WORD COUNT 666

WORD COUNT 666 JUNE 24, 2009

NAIL IN SMOKING’S COFFIN – by Donald Kaul

It’s been 45 years since I quit smoking cigarettes, two weeks before the surgeon general’s report on smoking came out. I thought you should be smart enough to figure out that cigarettes were bad for you without the government telling you After all, they didn’t call them “coffin nails” for nothing.

I’d been quitting smoking for almost as long as I’d been smoking, about 12 years. I’d smoke for six or eight months (a pack or two a day) until I got that wonderful, rich morning cough that heavy smokers know so well. Or I’d get one of my two fall-winter-spring chest colds. And I’d swear off the nasty things.

But sooner or later---sometimes as quickly as a couple of days---I’d get back at it.

My environment didn’t help. I worked in a newsroom, where pretty much everyone smoked. We’d sit there at our typewriters, cigarettes dangling from our mouths, while we pounded out our nearly deathless prose. Finished, we’d drop the still-burning butt on the floor and grind it out on the linoleum.

Was it coarse and ugly? Yes. But impossibly romantic, the sort of thing that Humphrey Bogart movies were made of.

That was the thing about cigarettes, they were cool. And if you wanted to be cool too---as who didn’t---you had to smoke them. Edward R. Murrow, the coolest of postwar TV journalists, held his cigarette like a scepter while interviewing the rich and famous, his head wreathed in smoke.

James Dean, the coolest of young actors not named Brando, appeared in “Rebel Without A Cause” with a filtered cigarette lightly clenched in his front teeth. Until then we hadn’t realized that filtered cigarettes could be cool. (Such was the power of movies in the good old days.)

But, always, we knew it was bad for us. We could feel it. We just didn’t know how bad. The surgeon general’s report told us. Very bad.

People who smoked were nine or 10 times more likely to get lung cancer than people who didn’t. (Both Bogart and Murrow were to die of lung cancer, by the way, taking the edge off the romanticism of it all.) Smoking also caused emphysema and heart disease, the report said, and the birth-weight of babies born to women who smoked was significantly lower than that of infants born to non-smokers.

So I quit and I stayed quit. I suppose it saved my life.

The report, initiated under President John Kennedy, was easily the greatest public healthy initiative of my time. And now we have another step on the way to sanity. Last week Congress passed a bill that will give the Federal Drug Administration power to regulate the sale and manufacture of of tobacco products, just as it does other dangerous drugs.

It promises to be the next great public health measure for---while the warnings of the 1964 report helped cut smoking in half over the decades---an estimated 20 percent of Americans still smoke. And 40,000 of them die of smoking-related diseases each year.
Imagine that. The nation was appalled when 3,000 died in the 9/11 attacks. We consider it a national tragedy, which it is. Six years of war in Iraq have cost 4200 dead and we mourn their loss.

Tobacco claims 40,000 lives a year and it’s taken us 45 years---1.8 million lives worth---to take really tough effective measures to regulate its use.

We won’t be able to stop people from smoking. It’s an addiction. (I had a friend dying of emphysema who would disconnect himself from his oxygen tank to sneak a cigarette.) But if they can keep a high percentage of kids from taking it up, that’s something; that’s a lot.

I’ll admit that even today it looks kind of cool when you see people smoking in, for example, a French movie (smoking has all but disappeared from American movies). Seeing someone in a hospital bed, tubes attached, gasping into an oxygen mask? Not so cool.

Don Kaul is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent who, by his own account, is right more than he's wrong. Email: dkaul2@earthlink.net -- A photo of Donald Kaul is available CLICK HERE

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