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Cigarettes, not bombs, are deadliest artifacts of civilization

By Peter Singer: 0 Comment(s)Print E-mail Shanghai Daily, November 17, 2011

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[By Zhou Tao/Shanghai Daily]

US President Barack Obama's doctor confirmed last month that the president no longer smokes. At the urging of his wife, Michelle Obama, the president first resolved to stop smoking in 2006, and has used nicotine replacement therapy to help him.

If it took Obama, a man strong-willed enough to aspire to and achieve the US presidency, five years to kick the habit, it is not surprising that hundreds of millions of smokers find themselves unable to quit.

Although smoking has fallen sharply in the US, from about 40 percent of the population in 1970 to only 20 percent today, the proportion of smokers stopped dropping around 2004. There are still 46 million American adult smokers, and smoking kills about 443,000 Americans each year. Worldwide, the number of cigarettes sold six trillion a year, enough to reach the sun and back is at an all-time high.

Six million people die each year from smoking, more than from AIDS, malaria, and traffic accidents combined. Of the 1.3 billion Chinese, more than one in 10 will die from smoking.

Earlier this month, the US Food and Drug Administration announced that it would spend US$600 million over five years to educate the public about the dangers of tobacco use. But Robert Proctor, a historian of science at Stanford University and the author of a forthcoming blockbuster titled "Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition," argues that to use education as one's only weapon against a highly addictive and often lethal drug is unpardonably insufficient.

Elimination

"Tobacco control policy," Proctor says, "too often centers on educating the public, when it should be focused on fixing or eliminating the product." He points out that we don't just educate parents to keep toys painted with lead-based paints away from their children's mouths; we ban the use of lead-based paint. Similarly, when thalidomide was found to cause major birth defects, we did not just educate women to avoid using the drug when pregnant.

Proctor calls on the FDA to use its new powers to regulate the contents of cigarette smoke to do two things.

First, because cigarettes are designed to create and maintain addiction, the FDA should limit the amount of nicotine that they contain to a level at which they would cease to be addictive. Smokers who want to quit would then find it easier to do so.

Second, the FDA should bear history in mind. The first smokers did not inhale tobacco smoke; that became possible only in the 19th century, when a new way of curing tobacco made the smoke less alkaline.

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