Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 8, 1994 TAG: 9405100010
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By USHA LEE McFARLING BOSTON GLOBE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
``If anyone suggests smoking will disappear in this century, I've got some land I'd like to sell them,'' says Kenneth Warner, a University of Michigan professor who has analyzed tobacco's pervasive effect on society. If smoking ever wafts away, he predicts, it won't happen until well after the turn of the century.
Adds Gregory N. Connolly, director of the state Tobacco Control Program in Massachusetts: ``I wouldn't hold my breath.''
So what will happen by 2000?
Smoking will not be banned. Citing the debacle of prohibition in the '20s, even the staunchest tobacco critics say a ban would be a nightmare, a $48 billion invitation to organized crime that would send 46 million Americans into either withdrawal or the black market.
What could be banned is smoking in public. If that happens, says Edward L. Sweda, an attorney with GASP (the Group Against Smoking Pollution), ``it would be a society where people would not have to put up with second-hand smoke.''
The standard prediction is that eventually smokers will smoke only in their homes. But many people, says John Pierce, who was C. Everett Koop's chief economist when Koop was surgeon general, are protecting their spouses and children by not smoking at home. Smokers may find their last domain to be another of our country's cultural symbols.
``In San Diego, they're smoking in their cars,'' Pierce says.
What the tobacco foes now plan is a one-two punch for the tobacco industry. First, reduce the number of smokers to weaken the industry's political leverage and its profit motive. Only then, says Connolly, would it be politically feasible to go after smoking's jugular vein.
In a best-case scenario, says Edward L. Sweda of GASP, ``the inconvenience will get to a point where smoking is just not worth it.''
But this caution comes from Dr. Jeffrey Harris, an internist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston: ``Imagining a world without smoking is imagining a world in which people quit, and quitting smoking is incredibly difficult.''
Forty percent of smokers try to quit each year, Harris says, and only 3 percent succeed. The harsh truth, some health advocates worry, is that people who were least addicted and most able to quit have already done so, leaving a vast reservoir of heavily addicted, hard-core smokers.
Another reality is that the remaining smokers will be those who smoke at the highest rates today: the poor, the less-educated, those suffering from depression and alcohol abuse, blacks, and women. (Smoking among blacks and women rose in 1991, the most recent year analyzed, after years of decline.)
Primarily because smoking is so addictive, there is only one path to a smoke-free future: Smoking will die out as smokers die off - but only if no new smokers light up. Since most smokers pick up the habit before they turn 18, today's tobacco war is over the lungs of America's children.
``If anything,'' says Connolly, ``the battle is just beginning.''
One one side: cartoon character Joe Camel, which the tobacco industry denies is calculated to lure children to cigarettes but which, one survey found, is recognized as having to do with smoking by 80 percent of 6-year-olds.
On the other side, a battalion of smoking foes led by Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, who claims to ``relish the task'' of creating ``a world in which young people no longer want to smoke.''
by CNB