Pubdate: Thu, 23 Jan 2014
Source: Record, The (Troy, NY)
Copyright: 2014 Washington Post Writers Group
Contact:  http://www.troyrecord.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1724
Author: Richard Cohen, Washington Post Writers Group

MARIJUANA? WHERE'S THE DEBATE OVER CIGARETTES' RISKS?

On Jan. 1, Colorado began permitting the legal sale of marijuana. 
Even before that, the nation's news media had swung into action, 
arguing just about everything - marijuana is dangerous or not 
dangerous, a gateway drug or just a lot of smoke. Nothing I saw 
mentioned why I, for one, will not smoke marijuana. I'm afraid it 
would lead me back to cigarettes.

Once I was addicted to cigarettes. (I suppose I still am.) Now the 
latest surgeon general's report shows that cigarette smoking is even 
worse for us than we once thought. To all the usual diseases - lung 
cancer and heart disease - can be added diabetes, colorectal and 
liver cancers and, irony of ironies, erectile dysfunction. The 
Marlboro Man needs some help.

Boris D. Lushniak, the acting surgeon general, tacked on some more 
horrors: vision loss, tuberculosis, rheumatoid arthritis, impaired 
immune function and cleft palates in children of pregnant women who 
smoke. Did I mention bladder cancer? How about cervical cancer? They, 
too, can be caused by smoking. Can you imagine anything more 
economical: almost any disease you can name in a single package.

The managers and directors of tobacco companies must wonder at their 
good fortune. The nation is engaged in a great debate about marijuana 
- - is it dangerous, addictive? - while tobacco is not only legal but 
widely available and not discussed. Smoking, the surgeon general 
says, is responsible for 480,000 premature deaths a year. That's a 
bit more than the population of Kansas City, Mo. - dead, dead and 
very dead every single year.

About 18 percent of Americans smoke, down from 42 percent in 1965. 
But the decline has leveled off and with it has come an appreciation 
of just how unhealthy smoking is. Tobacco is about the only product 
you can think of that, when used as directed, can kill you.

To my knowledge, Karl Marx never considered tobacco companies in his 
criticism of capitalism. Yet almost 150 years after he published "Das 
Kapital," these companies are selling a carcinogenic delivery system 
to what are, after all, nicotine junkies. How's that for 
exploitation, Karl baby? What other industry can claim so many lives 
and so much misery? Beginning with its early efforts to suppress 
medical findings, what other industry has such a splendid history of 
lying to the public? Yet the people who run these companies are not 
shunned, denied membership in the country club and appropriately 
reviled. Instead, they are welcomed and respected and, of course, 
well compensated. If you read the websites of the various tobacco 
companies, you would think that they are in the business of fighting 
smoking and that new smokers somehow materialize out of thin air. The 
word "responsibility" is a leitmotif. This is an outrageous restraint 
of trade; these companies leave little hypocrisy for anyone else.

The truth is I loved to smoke. But now I can hardly bear to watch 
Bogie light up in some film-noir classic without seeing it as 
foreshadowing his death from esophageal cancer at the age of 57.

And when I see kids on the street smoking, flipping off health 
concerns with the arrogance of youth, I want to slap them silly or, 
at the least, delay their walk with a lecture on what the surgeon 
general has found.

But mostly I want them and everyone else to ask how we can have a 
national debate on marijuana and ignore the annual mountain of 
cadavers from smoking cigarettes. It, for sure, is a gateway drug - 
to an early grave.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom