• 11/16/2006
  • Newtown, CT
  • William A Collins
  • The Newtown Bee (www.newtownbee.com)

Who cares how,
The doctors fret;
I just need,
My cigarette.

So who do you suppose will slaughter more of their fellow mortals in this bright-eyed new century? Can the Janjaweed sustain long enough to claim the record? Perhaps the Taliban? Muktada al-Sadr? Al Qaida? Will such ephemeral evildoers be able to top their more enduring rival, the Pentagon? And whose numbers can you trust anyway?

No matter. All these killing machines are pikers compared to the tobacco industry. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), we’re now on track to suffer one billion smoking deaths by 2100. That would be roughly 10 times the toll in the more benign 20th Century. This would require a hefty increase over the 1.4 million tobacco deaths a year currently reported, or the mere 11 million new cancer cases diagnosed annually. Maybe the WHO is exaggerating. Still, Asia is coming on strong.

But exaggeration or not, the industry is giving the death record its best shot. The government’s remarkably independent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have detected that producers have gradually been slipping higher levels of nicotine into their product. This is making it ever harder for existing addicts, however laudable their intentions, to lay their habit aside. That’s bad news for the reported 60 percent of smokers who want to quit, and the 40 percent each year who actually give it a try. More nicotine, stronger addiction.

The companies have also spent a bundle researching special appeals to women. Thus we’ve seen the “slim” cigarette, the sweeter taste, the appetite suppressant, and the alleged relief from “neuroticism.” No relief, however, from cancer.

Fortunately, in this country anyway, all this research and marketing has nonetheless turned out to be a rearguard action. Smoking is down, lung cancer is down, and the old Prohibition slogan, “Lips that touch liquor will never touch mine,” would be back in vogue today if only “tobacco” started with an “L.” Puffing is no longer socially acceptable.

A lot of work has gone into this success. The medical profession has been heroic. Nonprofit groups have given us no rest, and now they are beleaguering teenagers to keep them off the weed. In fact, the antismoking campaign has been one of those rare efforts that has elevated an aspect of American society to a higher moral plateau than the rest of the world.

Except, unfortunately, for the State of Connecticut and the federal government. Our state legislature continues to throw into the general fund virtually all of that pot of money from the Great Tobacco Settlement. Almost all other states put much more of it into smoking cessation programs. The feds, in turn, recently gave the companies a huge gift by reducing the penalties requested in a second big national lawsuit. It pays to have friends in high places.

Another related moral issue may also soon wash up on Connecticut shores. It seems that UST, the world’s preeminent maker of chewing tobacco, is thinking of leaving its longstanding home in Greenwich for cheaper digs. An enterprise zone with tax advantages has been suggested.

So which Nutmeg city will welcome this purveyor of bad health and bad taste, along with its elegant new product, “spitless” tobacco? Who will provide tax breaks to such an outfit? Yes, that’s right. Everyone. The state, too. Business is business. If we’re so happy to prostrate ourselves to make handguns and war machines, what’s a little cancer?

And cancer is where it’s at. The United States tobacco companies, blunted now in their home country, are working like beavers everywhere else. In the end, they cause more casualties than AK-47s, land mines, and cluster bombs. Mother Teresa wouldn’t be pleased.