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

DATE: FRIDAY, March 4, 1994                   TAG: 9403040236
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NOT EVERY EVIL CAN BE BANNED

IT IS the most immoral kind of newspeak to profess, as the tobacco industry does unabashedly and repeatedly, that "cigarettes are not addictive."

This incantation was called up yet again last week when the Food and Drug Administration asked Congress for direction on whether it should regulate, and perhaps eventually ban, cigarettes with addictive levels of nicotine. It seems the FDA strongly suspects, after all these years of governmental blindness, that the tobacco industry manipulates the nicotine content of cigarettes - actually f+iincreasingo it in some cases - to assure a high enough level to create and feed addiction.

That's at the least outrageous, if true. It also would make tobacco a drug, says the FDA, therefore under its jurisdiction to control - if such is the public will.

How tempting simply to tell these peddlers of disease and death to be gone. If only the telling would make it so.

Unfortunately, the nation's long, heavily funded and remarkably unsuccessful War on Drugs offers a pretty good foreshadowing of where such a policy would lead. Inevitably, there would be a black market, and a new class of criminal to grow rich on a new class of crime. Smoking almost certainly would decline, but at a great cost to society - not just in dollars spent trying to obliterate yet another vice, but in loss of respect for the law when a much-demanded product goes suddenly from subsidized to outlawed status.

How ironic that the question is being raised at a time when the nation is called to debate whether illegal drug use should be decriminalized to end illicit profits and resulting turf wars, and to emphasize education and health strategies as the best governmental response to addictions.

Tobacco kills many more people than drugs, and is a health threat even to nonsmokers who have made the choice f+inoto to risk cancer and heart disease and respiratory disease by acquiring this habit. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated secondhand smoke kills 3,000 adults a year from lung cancer alone. That number pales beside the some 400,000 Americans killed every year by directly smoking, but it is not inappreciable. Meantime, children suffer as many as 300,000 cases of bronchitis and pneumonia annually from breathing secondhand smoke.

One result of such findings is that smoking is becoming less socially acceptable, and more adults are kicking the habit. Less gut-satisfying than a ban, but perhaps more effective in the long run, would be passage of the federal Smoke-Free Environment Act, endorsed by the Clinton administration and the past five surgeon generals. It would ban or restrict (to smoking rooms ventilated directly outside) smoking in commercial and public buildings regularly entered by 10 or more people at least one day each week. That's just about all of them.

Of course, the effectiveness of adult smoker-stigmatization and get-smart efforts leaves children as targets for Joe and Josephine Camel, a new generation tempted to just try it - and, the industry fervently hopes - get hooked (before you're old enough to know better).

This is another reason why, on top of public-information campaigns such as Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders' against Joe Camel, a heavy tax on tobacco products is needed. Not only would it help pay for the damage cigarettes cause. Experience in other countries suggests it would encourage more people to quit - young people most of all.

by CNB