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Jump to full article: New York Times, 2009-06-13
Intro: Re “Senate Approves Tight Regulation Over Cigarettes” (front page, June 12) and “Tobacco Regulation, at Last” (editorial, June 12):
How long has this been going on? At least 75 years by my calculation. Research done by my father, Irving S. Wright, M.D., and Dean Moffat, M.D., in 1934 clearly showed the deleterious effect of smoking on the circulation (“Effects of Tobacco on Peripheral Vascular System,” Journal of the American Medical Association, 1934).
The research done in the 1950s by Dr. Ernest Wynder linking smoking to lung cancer was crucial to the near-eternal battle to regulate tobacco. Now, with luck, this will be carried out, and lives will be saved.
I’m stunned whenever I see a young person smoking, and I see that more and more. Don’t they know that cigarettes kill and, at 40 or 45 cents apiece here, burn up pocket change fast?
So I don’t quite get Congress’s feckless proposal to fob more tobacco regulation onto the Food and Drug Administration, which arguably cannot handle what it already has to do. If anyone understands tobacco addiction, it is the First Smoker, President Obama . . .
What is instead called for is a Prohibition-style tobacco ban . . .
Government and politicians — and smokers — should just go cold turkey on tobacco and tobacco money, for the sake of the country’s well-being. Anything less is two-faced and toothless.
The F.D.A. already has too much on its plate . . .
As the article mentioned, only one in five Americans still smoke. Obviously, the antismoking information campaign of the last many years is having a beneficial effect. Those who choose to smoke should be left alone to do so
. . .
When it comes to what Americans ingest into their bodies, our nation has become obsessed with nanny-state regulation. Enough already! It’s too bad that we aren’t half as concerned about the garbage Americans put into their minds on a daily basis.
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