UP IN SMOKE; WITH TOO FEW PUBLIC ENEMIES, TOBACCO COMPANIES ARE DEMONIZED.

Byline: Economist Newspaper Ltd.

EVER since the collapse of communism, America has been casting around for a new enemy. Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic gamely volunteered for the role. But no great nation can define itself against such tinpot figures.

Some Republicans want to demonize China. But American business is not willing to kiss goodbye a billion potential customers.

As for Pat Buchanan's idea of going the whole hog and demonizing all foreigners, it is rapidly turning him from a merely marginal figure into an irrelevance.

The problem is that these days Americans are keener on finding their evil empires at home than abroad.

Foreign countries seldom impinge on people's attention, and when they do it is more likely to be as a source of a nifty product than as a military threat. But when it comes to giant companies that make their living out of persuading people to consume noxious substances, Americans are as vigilant as they were at the height of the communist menace.

With the release of Michael Mann's new film, ``The Insider,'' big tobacco has taken yet another step toward filling the place once occupied by the Soviet Union.

The film tells the story of how it tried to silence Jeffrey Wigand, a scientist turned whistle-blower, blackening his reputation and using a threat of a $15 billion lawsuit to make CBS drop an interview with him.

Hollywood has been slow to join the anti-tobacco crusade, perhaps remembering the golden days when Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall breathed clouds of cigarette smoke at each other. But this film has Hollywood on the march.

Brown & Williamson's silencing of Wigand proved to be a Pyrrhic victory. The company's ruthless treatment of its former employee was soon exposed in the press, and CBS, its tail between its legs, finally screened its scoop. It was also one of big tobacco's last victories in its long campaign to keep the media at bay.

People who leave Mann's film thinking that tobacco companies are still omnipotent organizations that can conceal evidence of the effects of tobacco are as deceived as those CIA geniuses who speculated that Yuri Andropov's Russia was pulling ahead of America.

Big tobacco was already in headlong retreat by the time Wigand made it to the screen. In ``Thank You for Smoking,'' Christopher Buckley's 1994 satire of the tobacco wars (Random House), the industry's public-relations machine is already a joke.

The industry's chief ``smokesperson'' is about to lose his job because of his failure to reverse the trend of public opinion. His only comfort is his regular lunches with fellow self-described ``Merchants of Death'' from SAFETY (the Society for the Advancement of Firearms and Effective Training of Youth) and the Moderation Council (formerly the National Association for Alcoholic Beverages).

Since then, the defeat has become a rout. Smoking is banned in most public buildings. In California you cannot smoke in bars; in Davis and Palo Alto you cannot smoke within 20 feet of a public building.

The country is so plastered with anti-smoking ads, most of them paid for by the tobacco industry as part of a $206 billion settlement with the states, that the Marlboro Man is becoming a symbol of impotence and emphysema rather than rugged independence.

``Mind if I smoke?'' asks an elegant young man on a popular Californian billboard. ``Care if I die?'' replies his date.

What the tobacco wars show is how feeble even the most ruthless big businesses are compared with a newer force in American life: the alliance of citizen activists, public-health officials and trial lawyers.

The first shots in the tobacco wars were fired by citizen activists. Ahron Leichtman founded Citizens for a Tobacco-Free Society because the merest whiff of tobacco smoke gave him a headache.

John Banzhaf got so sick of advertisements featuring ``confident, rugged men smoking cigarettes'' that he founded Action on Smoking and Health, ASH. (His motto, shown in abbreviated form on his license plate is, ``Sue the bastards.'')

These people became an unstoppable force when they linked up with the medical and legal professions. The public-health profession has been looking for a justification for its existence ever since the communicable diseases that it was established to fight were all but wiped out.

Tobacco provided just what it needed. And anti-tobacco lawsuits are the legal profession's equivalent of Silicon Valley.

A Florida state court's decision last month, in a case involving 500,000 smokers, that the jury can award punitive damages in a single lump sum instead of deciding cases one smoker at a time means that another gigantic ruling against tobacco companies may be in the offing.

Is there a danger - drop your voice - that the anti-smoking crusade has gone too far?

Anti-smokers are undoubtedly right to say that big tobacco failed to come clean about the harmful effects of smoking (though why people should choose to listen to the industry's advertisements rather than the surgeon-general's health warnings is not clear).

No doubt people should be educated about the ill-effects of smoking. But, as the number of smokers inexorably declines, disapproval has turned into intolerance, persuasion into outright bullying.

For many anti-smokers it is inconceivable that rational people can understand the risks of smoking and still continue with the habit. They must be either the slaves of addiction or the dupes of the tobacco industry's propaganda.

This attitude not only encourages anti-smokers to tolerate grossly regressive taxes and even grosser infringements of individual liberty. It also leads them to bring legal cases that make a mockery of individual responsibility.

There is no reason why this should stop with smoking. What about drinking? Many boozers share smokers' subversive belief that quality of life is more important than quantity.

What about skiing or paragliding? Both activities not only involve risks to their participants but also costs to the people who have to clean up after their mistakes.

And what about the national epidemic of obesity? Fat people not only impose huge costs on society because they are tend to be unhealthier than thin ones. They are also damned annoying when you have to sit next to them on airliners.

Forcing people to be thin may seem a little farfetched. But then so did banning smoking in bars just a few years ago.

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Photo

Photo: (color) Christopher Plummer, right, portrays ``60 Minutes'' news correspondent Mike Wallace interviewing scientist turned whistle-blower Dr. Jeffrey Wigand, played by Russell Crowe, in the Touchtone Pictures' movie ``The Insider.''

Frank Connor