Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

When Will Cancer Stop Being “Our Fault”?

By placing the burden of maintaining one’s health on individuals, we obscure the broader environmental, political, genetic, and social forces that affect our well-being.

My father stopped seeing doctors after his mother died from breast cancer. No yearly physicals. No checkups. No emergency-room visits. It was as though avoiding them could shield him from a similar fate.

By the time he was dying of lung cancer, he had more than made up for lost time. The man who never had a blood test now had a team of specialists, regular scans, weekly chemo and radiation treatments. His diagnosis changed everything for him. In turn, he tried to renegotiate its terms: He took vitamins, asked doctors questions, and stopped drinking. The most jarring change was when he quit smoking. It was strange to see him without a pack of Player’s Navy Cut in hand. If he didn’t already have a cigarette lit, then the pack was never far away, either in his pocket, in the car, or on the dinner table.

I remember the warning labels on every pack, some variation of “smoking kills.” They were unique in that they never cut off the branding or interfered with the packaging itself. It was as though the messaging was there to be seen but not absorbed, which of course was the case. Legally, tobacco companies had to disclose the long-term health risks of their products. But they also needed people to buy them, for their own financial gain. Ironically, Canada’s government needs those profits to nearly break even: While tobacco is the leading cause of preventable death and disease in Canada, costing the healthcare system $6 billion per year, it also brings in an additional $5.8 billion in federal revenue, thanks to tobacco taxes.

Eventually, as the public attitudes toward smoking and regulations started to change in Canada and the United States, the warnings shifted in tone, turning more graphic. By the early 2000s, they included images depicting cigarettes’ toll on the body: tarred lungs, smoke escaping from tracheotomy holes, rotting teeth, and a corpse with a sewn-up chest. One in particular always caught my eye. It was of a woman named Barb Tarbox on her deathbed. The caption read: “This is what dying of lung cancer looks like.”

The story of Barb Tarbox starts as soon as it ends. When the former model was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2002, she wanted everyone to know what it did to her. “People have to see what happens,” she told the photographer Greg Southam when they first met that year. “It’s eating everything inside me.” And so, for the last few months of her life, Tarbox planned her funeral and visited schools across Canada to show students what smoking and cancer did to the body. She cradled a cigarette in one hand and ripped off her hat with the other. As she exposed her bare head to 500 teens, she implored them to look at her. Her speeches were compelling because she embodied her own moral failing: dying by her own hand but unable to tear it away from what was killing her.

After the veins in her legs turned black and tumors had overridden her brain, Tarbox could no longer lament the deadly disease growing inside her. It was then that she tasked Southam with capturing her final days. One of the last pictures he took of her was on her deathbed, and for nearly a decade that was the photo distributed in the US and Canada on cigarette packages like my father’s.

If awareness relied solely on reach, then those graphic images of Tarbox might have been enough to dissuade prospective smokers from buying a pack. But Tarbox living on in the cultural imagination as a warning label has been about as effective as it is legally binding. Awareness and stringent marketing regulations could never compete with the billions of dollars that tobacco companies invest in advertising and loopholes every year, including flavored tobacco products that mask its taste in order to appeal to younger consumers. The cigarette warning becomes useful then as an ideological smokescreen. There is an implication that illness is tied to an individual’s choices rather than to the manufacturers of hazardous and addictive products, their advertisers, or the governing bodies that still allow them to be sold.

Tarbox displayed her body as a public-health warning, but the current use of her likeness is incongruous considering her earliest intentions. Her disintegrating body never discourages smoking but rather warns you that the product is linked to death. Once that risk is disclosed, the responsibility to avoid it is yours.

Cancer is an illness often mythologized as a great equalizer, one that doesn’t discriminate between rich and poor,........

© The Nation