What Marlboro Man Packs Is Even Deadlier Than a Gun

The following story never fails to draw a chuckle, which says something about people’s gallows sense of humor:

A friend gave me a tape of a Brooklyn Dodgers radio broadcast from the mid-50s. As one of the Dodgers rounded the bases after hitting a home run, announcer Jerry Doggett added the footnote that as a sponsor’s prize, free cartons of cigarettes would be sent “to the guys at Vets Hospital.”

One assumes the vets choked on their gratitude.

It makes you wonder what the vets (or the Dodgers) would have said back then had they seen a report like the one issued last week that identified tobacco as the nation’s biggest underlying cause of death.

But why wonder about what people 35 years ago would have said? What about people today?

Even as the information mounts yearly about tobacco’s deleterious health effects, the industry chugs along. And while the percentage of adult white men who smoke has declined considerably over the years, that drop-off has been partially offset by advertising targeted at teen-agers, ethnic groups and women.

With so many people quitting, I had the general impression that the cigarette companies might be seeing the beginning of the end, but not even the head of an anti-tobacco organization engages in such wishful thinking.

“Everybody says, ‘What are you going to do after you slay this beast?’ Ahron Leichtman said. “This beast is not going to go down. This is not the kind of dinosaur that’s going to be obliterated from the face of the earth. Not in our lifetimes, anyway.”

Coming from the head of a group called Citizens for a Tobacco-Free Society, Leichtman’s assessment sounded rather dispiriting.

I grew up in a household where my father smoked for 30 years, until heart disease in his early 50s forced him to quit. I know nicotine is addicting, but what sticks in my mind is how quickly and completely he quit, once the doctor ordered him to.

That comes to mind because quitting smoking can save lives, at least according to government researchers. Simply put, it’s not impossible to do.

The government study released last week said an estimated 400,000 deaths a year--nearly 20% of the nation’s total--could be directly linked to tobacco use. The report cited tobacco as far and away the leading cause of deaths in the country. Firearms, just to cite another contributor on the death list, were cited in 35,000 deaths.

It doesn’t take a moralist or genius to ask why we treat something so benignly, all the while knowing it’s linked to 400,000 deaths a year.

Oh sure, on the grand timeline, cigarettes seem to be losing ground. Smoking is banned in Los Angeles restaurants, and San Francisco just passed an ordinance banning them in the workplace, but California is “light years” ahead of the rest of the country, Leichtman said.

“I don’t expect to see cigarettes banned,” said Leichtman, whose organization is based in San Francisco. “They’re legal not because they’re safe but because they’re old. They’ve been grandfathered into the economy of our country.”

Largely for pragmatic reasons, meaning Congress would never go for it, Leichtman’s group doesn’t favor an outright ban on cigarette sales. Instead, it has narrowed the battleground to public places, hoping to put a dent in what he describes as the “$4-billion drug industry.”

I don’t have grand visions, either. As much time as I spend eating out, I’d settle for smoke-free restaurants. Nothing ruins dinner faster than a nice headache caused by someone else’s smoke wafting over from the smoking section.

Perhaps my modest wishes will come true. Two state legislative committees have bills that would restrict smoking in public. One, AB 996, was sponsored by the tobacco industry to offset a more stringent bill, AB 13.

Public bans on smoking seem to be the way the curve is going, but Leichtman says the raw numbers of smokers remain daunting. The country had 50 million smokers in 1992, he said, and they smoked nearly 500 billion cigarettes.

According to my math, that’s counting more than a pack a day for each smoker. But even if Leichtman’s figures are high, we’re talking about a mammoth industry.

That’s why he doesn’t expect cigarettes to disappear any time soon. “Cigarettes remain the most profitable consumer product ever sold,” Leichtman said, despite various efforts to hamper the industry.

What an amazing enterprise the tobacco industry is. Sitting at the top of the charts as America’s No. 1 killer and still going strong.

It kind of makes you wonder why we’re so worried about something as relatively harmless as guns, buried way down there at No. 6 on the list.

Fact is, those street killers we say we’re so worried about are going to have to go some to catch up with the cigarette makers.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.