7/1/2008 Chicago, IL D. Robert McCaffree, MD Chicago Tribune (www.chicagotribune.com) I read with interest the open letter from Dr. Brad Rodu to Sen. Obama in the June 22 Perspective section ("Quitting ins't that easy"). In this open letter, Dr.Rodu advocated the use of smokeless and spit tobacco (which I will refer to only as spit tobacco) to reduce the cravings of nicotine addiction and reduce the harm from cigarettes. He minimized the risk from spit tobacco in his comments. As a physician who has spent my professional career helping those with nicotine addiction, I would like to offer an alternative view. Using spit tobacco for smoking cessation is an area of controversy among anti-tobacco advocates. Many of us who have cared for patients with their tongues or half their jaws removed because of spit tobacco would not advocate its use. Moreover, UST, Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds and other producers of spit and smokeless tobacco are marketing flavored packets designed to attract and addict young people. And many spit tobacco products deliver more nicotine than cigarettes. While I support using a variety of techniques for smoking cessation for my patients, I would suggest that a safer method than spit tobacco is using approved nicotine replacement such as patches, gum and lozenges. In fact, the most recent update of the CDC Guidelines for Smoking Cessation doesn't recommend use of spit tobacco but does recommend the use of combinations of nicotine replacements, such as patches plus gum, finding that the results were as [...]

7/1/2008 Washingon, D.C. Matt Schudel Washington Post (www.washingpost.com) Clay S. Felker, the pioneering editor who founded New York magazine and helped launch the new journalism of the 1960s, with its novelistic techniques and strong point of view, died July 1 at his Manhattan home at 82. He had battled throat cancer in recent years. "He had beaten cancer three times," his wife, writer Gail Sheehy, said yesterday. "He died at home in his sleep." By defining the form of the modern city magazine and encouraging writers to address modern life in a bold, vividly descriptive style, Mr. Felker was one of the most influential journalists of his time. His first triumphs came in the mid-1960s, when he was editor of New York, originally the Sunday magazine of the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. He gave writers such as Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin the freedom to roam the city and write as they pleased, making the colorful supplement "the hippest Sunday reading in town," as Newsweek put it. When the newspaper folded in 1967, Mr. Felker used his severance pay to buy the magazine's name and secured more than $1 million in financing to rebuild New York as a glossy weekly publication. When it debuted on April 8, 1968, it was not an immediate success, but Mr. Felker soon found an innovative formula that would inspire imitators around the world. He combined in-depth articles on politics, crime and finance with lighter features on shopping, restaurants, reviews and listings that made [...]