DONLEY T. STUDLAR
IN ONE OF THE FEW DIRECT COMPARISONS OF TOBACCO CONTROL POLICY IN Canada and the United States, Kagan and Vogel pose the question “Which is more remarkable?”:
Twenty-five years after their hazards have been widely publicized,
cigarettes—highly addictive, extremely dangerous, unnecessary
products—continue to be sold and consumed in huge volumes.
Within the past decade or two, despite the objections of economically
powerful tobacco industries and of millions of smokers (a sizable
proportion of the electorate), virtually every democratic industrialized
nation has enacted laws that curtail cigarette advertising, impose new
taxes on cigarettes, and prevent smoking in public places where citizens
have long been accustomed to light up at will.1
This amounts to asking, Is the glass half-full or half-empty?—or, in the context of this chapter, is it more remarkable that governments have imposed so many losses on tobacco interests or, perhaps, so few, as scientific information about the hazards of tobacco use has proliferated over recent decades and public concern has grown?
Tobacco control, both through the budget (taxes and subsidies) and through regulation, is a pertinent contemporary issue to which to apply the concept of loss imposition. In both the United States and Canada, tobacco control has developed