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

DATE: THURSDAY, August 4, 1994                   TAG: 9408050001
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

POPULAR SMOKING BEGAN AS A HEALTH MEASURE

A: The Why staff refuses to join the media crusade to demonize the tobacco industry simply because it has sought, in the name of profit, to serve the whims of Satan. You'll have to look elsewhere if you want to read another diatribe against the cancerstick peddlers.

That said, we think it's a good time to figure out what's going on in the lungs of a smoker. Why does cigarette smoke incite tumors, and why only sometimes?

The proof of the smoking/cancer link comes from several different categories of evidence. The first is epidemiological (as in epidemic). People who smoke have a 17 times greater chance of getting lung cancer than people who don't.

If the ratio was just 2-to-1 then you might argue that it was merely a reflection of the fact that smokers aren't health fanatics, that they are more likely to eat nothing but chili dogs for 55 years and so forth. But a 17-to-1 ratio can't be explained away. ``Lung cancer is almost exclusively a smoker's disease,'' says Donald Shopland, a spokesman for the National Cancer Institute.

A hundred years ago there was no such thing as lung cancer in medical literature. It wasn't officially registered as a disease until 1930. That's probably because before about 1910 people, being primitive, thought that what you were supposed to do with tobacco was chew it. Camels, the first major national cigarette brand, were introduced in 1913. Cigarettes grew in popularity because of tuberculosis. The public feared that the spitting of tobacco was spreading TB. So they started smoking - as a health measure.

The next indication of a link is what Michael Siegel, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, calls ``biologic plausibility.'' This is the fact that tobacco smoke has been shown to cause cancers in laboratory animals.

A third type of evidence comes from study of lung tissue. Autopsies of some smokers who didn't have lung cancer have shown that they did have precancerous, abnormal, ``neo-plastic'' cells in their lungs.

Now we come to the hard part. What actually happens inside the cells of a smoke-enshrouded lung? The most truthful answer, and one that would probably warm the heart of a tobacco executive, were he to have one, is that we don't really know. Somehow the carcinogens are damaging the internal regulatory systems of cells and causing them to divide uncontrollably.

The dastardly thing about cancer is that it is not a freakish, unnatural development. Cancer is nothing more than your own cells dividing and forming masses where they don't belong. Cancers ``R'' Us. A cell normally regulates and suppresses its own ability to divide. If that suppression mechanism is damaged, you can get cancer.

Maybe cigarette smoking will turn out to be a strictly 20th century fashion, like jousting in the 11th century, or dying of plague in the 14th. Our guess is that within a quarter of a century smoking will be considered a bizarre and antiquated behavior.

Naturally that's when we plan to start.