FEW CHOICES ONCE HOOKED

The Nov. 23 Outlook article, "Smoking is a choice, not an illness," by
Kevin Wm. Wildes deserves a rebuttal. The author does not show ethical
behavior in his writing and apparently assumes that the reader has a
limited education.

Wildes says smoking is not an addiction, only a habit. But he should go to
a library and look up the definitions of addiction and habit. An addiction
is "the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that
is psychologically or physically habitforming, as narcotics, to such an
extent that its cessation causes severe trauma."

This is what is true of cigarette smoking: It is an addiction due to the
nicotine in the product.

Wildes complains that his smoking friends have been transformed into
addicts because of social and medical pushes to make what he calls a habit
into a medical problem.

After smoking for 40 years, it took me three very traumatic times over a
20yearperiod to finally quit eight years ago cold turkey. But I
admitted being "hooked" (slang for being addicted) for years. Where is
Wildes' justification for saying that people are just now being called
addicts when they have been just that for years?

Wildes says that doctors profit when the addicts behavior is turned into a
medical condition, and that the companies that develop therapies for
quitting, such as the nicotine patch and nicotine gum, profit. But these
"medical profiteers" will end up with a dead golden goose. There is far
more money to be made treating smokingrelated illnesses such as heart
attacks, cancers and emphysema.

How did Wildes forget the insurance companies that charge more to smokers
than nonsmokers? He totally ignored health statistics showing the number of
deaths annually from cigarette smoking, the amount of work time lost and
the medical costs of smokingrelated illnesses. And he conveniently ignored
the admission by the tobacco companies that cigarette smoking is indeed
addictive and that nicotine is the addictive drug found in tobacco.

Rodman T. Johnson, Houston