Watching a soccer game at a Turkish bar reliably produces one moment of happiness—even if neither team scores. When the halftime whistle blows, all the young men clear their chairs and go outside to smoke. So few people remain inside—where it’s been illegal to smoke since 2009—you’d think someone called in a bomb threat.
Smoking is alarmingly common here, with 60% of Turkish men declaring themselves regular smokers. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization lists Turkey as the world’s seventh largest producer of cigarettes, and the eighth largest market for consumption. Indeed, an Italian classmate told me that a common phrase for heavy smokers in Europe is that they are “smoking like a Turk.”
There’s some ugly reasons for this high level of consumption. “Anti-smoking groups say international cigarette companies in the past picked the Middle East as a key market and distributed free cigarettes to promote them.” Likewise, the Turkish Temperance Society says that tobacco companies introduced higher-nicotine, shorter cigarettes in Turkey in anticipation of 2009’s smoking ban. When I first read this I filed it into my voluminous, ever-growing mental cabinet of Turkish conspiracy theories. But actually in November of 2007 Phillip Morris International really did introduce “Marlboro Intense Cigarettes” to Turkey. I suppose nothing is beyond an industry that has tobacco vending machines in Japan.
There is some good news. Turkey’s smoking rate is increasing by between 1% and 1.5% every year, whereas the rest of the developing world averages an annual increase of 3.4%, according to the World Health Organization's smoking statistics from 2002.
This is quite a culture shock for a student from the United States. Consumption of cigarettes in the US has decreased by half since the mid-1960s, such that now approximately 23.9% of American men and 18% of American women are regular smokers. I suspect that many members of my generation were effectively brainwashed by dozens of hours of DARE programs and PE classes dedicated to proving smoking’s lethal abilities—I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life.
In a recent Brookings Institution Report, Hakan Altinay, an alumnus of my political science department here at Boğaziçi University, used the metaphor of global smoking to discuss climate change. Over a billion people in the world continue to smoke cigarettes despite the high likelihood that this will decrease their future quality of life, and possibly kill them. Likewise, over a billion people (at least a hundred million or so living in the United States) seem willing to continue current patterns of consumption and carbon emission despite the strong evidence that this will decrease their future quality of life, and possibly kill them. In both cases, people ignore evidence (often with the help of embedded interests) and defer a high cost now for a much higher probable cost in the future. To make matters worse, these people are voters.
When I see Turkish men file out of the bar to light up, I have many feelings. The cultural difference and the physical comedy of everyone leaving entertains me. I feel a little disgusted—all of those people smell like ashtrays. And I feel a bit of condescension. My government effectively spent tax revenue to train me that smoking was bad while these Turks, for whatever reason, did not find this healthier, better smelling path.
But I also imagine what a Turk feels when they see a road of Ford Explorers with one person in the driver’s seat, dozens of golf courses in the desert, and heaps of trash bags on the curbsides. We have our equally disgusting and unenlightened patterns.
At least Turkish smokers are mainly hurting themselves. By contrast, our willing destruction of the earth will mostly hurt millions of other people, particularly in developing countries like Turkey.
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