Braude Plan to Ban Smoking in Restaurants

Why? Why? Ask yourself why cigarettes are legal when they have been proven to cause all sorts of diseases such as cancer. And why do we let the cigarette industry promote itself with flashy ads such as the animated camel used by Camel cigarettes.

My high-school age friends can go into numerous stores and buy cigarettes. Sure, cigarettes are illegal for minors, but the law is largely unenforced. So what’s the only solution? Make cigarettes illegal. If marijuana and cocaine are illegal, why aren’t cigarettes? They all cause the same final effect--death (as proven by the surgeon general).

Cigarettes have almost 2,000 times as much benzene as the Perrier water recently recalled for contamination. Smoking costs the nation an estimated $52 billion a year. If we didn’t have such a problem with cigarettes, we might have been able to spend that money to pay for the savings and loan problem that this nation is faced with. We spend all that money on cigarette research and treatment of cigarette-related diseases. Lung cancer among women has jumped more than fivefold in the past 20 years, and now surpasses breast cancer as the leading cause of death.

Half of the current smokers first lit up by age 15, some 90% before they were 19. Some critics believe that the industry is deliberately capitalizing on adolescents’ desires to be popular and attractive by attributing those qualities to smoking. The only solution is to completely eliminate the cigarette scene from society.

In a society frustrated by the abuse of hard-core drugs such as crack, heroine and cocaine, we have forgotten about the No. 1 killer in America. Cigarettes are the only legal product that when used as intended cause death.

JISANG YOOK

North Hollywood