There’s a new bill before the Michigan legislature that if passed, would eventually save an estimated 17,000 lives a year. Its main sponsor is State Representative Tommy Brann, who was just 19 years old and fresh out of high school when he started a restaurant called Brann’s Steakhouse and Grill in the west Michigan town of Wyoming.
He later built it into a small but successful chain of steakhouses, and three years ago, got elected to the state legislature as a Republican. He’s in his second term now.
I’ve never met Brann, though I have talked with him on the phone, and he seems a decent and compassionate human being. Two years ago, he introduced a couple of bills that would have established much harsher penalties for anyone convicted of deliberately killing someone’s pet dog. They didn’t make it into law, though I think they should have.
Ideologically, Brann and I are mostly in different pews. He told me once that he thought Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged would be a great college textbook for a course on free enterprise. I bit my tongue and didn’t say anything about that.
But his newest bill, HB 4039, is something everyone in the state should completely support. Brann and four bipartisan co-sponsors wants Michigan to change the legal smoking age from 18 to 21, something seven other states and a number of cities have already done.
Coincidentally, his bill was being introduced just as the University of Michigan was releasing a major new study on this very issue. They concluded that passing a bill like Brann’s, something they call “Tobacco 21” legislation, would mean that in five years, we’d have 198,000 fewer smokers than we do now, and 17,000 fewer deaths a year.
Those figures sounded suspiciously large to me, until I reflected that nearly all smokers take up the habit when they are teenagers, to look cool, because of peer pressure, or both.
Virtually no one older decides to start smoking, once they are mature enough to realize it is an expensive, dirty and smelly addiction that will ruin your skin, heart and lungs.
The good news is that most adults get it. More than 40 percent of Americans smoked cigarettes before the Surgeon General’s report in 1964 that conclusively linked tobacco to lung cancer. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control, that had fallen to 15.5 percent by 2016. But the bad news is that more than 20 percent of Michiganders still smoke.
And as of two years ago, more than 10 percent of Michigan high school students were smoking, again a figure slightly higher than the national average.
You might think Brann’s bill to raise the smoking age would pass unanimously in about five minutes, and it should. But you can bet that the tobacco lobby will be working hard against it. Raising the age when it becomes legal to use tobacco will cost them customers.
Never mind that tobacco is, after all, as a pioneering journalist named George Seldes said in the 1940s, the only legal product when, used as directed, will kill you.
Common sense ought to tell us that when even a follower of Ayn Rand thinks a product is too dangerous for young people to use, we should pay attention.
