A Closer Look at Stogies

When Assemblywoman Carole Migden (D-San Francisco) introduced a bill requiring cigar importers and manufacturers to put health warning labels on their packaging, she expected it to sail through the Legislature on the strength of logic. Why shouldn’t cigars--which the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this summer definitively linked to cancers of the throat, mouth, esophagus and lungs--carry the same warning labels as cigarettes?

In recent months, however, the cigar industry, which inhaled $1 billion in U.S. sales last year, has been depicting Migden as an uptight spoiler of their gentlemanly pursuit. Migden’s bill passed the Assembly in June on a 50-27 vote, but she says rallying support for it in the Senate, which will vote on the legislation later this month, has been “like walking through sludge.”

Migden’s critics say that adults who occasionally relax in an armchair, put on a symphony and enjoy a stogie don’t need and wouldn’t heed warning labels. Migden is concerned not about middle-age men in smoking jackets but about the increasing numbers of teenagers who have fallen for cigars as hip and cool emblems of the likes of Wayne Gretzky, Whoopi Goldberg and Arnold Schwarzenegger, all of whom have appeared on the cover of Cigar Aficionado magazine. A Centers for Disease Control study last year found that about 6 million ninth- through 12th-graders had smoked at least one cigar in the previous year. The CDC study also found that cigar smoking had led some children to cigarettes.

The cigar industry might be right that warnings wouldn’t change well-educated adults. But Migden’s bill is worthy if it sways even one teenager or young adult who thinks cigars are some kind of safe alternative to cigarettes.