Inquirer Editorial: Smokers should quit, but they also need to work

As of next month, central Pennsylvania's Geisinger Health System will no longer hire smokers, regardless of when or where they intend to smoke. In other words, a health system has decided it will have no truck with anyone who has what is widely accepted to be a health problem.

Isn't that a little, well, sick?

Geisinger is far from the first employer to adopt such a punitive policy, nor will it be the last. Alaska Airlines and others started the trend decades ago, yielding smoker-protection laws in New Jersey and other states. At least two other Pennsylvania hospital groups don't hire smokers, and Philadelphia's Roxborough Memorial Hospital may follow suit.

The rationale for these policies is the belief that sickened smokers raise the insurance costs of their companies and coworkers. But the pitfalls of this reasoning were neatly demonstrated by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' prompt call for Geisinger to stop hiring meat-eaters as well. Presumably, the company could enforce herbivory by adding cholesterol screening to the Orwellian nicotine tests it already plans to impose on job applicants.

In one sense, discriminating against people who drink root beer or enjoy bungee jumping would be more reasonable than blacklisting smokers. While there's relatively little evidence of a physiological imperative to consume baby back ribs, ride ATVs, or engage in any number of other risky behaviors, the sheer power of nicotine addiction has been thoroughly established.

Consider the recent research (not the first) showing that nicotine patches and gums do little to help anyone kick a smoking habit for good; or the rather alarming list of side effects featured in ads for other drugs purported to facilitate quitting, which prompted a recent Saturday Night Live parody to advise, "Just keep smoking."

Of course, joking aside, that's terrible advice. The point is that kicking a nicotine addiction - like kicking a cocaine or heroin addiction - is very worthwhile but also very difficult, and no one has found a way to make it easy.

So what led so many people and corporations to the erroneous conclusion that nicotine addicts should be deprived of something as basic to their survival as employment? Perhaps this country's largely defensible assault on a serious public-health problem has in some instances escalated into a counterproductive and moralistic war on the people we're supposedly trying to help.

Banning smoking from restaurants for the sake of workers and other customers, as well as the possibility that more smokers will think about quitting, makes sense. But denying smokers basic rights and freedoms is too reminiscent of this country's horribly failed attempts to address other drug problems through mass imprisonment. Sure, hate the smoking. But let's love the smokers.