
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, November 11, 1993                   TAG: 9311120270
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A14   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NO HIDING BEHIND THE SMOKE

HERE IS yet another study that shows just how deadly tobacco addiction is in America. Government researchers who sought to look behind the statistics on causes of deaths to the behaviors that led to the strokes, the heart disease, the cancers, etc., found that one habit contributed more than any other: smoking.

In 1990, some 400,000 Americans died from illnesses in which smoking was a factor. That's 19 percent of everyone who died that year. Compare this, say, to drug abuse, that evil feared by every parent who sends a child out into the world. It contributed to 20,000 deaths that year.

Now, this isn't to suggest that drug abuse be taken less seriously. It is a cause of many social ills besides the early deaths of its victims. The data do ask, however, that tobacco be recognized for the killer it is. Among preventable causes of death, nothing can compare with it.

Smoking may not lay waste to the lives of its users, as other addictions can. Tobacco isn't going to put someone into a useless stupor, cause anyone to act erratically or violently, or make someone miss work because of a hangover.

But what it will do is cause terrible suffering for, and cut cruelly short the lives of, thousands upon thousands of productive, talented, energetic, caring people.

Does the Tobacco Institute care about these people, these devastated lives? A spokesman dismisses the latest research - like earlier studies - as unreliable, claiming it is based on faulty methodology.

The study and its results were considered valid enough to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but that's not good enough for the objective experts hired and paid to dissemble by the tobacco industry.

Cigarette makers seriously maintain that smoking is not addictive. They insist there is no conclusive evidence that smoking causes any illness. They claim they do not advertise to entice new smokers.

This is the sworn testimony of top tobacco company executives, all giving depositions in a $5 billion lawsuit filed by flight attendants who claim their health has been damaged by having been forced to breathe smoke on airplanes.

It is the sworn testimony of the tobacco executives that anyone can quit smoking with a little willpower. It is their sworn testimony that, not being medical doctors, they don't have a clue about whether smoking causes cancer. It is their sworn testimony that they are not trying to hook new customers on their product.

Right.

That's why Camel cigarettes are advertised by Joe Camel, a benign-looking cartoon character that all the kiddies know, Virginia Slims are hawked by slender young models in elegant evening gowns, and Marlboros are modeled by a rugged, virile cowboy riding the rough country. (Not anymore by the original Marlboro Man, though. He's dead, of lung cancer.)

The images are a lie, as is the tobacco companies' feigned ignorance of any ill effects their product might cause. In fact, smoking is less likely to assure sex and coolness than it is a hospital room, a respirator and a grieving family. In fact, the industry is selling an addiction that has spread pain and death on a scale dwarfing all other killers. Yet another study shows this, as if the evidence weren't compelling enough already.

Every year, an estimated 400,000 Americans - 9,000 of them in Virginia - die as a result of smoke-related diseases. One would like to hope that gives the people at the Tobacco Institute just a little pause.

by CNB