Both governments took so long to enact laws to protect non-smokers and discourage young people from starting for one simple reason: smokers as a statistical group died off much earlier than non-smokers, and thus were much less of a burden on the country’s health services. Lots of French and Germans dying of smoking-related diseases in their fifties and sixties meant the government had an easier time paying for treatment for the survivors. There were no protections for non-smokers at all here thirty years ago. Planes stank. Trains stank. Restaurants stank. Some cafés were so full of smoke, I called them “Café Auschwitz,” not giving a damn about the dirty looks I got. I couldn’t take my children there, and they didn’t want to go.
Friends who couldn’t or wouldn’t shake nicotine addiction would always mention that one relative or acquaintance who smoked 14,000 cigarettes a year (2 packs a day), and lived to the age of 98. We would always come back with the one guy who could walk across the Autobahn at rush hour blindfolded and not get a scratch—unlike the other thousand people who tried it and became instant roadkill.
My wife was the rare German who never smoked. Many of her friends did but have quit. Her parents’ generation all smoked except for her mom. Her mom, now 96, is the only one still alive, and the government isn’t even paying for most of her current care. I am. A health minister here is a bureaucrat. Bureaucrats hate complications. A population costing more in health care than is in the country’s health care budget is a complication. Their life is made easier when a good portion of their population dies early.
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