascist bunch of paternalist busybodies. He succeeds quite well in playing with ideas as to construct a logically solid argument. And he should, he is a writer after all (one can easily see he's not a human rights promoter, not fully committed at least). The only problem is that his account is biased, terribly. He handles logic well, but not facts. His vision of reality seems to be based upon a childish wish to get away with anything he wants to do, whatever the outcome. Quite understandably, then, he doesn't give any figures of death rates due to consumption of or exposure to tobacco smoke (ie. about 50.000 deaths per year). Otherwise he would be fouling his own nest.

It's true that walking along polluted streets in a big town and similar things aren't good for our health, as is tobacco. But what Mr. Marias seem to be implying is that we shouldn't give a damn about any situation which is wrong, because there are many other situations which are much worse. I would be very supportive to policies which encourage using the bike to go to work or to somehow forcing, if that could be possible, the US to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol. But still I am a breathing human being, and up to now I have had to stand stinky, carcinogen smoke on virtually every place I've been to in Spain to have some leisure time, very often including areas where smoking was already forbidden. If Spaniards had been as civic as Mr. Marias holds, I'm sure the recently passed anti-smoking law wouldn't have been necessary, nor would there have been any social demand for it.


By the sight of things, Mr. Marias is not aware, or ignores, that, according to the WHO, the concentrations of toxicity in our lungs are much higher when we inhale tobacco smoke than because of atmospheric pollution. Not to mention that we usually don't sit or stand next to a car's exhaust pipe INDOORS -- that would be unbearable, indeed much more than smoke! Be it as it may, the fact is that smoking causes many thousand deaths a year, and car combustion does not. Its effect on the natural environment is, however, quite another topic.

Mr. Marias asserts that 'the government's argument that it is seeking to improve public health is hypocritical [because] the Spanish Treasury takes in colossal revenues, direct and indirect, thanks to this pernicious habit'. So, what does this mean? Should the Spanish government not tax tobacco in order not to be hypocritical? I don't get this 'implicit message': how come the Spanish government can be implicitly talking us into smoking more, whilst at the same time regulating tobacco consumption on the grounds that it damages our health and that nearly one thousand people die every year in Spain because of their exposure to second-hand smoke? It's been proven that higher taxes on tobacco discourages smoking, so taxing is perfectly consistent with the government's aim to improve public health. Besides, I honestly don't think any Spaniard, however patriot they are, smokes more out of a wish to help settle the national debt.

As usually happens with smokers, Mr. Marias is looking at reality from the angle that best suits his interests. I agree with him that 'people should be allowed to make decisions about their health as they see fit, even if that means undermining it'. What I can't subscribe is that they make decisions about other people's health, which is what happens when someone smokes in a pub or a bar or a disco or whatever public place. This smoking guy might be having a great time with his or her smoking fellows, but the waiters, the dancers, the bouncers and the people who work there in general do HAVE TO inhale their happy smoke. They don't have a choice -- unless they quit their job, that is.

So please Mr. Marias, when you see a Spaniard in a place where there are non-smokers too, do ask them kindly not to smoke and not to force the workers there to breath their smoke. You will see how civically they react.