Designer Smokes

I just read your article (Jan. 25) on the new Yves Saint Laurent designer cigarettes and I was appalled. Even more appalling was the reaction of the people who were interviewed.

I have cancer. I had surgery on Aug. 30 for a malignant brain tumor. I did nothing to bring this condition on myself. It just happened.

When I see people smoking and deliberately doing something to their bodies that could cause cancer, it almost makes me sick. I guess it is that old “it-can’t-happen-to-me attitude.” Well it can.

Why is Saint Laurent and the R.J. Reynolds Co. doing this? Money, of course. It is just another way to make you turn loose a buck.

And the ads, of course, are filmed with beautiful women in glamorous places. Why not bring the cameras into the cancer wards and show what it is like after you have smoked all those chic cigarettes?

BETTY MACLEAN

Torrance

I see R. J. Reynolds is coming out with a new designer cigarette. Paris designer Yves Saint Laurent will put his initials in gold on a fancy colored box. No matter what they put on the outside of a cigarette, the inside will always be a time bomb. Will people ever learn? I can vouch for that.

GEORGE GARDNER

North Hollywood

Yves Saint Laurent is shrewd to market designer cigarettes. In a few years he’ll be able to sell designer scalpels to surgeons for use in excising designer tumors from the lungs of his “in” customers.

JACK SANDWEISS

Beverly Hills