THE ORANGE GROVE

The Issue:The American Lung Association undermines its own good works by
embracing antismoking zealotry.

The Writer: Mr Wagner is an attorney in Irvine and former president of
the board of directors of the American Lung Association of Orange
County.The views expressed are his own.

The American Lung Association recently bestowed some award or another on
liberal activist and sometime actor Woody Harrelson.

This is embarrassing. For the past two years I served as president of the
American Lung Association of Orange County, one of the American Lung
Association's approximately 95 local affiliates. I have enormous respect
for much of the Lung Association's work.

But really, an award to Woody Harrelson? That goes too far.

Larry Flynt in the movie "The People vs. Larry Flynt," tries in one short
scene to get his wife to stop smoking. That was enough for the American
Lung Association. Never mind that the movie also depicts Flynt and his wife
spiraling down into a life of drugs and debauchery that ultimately kills
her. Harrelson's Flynt at least showed proper concern for the wife's lungs.

So the American Lung Association, attentive always to the dangers of
smoking and otherwise morally tonedeaf, awards the actor playing Flynt
with recognition for a good deed well done.

In other words, the American Lung Association honors the actor playing
Larry Flynt because of a scene someone else wrote about the supposed evils
of smoking, all in a movie celebrating depravity. This is truly weird.

(By the way, I do not for a moment agree that the movie actually celebrates
the First Amendment as its apologists in Hollywood claim. Nor, of course,
does the American Lung Association care a whit about freedom of speech,
especially if the speaker is a tobacco company. Indeed, the American Lung
Association seems not even to care that the actor "winning" this award is
an outspoken marijuana enthusiast, when the preferred delivery system for
pot among its aficionados is ... smoke!) Consider that when the "secondhand
smoke" bandwagon started rolling, the official line was that such smoke
killed 4,000 people annually. I guess that number proved insufficiently
scary to focus groups because it was quickly revised upward to 50,000 dead
per year al without a single new study to support the higher number, and
with only junk science to support the lower number.

Consider also that in California a "tobacco czar" was appointed to oversee
spending of the $100 million the state confiscates from the economy
through Proposition 99. The money is to be used for antitobacco
billboards, radio spots and other propaganda. In a newspaper interview
recently, this "czar" Stanton Glantz expressed his hope that soon
tobacco smoking would be the province only of the "sleazy." I wonder what
Glantz thinks of Larry Flynt? And since when is there a moral component to
smoking?

I also find it ironic that the Glantz comments appeared the same week the
California Supreme Court struck down a law requiring minors to get parental
approval for an abortion. My daughter can now buy an abortion but not a
cigarette.

Finally, Hillary Clinton's recent remarks critical of Julia Roberts'
smoking in another movie provide a counterpoint to the American Lung
Association's goody Harrelson award. The press laughed Dan Quayle off the
national stage for suggesting, as the first lady does now, that character
portrayals in the movies and on television can have some effect on
behavior. Does it take a village to kick the habit?

My own experiences with the nosmoking crowed while serving as president of
the Orange County Lung Association affiliate further demonstrate the point
that politically correct antitobacco zealots have gotten hold of the
national organization by the scruff of the neck and shaken it senseless.

At a Lung Association conference last year in New Orleans, I participated
in a marketing workshop. Our task in this workshop was not to market the
great programs our local Lung Association affiliates offer, but instead to
create an advertising program to "educate" teenagers that smoking will
kill them. I became persona non grata when I said, sensibly I thought, that
smoking does not kill teenagers; at most, it shortens the lives of roughly
a third of the middleaged people who took up smoking as teenagers.

Why then be embarrassed by the American Lung Association instead of just
getting out of the organization entirely? The affiliates are legally
separate from the national American Lung Association. Each also works very
hard to address the significant health problems that exist beyond just the
narrow tobacco issue. For example, lung disease is the No. 1 killer of
children under the age of a year; asthma is the leading cause of missed
school days; tuberculosis has made a comeback in many parts of the country.

In solving these and other problems, the local Lung Association affiliates
can and do make a difference in the lives of the young and the seriously
ill. It is because of this difference, and not because of Woody Harrelson
or some leftwing interest group's hatred of tobacco companies, that
volunteers such as yourself spend long hours raising money and working for
our various local affiliates.

I just wish the national organization would not work against us with its
embrace of politically correct positions and celebrities.