The erudite Dr. Burton in his _Anatomy of Melancholy_ refers to the
plant nicotiana as "divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco which goes
far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosophers' stones."
It is the purpose of this article to study the social cost and the
social advantage of this divine commodity in the United States, for
the purpose of framing a rough and necessarily incomplete balance
sheet, which will bring into juxtaposition the credit and the debit
items. Such a balance sheet can obviously not aspire to accuracy in
every detail. Many items cannot be expressed in figures at all. For
those which can be translated into dollars and cents we cannot always
get perfectly reliable statistics. In many cases we must resort to
estimates. Fortunately the most important data are those for which the
figures are most trustworthy, and, as regards the others, it will not
be altogether fruitless to enumerate them, even though we may not be
able to give their value in legal tender.
_Dr._
1. The importance of tobacco in our national budget is shown by the
latest census figures, according to which it ranks eleventh among the
industries of the country, with respect to the value of the product.
Our manufactured tobacco was worth at the factory in 1909,
$416,695,000. It thus outranked bread and other bakery products,
women's clothing, copper, malt liquors, automobiles, petroleum, and
distilled liquors. It was but about a third less important than
manufactures of cotton. Its value was more than twice as great as that
of distilled liquors.[3] These figures do not, of course, tell us how
much the people now spend on tobacco. They represent the value of the
product at the factory four years ago. They do not include such items
as transportation, middlemen's profit, advertising, etc., which enter
into the retail price. Nor do they include the large amount spent upon
imported tobacco.
[Footnote 3: Abstract of 13th Census, p. 442.]
A careful statistician, Professor William B. Bailey, of Yale,
published, nearly two years ago, some figures showing that the people
of the United States spent at that time in a single year about
$1,100,000,000 on tobacco. As the receipts from the internal revenue
tax on tobacco have increased by about fourteen per cent. in the last
two years, it seems fair to assume that the general consumption has
increased by this amount. Fourteen per cent. of $1,100,000,000 would
be $154,000,000. It seems, therefore, conservative to state that at
the present time the people are spending at least $1,200,000,000 for
the pleasure of smoking and chewing. As a check upon these figures,
the author has made two independent estimates each by a different
process, and their results confirm the figures given above. It should
be noted, moreover, that this estimate applies only to the direct
purchase of tobacco. It does not include the accessories of smoking,
such as matches, pipes, receptacles for holding tobacco, cuspidors,
etc. In the fiscal year 1911-12, we imported pipes and smokers'
articles valued at $1,478,000, in addition to what we produced at
home. The difficulty of securing estimates on these accessories is so
great that no attempt has been made to include them. If they could be
included, the amount which tobacco users spend for their particular
pleasure would undoubtedly foot up a great deal more than
$1,200,000,000 a year at the present time.
The significance of these figures can best be appreciated, if we
compare them with other items in our national budget. To put the
matter concretely, "tobacco takers" spend in a single year twice the
amount spent by the entire country on railroad travel[4] and about
three times the amount which it spends on its common school system;
they pay out annually about three times the entire cost of the Panama
Canal; they destroy directly about three times as much property as
was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake. Their smokes and chews
cost them just about twice what it costs to maintain the government of
the United States, including the interest on the public debt. Our
smokers could in a year and a half pay off the entire bonded debt of
our states, cities, and counties, as it was in 1902, and in an
additional nine months the entire interest-bearing debt of the United
States, if they were willing to exercise the self-denial which was
exercised a few years ago by the Persian people.[5]
[Footnote 4: The gross passenger receipts with payments for excess
baggage, etc., in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1913, were
$666,554,927, omitting railroads whose operating expenses were
below $100,000. Provisional report of Interstate Commerce
Commission "For the Press."]
[Footnote 5: According to W. Morgan Shuster, the people of Persia
practically gave up smoking as a protest against the concession of
a tobacco monopoly to an English Company. See _The Strangling of
Persia_, p. xvii.]
Here are also a few comparisons with foreign countries. A well-known
international jurist not long ago put together, as an argument against
war, the figures showing the expenditure of the leading nations of the
world on their army and navy. The list included Germany, Russia,
France, Great Britain, and Japan. The figures for 1910 footed up
$1,217,000,000 or approximately the amount devoted to tobacco by the
people of the United States in a single year.[6] Our smokers impose
upon the resources of the country a burden larger than the war
indemnity which Germany exacted of France after a humiliating defeat
in 1871; they spend about six times what it costs the German Empire to
maintain its elaborate and comprehensive system of workingmen's
insurance.[7]
[Footnote 6: T. S. Woolsey, _Yale Review_, March, 1913.]
[Footnote 7: The total amount spent for all purposes under
insurance for sickness, accidents, invalidity and old age in
Germany was 804,000,000 Marks or less than $200,000,000 in 1910.
_Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich_, 1912, p. 372.]
2. The cost of smoking to the country is by no means limited to its
costs to the smoker. Chief among its indirect burdens is the
incineration of property other than tobacco leaves, and the
destruction of innocent lives which it exacts as its annual toll from
non-smokers. We have had some tragic illustrations of this in recent
years. The Triangle shirtwaist fire in New York City in 1910 not only
burned up valuable property but caused a cruel loss of life. Over one
hundred and forty workers were sacrificed in this case to a
cigarette.
In the winter of 1912 occurred the destruction of the Equitable
Building, "caused by the careless tossing of a match into a waste
paper basket in the Savarin restaurant which occupied quarters in the
basement. This match had doubtless been used to light a cigar or
cigarette."[8] The waste of time caused by this fire in addition to
the actual destruction of the structure must have been enormous, if
one thinks of the loss of the records of the great corporations which
occupied the building, and of the inconvenience and delays suffered by
stockholders and policy holders and other persons who had business
relations with them. The fire which destroyed a part of the state
capitol at Albany, including a vast number of books and manuscripts,
was in all probability caused by a smoker, though the evidence is not
quite as conclusive as in the case of the Triangle shirtwaist factory
and the Equitable Building. Powell Evans says regarding this fire:
"The financial loss is $6,000,000. The loss of documents and records
is priceless." And yet to estimate the total social loss we should add
to the pecuniary value of the building and its contents, the waste of
time and labor inflicted upon a large number of innocent students who
desired to use the library, but were unable to do so. All of the
readers of the summary of legislation, e. g., were seriously
embarrassed, since this fire delayed the issue of this publication by
a couple of years.
[Footnote 8: Report of Fire Department of the City of New York for
1912, p. 13.]
These cases are referred to, because they were peculiarly dramatic and
are still fresh in the memory of newspaper readers. But it would be a
mistake to assume that they represent anything exceptional or
phenomenal, like an earthquake or a tornado. Smoking is a chronic and
regular cause of fires, perfectly familiar to those whose profession
requires them to risk their lives in fighting them, a cause as
susceptible of statistical treatment as the mortality from
tuberculosis or typhoid. Unfortunately our statistics on this subject
are very meagre, and efforts to secure figures from insurance men, who
would be expected to have a direct interest in ascertaining the facts,
have been surprisingly discouraging. Through the prompt courtesy of
the officials concerned, however, the reports of several state fire
marshals and of the fire commissioners of several large cities have
been secured, and are summarized below.
These statistics make no claim to completeness. In the nature of
things, the causes of many fires cannot be ascertained, and, even
where they are stated in a printed report, they are not always easy to
interpret. For the particular subject under discussion it is
especially hard to know what percentage of the fires caused by
carelessness with matches should be charged to smokers. The common use
of electric lights in cities, as well as of permanent fires for
cooking and heating, makes it altogether reasonable to suppose that a
very large percentage of the matches used serve the purposes of
smokers. Observation of the habits of smokers indicates that a still
larger percentage of fires caused by the careless use of matches is
attributable to them. To avoid exaggeration, however, it has been
thought best not to assume that all of the fires caused by
carelessness with matches should be charged to smokers. Hence two
columns are printed, one showing the fires due to matches (exclusive
of matches in the hands of children and matches supposed to be ignited
by rats or mice), the other showing the fires which are caused
directly by cigars, cigarette stumps, smoking in bed, etc. The column
giving the total number of fires for which causes are assigned is made
by deducting from the total number of fire alarms the cases of false
alarms, double alarms, etc., and the cases in which the cause was
either not ascertained, or so vaguely stated as to be meaningless.