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News flash: Tobacco products addictive

Regulation is reining in the tobacco industry

Date published: 6/19/2009

A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs. --James I

IT TOOK only 305 years, but Congress has finally gotten around to acknowledging that the English king had it exactly right. A new law at long last puts tobacco under the Food and Drug Administration. Despite the industry's past denials that nicotine makes their products intensely addictive, tobacco is now going to be regulated as what it is--an exceptionally dangerous drug.

It's certainly the most lethal addictive substance known, responsible for more illness and death than all other drugs combined. Tobacco causes more than 400,000 American deaths every year, about 20 percent of the total. That's roughly 100 times the number of Americans who've died in the six years of the Iraq war. The World Health Organization has declared tobacco use the second-highest mortality factor on the planet--5 million a year, at a cost of hundreds of billions.

Approximately 47 million Americans still use tobacco--mostly cigarettes--23 percent of adults and about 30 percent of teenagers. While these are terrible numbers, they represent tremendous progress: They're the reverse of 60 years ago, when the overwhelming majority of Americans used tobacco in one form or another.

Smoking bans used to be considered not only unjustified but un-American, an interference with everyone's inherent right to foul the air everybody else was forced to breathe. But even the most unyielding smokers had to know smoking's undisputed reign was ending when Ireland's pubs, renowned for wall-to-wall fumes, went smokeless five years ago. So far, 25 states here have followed, banning smoking in all enclosed public spaces. Virginia--long a tobacco state--has at last adopted a partial ban, effective this December.

Why the sudden about-face in the United States after decades of stubborn resistance to overwhelming evidence? As usual, the answer is: money.

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Date published: 6/19/2009