TOBACCO SUBSIDIES AND ETHICALLY CHALLENGED "DOCTORS"

Doctors' tobacco holdings: 193 million cigarette packs Ethicist terms
findings 'shocking'

RALEIGH, N.C. - Hundreds of doctors across the country own and profit from
tons of tobacco, despite decades of health warnings, scolding from peers
and in some cases their own ethical reservations.

They're family practitioners who warn teenagers not to smoke, psychiatrists
who treat addiction, oncologists who identify malignant tumors and surgeons
who remove them.

One tobacco-owning doctor was a longtime regional medical director for the
American Cancer Socieiy. Another runs a public health department. A third
writes a newspaper's health tips column.

Almost none smoke.

"I won't smoke," says Stephen Jackson, an orthopedic surgeon in Paducah,
Ky., who co-owns the government rights to grow 1,400 pounds of burley
tobacco a year. "I mean, It will kill you."

All tell their patients not to smoke or chew tobacco.

"I get mad with them, fuss at them every day," says Richard Rush, a family
practitioner from Conway, S.C., with more than 11,000 pounds of flue-cured
to-bacco allotted to his farm.

Nonetheless, they are among at least 760 doctors and other health care
workers who own valuable federal tobacco-growing rights, known as
allotments or quotas, according to a computer analysis by The Associated
Press. They practice in 23 states, from Florida to Alaska, Massachusetts to
California.

Some of the doctors own minuscule government rights, as little as 21 pounds
annually; one in South Carolina has 932,000 pounds.

All told, these doctors control production of more than 7 million pounds of
tobacco -- enough to make 193 million packs of cigarettes a year. They also
grow nearly 290,000 pounds of the varieties of leaf used in chewing tobacco
and cigar wrappers.

At last year's sales prices, their leaf would be worth $13 million -
although a large portion of that goes to family members, sharecroppers and
those who lease much of the crop.

For professionals who have taken an oath not to do harm, those numbers are
"shocking and disappointing," medical ethicist Arthur Caplan says.

"I think you just cannot argue that you're going to make money on the back
of this obvious health menace," says Caplan, director of the Center for
Bioethics at the Universiiy of Pennsylvania. "To own and farm and produce
tobacco as a doctor, especially in small communities, sends a resoundingly
wrong message."

"I'm too greedy," George Burrus, a cardiovascular surgeon in Nashville,
Tenn., says when asked about his decision to keep his 6,500-pound quota,
even though he says he knows tobacco is "killing people." He clears about
$4,000 a year from leasing his leaf.

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)