OUR TOBACCO: ITS COST
A TENTATIVE BALANCE SHEET
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.
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]
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]
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.