‘Smokers Stand Alone in Blame’
Machan’s article offers some questionable comments regarding lawsuits against tobacco companies by smokers diagnosed with lung cancer. Machan’s contention is that if one elects to become addicted to smoking while fully aware of the risks involved, he must accept personal responsibility for the decision. Unfortunately, that decision, in far too many cases, involves painful and premature deaths.
He writes that, based on scientific knowledge, only those with some special genetic makeup are hurt by smoking. In truth, it would be far more accurate to say that only those with some genetic makeup are not hurt by smoking, since the vastly predominant number of tobacco consumers in our society eventually experience severe arterial degeneration, emphysema, heart disease and/or lung cancer, which by itself accounts for over 135,000 fatalities each year.
Whether consumers should or should not be willing to acknowledge personal responsibility for their tobacco addiction and, by extension, for whatever physical disablements may ensue therefrom, is not really the issue. An individual’s attempt to recover damages in court from a tobacco company for such disablements can only be decided by a jury, and clearly a reasonable case may be made for either side.
Additionally, while stressing that smokers cognizant of the publicized dangers must be prepared to shoulder personal responsibility for their actions, choices and decisions, Machan has curiously overlooked the growing addiction to tobacco not only among our teen-age population, but among pre-adolescent children as well. Does he suggest that these children be held responsible for their misguided choices?
Machan’s summary recommendation that we simply admit that millions of smokers want to smoke whatever the risks, and that the surgeon general would have to become a dictator to prevent it is too simplistic to be persuasive. Many thousands of hard-core smokers have quit, and numerous others will undoubtedly do so in the future. But when they do, it won’t be because we became resigned to the inevitability of addictive smoking, but because as a society we cared enough about the problem to pursue its solution.
MEL DIAMOND
West Hollywood
(Diamond is the liaison to the film and television industry for the national chapter of the American Cancer Society).
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