Source: Irish Times
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EDITORIAL

Smoking Still Kills

There can be only small wonder at the fact that one of the
many experts attending the 8th World Conference on Lung
Cancer in Dublin was able to report that many smokers and
exsmokers diagnosed as having cancer experience guilt and
anger. As has been known and promulgated for a generation,
smoking causes lung cancer. The real wonder must be about
just how this message has either failed to get through, or has
been rationalised or ignored by those already addicted to
nicotine. Clearly, there must be much more focused and more
effective actions taken; in the first instance, to prevent young
people from becoming addicted and, in the second instance, to
assist the addicts to break from tobacco and the risks
associated with its use.

The size and extent of the problems resulting from tobacco are
formidable, and growing daily. Lung cancer is only one of a
number of lethal diseases that are globally known to result from
the consumption of tobacco, yet estimates suggest that it alone
has been responsible for 20 million deaths in this century, and
there will be several million more before this decade concludes
with the millennium. The banning of smoking in an increasing
number of public places may well help to reinforce the message
of the high risk of smoking but, to put the situation very bluntly,
there is no point in prohibiting people from smoking in the
corridors of the United States Congress while the American
tobacco industry is legally permitted to peddle its lethally
addictive product around the world.

In recent months there has been a more focused attack on the
American tobacco industry than had previously been evident
and some progress has been made insofar as the industry has
been forced to admit more publicly than before that its
products are indeed both addictive and lethal. But, as one of
the speakers at this week's conference pointed out, the sums
offered in the US by way of compensation to victims and
healthcare agencies are minuscule relative to the total global
markets and revenues of the industry. The attack on the
tobacco industry needs to be further sharpened and extended
far beyond the legal confines of the United States.

The European Union and its memberstates must urgently bring
the same pressures to bear on those who produce and would
sell tobacco products. And there must be global agreements
with realistic means of enforcement which will prevent
alltobacco manufacturers from exporting their products to
those less developed countries which have become prime
targets for these lethal sales yet have no restrictions to protect
the health of present or future generations of their citizens.

It has been encouraging, in terms of the ultimate saving of
smokers' lives, to hear from the International Association for
the Study of Lung Cancer (the organisers of the current
conference in Dublin) that better means of the earliest possible
means of detection of lung cancer are being developed, and
that some more effective treatments are emerging. But these
therapeutic developments will not come without considerable
cost to all health services. Above all, they will not stop the
further spread of the diseases which result from smoking. Only
concerted social, educational and political action on a global
basis has any hope of doing that. It is already past the time that
such concerted action should be intensified right around the
world.

What better way to mark the millennium?

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