January 3, 2025

Do We Need Legislation to Discourage Self-Harmful Behavior?

Philip Kotler

I was shocked to read that 47,000 persons kill themselves every year and 72,000 persons die from drug addiction. (See David Brooks article “A Nation of Weavers.” (New York Times, February 18, 2019). Let’s add the millions who don’t die but suffer from the effects of tobacco, alcoholism, overeating, drug addiction, depression, bad teeth, and other unpleasant conditions. People suffer from many problems they self- created.

I was encouraged when I read that several nations are taking steps to help people learn how to live healthier lives. The article “The New Nanny State” published in The Economist (October 14, 2023, p.49), described how New Zealand made it illegal for anyone born after 2009 to buy tobacco. Cigarettes kill! Another proposed “nanny” law would be to ban hard liquor. Hard liquor is likely to cause cancer in heavy drinkers of alcoholic beverages.

Here are other nanny laws being considered to prevent people from hurting themselves.

· A law cutting down vaping or using certain vaping flavors.

· A law banning junk food or taxing junk food or preventing junk food from advertising.

· A law preventing cars for driving faster than 50 miles an hour.

· A law requiring children to take a course in how to brush their teeth (so that tooth decay won’t land them in a hospital).

Yet several nations and their citizens are great believers in personal freedom. Citizens would start a mass movement against any bans or limitations preventing them from smoking cigarettes or drinking alcoholic beverages. Their pleasure from these
“vice” products far outweigh any fear that they might be jailed or die earlier.

Instead of passing banning laws, isn’t it sufficient to just advertise the possible harm and leave the decision to the individual?

Before passing “nanny” laws, we need to answer three questions.

1. Why should the state have an interest in passing nanny laws?

2. What is the likelihood that a particular nanny law would work successfully?

3. What are alternative ways to discourage “self-harmful” behavior?

Why Should a State Propose Banning or Limiting a Behavior?

In some cases, a mass movement leads a large number of citizens to press legislators to take action. A high school in a local district might experience a shooting in a high school that kills a number of students. Parents and good people pressure the local legislators to pass a law preventing the purchase or ownership of guns or assault weapons in their jurisdiction. The law is likely to pass.

In other cases, a large number of citizens might be personally harmed by the behavior of others. Citizens who are in a smoking area complain that they are breathing in bad air. As a result, airplanes, buses, and trains started to outlaw smoking because of its bad affects on others. Offices and factories started to ban smoking by their employees, requiring them to leave the premises to smoke. The concern is not with the smoker hurting himself but hurting others in the vicinity.

Normally the State recognizes that it faces a high budget cost by its citizens self-harm behaviors. More citizens come into hospitals and strain the local health care resources and often they can’t pay their bills. The State must invest more money in training more doctors and nurses to handle more people in ill-health. The State has an incentive to discourage unhealthy behavior. It doesn’t want to be told that it is not providing good health care to its citizens.

How Likely is it that a Particular Nanny Law will Work Successfully?

The Nanny law must be designed so that the legislature will vote to pass it and the citizens will comply with the desired behavior. Both might fail.

Legislators will face high pressure from the industries that would be hurt by the ban. Cigarette companies and alcohol companies will object to the right of the state to ban their offerings. These companies will point out how many jobs they will have to shut down and how many advertising and transportation jobs will be lost. The financial cost to the industry may be so large that those advocating the ban may change their mind, wanting to protect their legislative position in the next election.

Also, the law must be easy to enforce the desired behavior. One of the most successful nanny laws was the requirement of persons in cars to click on their safety belt. This was easy enough to do. The fact that police could see if the safety belts were worn caused high compliance with the seatbelt law.

Yet if a law is highly resented, offenders will find ways to ignore it. When the United States passed the 18th Amendment in 1919, which prohibited the sale, transportation, and manufacture of alcohol, it led to unintended consequences, including:

• Organized crime. Criminal organizations became involved in the production and distribution of alcohol. They bribed law enforcement, politicians, and businesses, that made it difficult to enforce the law.
• Underground market. People found ways to drink alcohol, and an underground market of bootleggers, speakeasies, and distilleries emerged.
• Economic impact. Prohibition eliminated jobs in the fifth largest industry in the United States.
• Public opinion. Public sentiment toward Prohibition changed from positive to negative by the 1930s.
• Crime. The murder rate increased due to gangland killings. Overall crime also increased, including assault, battery, theft, and burglary.

The 18th Amendment was finally repealed 14 years later by the 21st Amendment on December 5, 1933. President Franklin Roosevelt legalized beer with an alcohol content of 3.2% and wine with a similarly low alcohol content. Some states repealed their own laws that enforced Prohibition.

The Prohibition law was successful in reducing the amount of liquor consumed but at a very great cost to society. And consumption returned to old patterns.

What are Alternative Ways to Discourage “Self-Harmful” Behavior?

Citizens and organizations seeking to discourage certain self-harm behavior should take a “demarketing” approach. They should widespread information on the harmful effects of the specific behavior. They can point out hard facts on how many people have been hurt by this behavior or they can touch the heart by showing pictures of harmed individuals. A photo of a long-time smoker’s wrinkled face and his shaking hands can say enough. A video of a drunken man striking his wife would be remembered. Movies dramatizing the awful lives of malfunctioning people will stir the emotions.

The next step would be to require the packages of these vice products to warn the users of the harmfulness of the product. Cigarette packages carry a warning that smoking could hurt their health. Newspapers and magazine articles can report on how many persons have died from this vicious habit. Students though their schooling days should be informed and reminded of the consequences of these harmful habits.

If these marketing measures work, there will be fewer people succumbing to these harmful habits. Marketers have developed a methodology called “social marketing” for helping persons overcome self-harming habits. Social marketers will study a group that needs help. For example, many teenage girls take up smoking. There was a time when smoking was seen as glamorous. Movies showed many actresses smoking. Teenagers report that smoking relaxes them. Much of their smoking is about their relations to males. Social marketers undertake behavioral studies to develop a deep understanding of why female teenagers smoke and they use this knowledge to create better treatments.

Those who cannot easily quit a harmful habit, still have another option, namely joining a group of persons suffering from this habit. There are several organizations to help people free themselves from alcoholism, including Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), Dual Recovery Anonymous (DRA), Secular Organizations for Sobriety (SOS), Smart Recovery, and Women for Sobriety (WFS). AA is the best known. Research shows a correlation between participation in support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and reduced drinking and cravings. The actual effectiveness of a peer support group like AA depends on many factors, including frequency of attendance, engagement and involvement, quality of professional treatment, and addiction severity.

As for smokers who want to quit smoking, they can contact the American Lung Association or the National Cancer Institute. Both offer online and phone advice, and a personalize plan to help persons quit smoking and using tobacco products.

Where the group method doesn’t work, the individual may turn to a professional therapist who is specialized in helping individuals with that illness. Successful therapists will be frequently mentioned by others.

Conclusion

Many people adopt practices that ultimately harm themselves. They turn to cigarette smoking, or alcoholism, or drug abuse, or overeating and find it hard to stop, even when they know that it is hurting them. They end up in hospitals and face big bills and debt. The shock may be such that they have the strength to give up the bad habit. But many can’t and they need help from friends or trained professionals.

The cost of these harmful habits falls on the nation as well. The nation needs to create more hospitals, more doctors and more nurses. Some nations want to pass nanny laws that would ban or limit certain self-harming behaviors. A state that passes a lot of these laws can be called a “nanny state.”

It is my feeling that much can be done to reduce the amount of self-harm behavior before there is a need to pass nanny laws, many of which don’t work well and are eventually terminated. I tried to show that proper education during the school years and proper marketing to dramatize the harm of these habits will help reduce the number of persons who succumb to self-harmful habits. For those who still persist in a self-harming habit, they can get help from social marketers, or join self-help groups, or eventually hire a personal therapist trained in their problem. These measures together will keep the state from needing to become a “nanny” state. Most nanny laws don’t really deliver the promised benefits.