"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety." --Ben Franklin

If Franklin were alive today, he could easily be talking about the wealthy in the United States. As Mike Davis demonstrates in "City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles," their desire for security has created an architectural style where the rights of the non-wealthy (especially those who are black, Latino, and poor, or some combination thereof) to live, travel, and play where they want has been removed.

The governments of many cities and towns in America have instituted "quality of life" laws – usually meant to maintain the lifestyle of those who govern the city or control its economy. While enforcement of these laws is part of the move towards removing the poor and working class from the city's public spaces, there is also a concerted effort by designers and police who, in cities like Los Angeles often work together, to create a city where "urban design, architecture, and the police apparatus [are merged] into a single, comprehensive security effort."

In opposition to the US tradition of a public, liveable city, this police-driven urban planning has as its basis "the destruction of accessible public space." Parks are no longer places that serve, as the designer of Central Park, Frederick Olmsted, observed, "as social safety-valves, mixing classes and ethnicities". Instead, they have become dumping grounds for the homeless and the addicted or, on the opposite end, walled off and privatised. As Mike Davis writes,

"Traditional luxury enclaves like Beverly Hills and San Marino are increasingly restricting access to their public facilities, using baroque layers of regulations to build invisible walls. San Marino, which may be the richest, and is reputedly the most Republican (85 percent), city in the country, now closes its parks on weekends to exclude Latino and Asian families from adjacent communities."

This process is helped along by governmental "disinvestment in traditional public space and a shift to corporate-defined redevelopment priorities." One other apparent reason for this shift in redevelopment priorities is the manipulation of the urban renewal program to (as Davis says) "clear the poor from the streets of Hollywood and reap the huge windfalls from 'upgrading' the area." Add to this the militarisation of the police forces and their use of questionably constitutional tactics ranging from military style police sweeps of poor and non-white neighbourhoods to "spreading scare literature typifying black teenagers as dangerous gang members" and what emerges is the recipe for an American police state.

While laws regulating environmental pollution are not as strong as many would like, and enforcement is even weaker, city officials in many metropolitan areas will spare no expense to regulate what they see as unwanted refuse: the homeless and the poor. Davis offers a particularly harsh window on efforts in that city.

This conscious 'hardening' of the city surface against the poor is especially brazen in the Manichean treatment of downtown microcosms. In his famous study of the 'social life of small urban spaces', William Whyte makes the point that the quality of any urban environment can be measured, first of all, by whether there are convenient, comfortable places for pedestrians to sit. This maxim has been warmly taken to heart by designers of the highly-corporate precincts of Bunker Hill and the emerging 'urban village' of South Park. As part of the city's policy of subsidising white-collar residential colonisation in Downtown, it has spent, or plans to spend, tens of millions of dollars of diverted tax revenue on enticing, 'soft' environments in these areas.

Planners envision an opulent complex of squares, fountains, world-class public art, exotic shrubbery, and avant-garde street furniture along a Hope Street pedestrian corridor. In the propaganda of official boosters, nothing is taken as a better index of Downtown's 'liveability' than the idyll of office workers and upscale tourists lounging or napping in the terraced gardens of California Plaza, the 'Spanish Steps' or Grand Hope Park.

In stark contrast, a few blocks away, the city is engaged in a merciless struggle to make public facilities and spaces as 'unliveable' as possible for the homeless and the poor. The persistence of thousands of street people on the fringes of Bunker Hill and the Civic Center sours the image of designer Downtown living and betrays the laboriously constructed illusion of a Downtown 'renaissance'. City Hall then retaliates with its own variant of low-intensity warfare.

Although city leaders periodically essay schemes for removing indigents en masse--deporting them to a poor farm on the edge of the desert, confining them to camps in the mountains, or, memorably, interning them on a derelict ferry at the Harbor – such 'final solutions' have been blocked by council members fearful of the displacement of the homeless into their districts. Instead the city, self-consciously adopting the idiom of urban cold war, promotes the 'containment' (official term) of the homeless in Skid Row along Fifth Street east of the Broadway, systematically transforming the neighbourhood into an outdoor poorhouse.

But this containment strategy breeds its own vicious circle of contradiction. By condensing the mass of the desperate and helpless together in such a small space, and denying adequate housing, official policy has transformed Skid Row into probably the most dangerous ten square blocks in the world--ruled by a grisly succession of 'Slashers', 'Night Stalkers', and more ordinary predators. Every night on Skid Row is Friday the 13th, and, unsurprisingly, many of the homeless seek to escape the 'Nickle' during the night at all costs, searching safer niches in other parts of Downtown. The city in turn tightens the noose with increased police harassment and indigenous design deterrents.

One of the most common, but mind-numbing, of these deterrents is the Rapid Transit District's new barrel-shaped bus bench that offers a minimal surface for uncomfortable sitting, while making sleeping utterly impossible. Such 'bumproof' benches are being widely introduced on the periphery of Skid Row. Another invention, worthy of the Grand Guignol, is the aggressive deployment of outdoor sprinklers. Several years ago the city opened a 'Skid Row Park' along lower Fifth Street, on a corner of Hell. To ensure that the park was not used for sleeping--that is to say, to guarantee that it was mainly utilised for drug dealing and prostitution – the city installed an elaborate overhead sprinkling system programmed to drench unsuspecting sleepers at random times during the night.

The system was immediately copied by some local businessmen in order to drive the homeless away from adjacent public sidewalks. Meanwhile restaurants and markets have responded to the homeless by building ornate enclosures to protect their refuse. Although no one in Los Angeles has yet proposed adding cyanide to the garbage, as happened in Phoenix a few years back, one popular seafood restaurant has spent $12,000 to build the ultimate bag-lady-proof trash cage: made of three-quarter inch steel rod with alloy locks and vicious outturned spikes to safeguard priceless mouldering fish heads and stale French fries.

The key to stopping the smoking habit – which kills 400,000 or more Americans every year and is projected to be killing 10 million a year worldwide by 2005 – is to prevent teens from starting. Over time that will reduce the death toll because fewer people will be smoking. One obvious pressure point is to eliminate advertising aimed at children. Criminalising it for youth smokers can also reduce teen smoking. Now, with the tobacco settlement, we really have the companies on the run.

That's the conventional wisdom, but in "Smoked: Why Joe Camel Is Still Smiling," Mike Males shows how that perspective actually plays into the hands of Big Tobacco rather than reducing the number of smokers.

First, take the tobacco settlement in which Big Tobacco pays $246 billion to the states that sued over the next 25 years. In return, the industry gets limits on health-related civil suits. A sweet deal, compared with the $516 billion in lawsuits previously scuttled by Congress after record lobbying by the industry. Worse, the $246 billion is tax-deductible, meaning that the outlay will only be half to two-thirds that amount. Here's the kicker: the structure of the deal is a disincentive for states to adopt anti-smoking measures that really work. Payments to the states will be reduced if the rate of smoking drops, making it in the interest of the states to keep rates high and maintain the payment level. It's no wonder that in the five months following the settlement and in an otherwise somewhat bearish market, Big Tobacco's stocks jumped 53%.

"The strategy of anti-smoking groups to treat teenagers as an enemy requiring denigration, lecturing, and punishment has proven popular but disastrously counterproductive.... In fact, teen smoking had fallen sharply for 20 years (60% from the mid-1970s to 1992) absent coercion before authorities of the 1990s decided to institute increasingly draconian punishments against youths who tried tobacco. Montana teenagers could legally buy cigarettes and chewing tobacco in the 1980s, yet (even in the heart of Marlboro Country) their rates of tobacco use were the lowest of any state in the nation--lower than states which aimed legal bans and draconian penalties at teen smoking," writes Males.

One reason why targeting teens doesn't work is that smoking gets painted as an adult activity, giving it allure for those who most want to be adult: teens. It's a paradox that RJ Reynolds took advantage of in full page ads saying, "Only adults should ever face the decision to smoke or not."

But wait a minute: what about those evil Joe Camel ads; didn't they seduce kids to smoke? A surprising answer: the evidence doesn't support it. As Males writes, "The biggest DECLINES in teenage smoking initiation occurred from 1975 to 1992, a period in which cigarette ad and promotion spending TRIPLED (even factoring out inflation). And the biggest INCREASES in teen smoking and rate of first puff occurred from 1993 to the present, when ad and promotion spending DECLINED sharply." That doesn't mean advertising is a waste: ads can shift which brand is chosen by people already smoking, but this is essentially a fight over which companies have the biggest market share, not a strategy for recruiting large numbers of new customers. Interestingly enough, concerning Joe Camel's impact in particular, the character was introduced in advertisements starting in 1988. Teen smoking DECLINED between 1988 and 1992.

But if we make smoking illegal, won't that stop kids, at least for the most part? Again, the evidence doesn't support such a move. Some states expel teens from school, deny drivers' licenses, impose fines and even jail youths. North Carolina imposes some of the most severe penalties. "That a state which grows two-thirds of the nation's tobacco would enact tough laws against youth access shows just how small a threat such laws are to the industry," writes Males. Meanwhile, even as these harsh measures are spreading, a 1999 study by the Massachusetts General Hospital shows that teen smoking is on the increase, perhaps indicating the ineffectiveness of the clampdown, and the counterproductive nature of the smoking-is-for-adults campaign.

But aren't teens too young to do the right thing? In 1991, Montana held statewide referenda among junior high and high school students proposing that schools be "tobacco free." They passed, with schools in Bozeman voting 80% in favour. However, in three cities, Billings, Livingston, and Missoula, where city councils had implemented local ordinances to criminalise teen smoking, students were significantly less likely to vote for the referendum than would have been predicted by the smoking rates. "These cities where teen smoking had been criminalised were the only cities where such a pro-smoking trend occurred," writes Males.

Just because targeting teens doesn't work doesn't mean we can't have a smoke-free society. This was the explicit goal of Reagan's surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, who targeted smoking in public places and relentlessly used his position as a pulpit from which to warn people of diseases associated with smoking. In one finding, Koop said, smoking is addictive in a manner similar "to drugs like heroin and cocaine." Another effective anti-smoking tool is simple: increased taxation. Higher costs means lower smoking. But that's unlikely: the tobacco settlement stipulates that if new federal taxes are put on tobacco, the amount paid by Big Tobacco as part of the settlement is reduced by a proportionate amount. New taxes mean the states would lose big time.

But Koop's goal "has been eclipsed by a less potent and probably counterproductive one: 'we don't want kids to smoke,'" writes Stanton Glantz, author of The Tobacco Papers. Clinton makes the difference clear: "we're not trying to put tobacco sellers out of business," he said. Why the switch to a focus on teens? One answer is tobacco money. Tobacco lobbyists poured millions into the Democratic Party. Philip Morris coughed up nearly half a million just "days before Vice President Al Gore's gutwrenching speech to the Democratic National Convention that his sister's death from smoking-induced cancer in 1984 led him to pour his heart and soul into protecting our children from the dangers of smoking." This is the same guy who, four years after his sister's death, bragged in the 1988 presidential primaries that he had been a tobacco farmer himself, and who profited from growing the killer weed well into the 1990s.

Another answer as to why the focus has been narrowed to teens involves the coopting of the anti-smoking movement. The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids agrees that the best way to lower smoking is to raise tobacco prices. Yet it championed the very settlement that minimises this. Tobacco prices will probably rise due to the settlement, but on a one-time basis, and not nearly as much as a stiff tax hike or sustained legal sanctions would have done.

One reason for the Campaign's championing the settlement may be where some of the settlement money is likely to go: into the coffers of the Campaign. The settlement is structured so that industry payments are reduced if smoking declines, and raised if smoking increases. So what's the best way to ensure the financial health of the anti-smoking movement: pursue ineffective campaigns against teen smoking that don't really alter smoking rates. As of this writing in November 1999, the Campaign is now lobbying hard to receive money from the settlement, but whether it will get the money remains a question.