Regulating Smoking

As an American Cancer Society volunteer dedicated to the society’s goal of reducing the devastating human and societal toll exacted by tobacco use, I heartily endorse the position taken in your editorial “Smoke Screen” (Jan. 27).

No Californian should sign the petition put forth under the rubric of the “California Uniform Tobacco Control Act.” To do so would offer the Philip Morris Co., the principal sponsor, the opportunity to potentially subvert or to destroy more than 300 city and county local ordinances written to protect nonsmokers from the harmful effects of secondhand smoke. Local ordinances should not be overridden by a callous industry, which disdains the incontrovertible evidence proving its products are a public health menace.

Tobacco-related diseases are the single most preventable cause of disease in the U.S., yet they are responsible for more than 400,000 deaths annually--approximately 53,000 of these attributable to secondhand smoke.

RAYMOND MELROSE DDS

Tobacco Activities Task Force

American Cancer Society, Los Angeles

* In your editorial you imply that passive smoke is a license to kill. As to the surgeon general’s figure of 44,000 death attributed to secondhand smoke, that is the real smoke screen. There is absolutely no proof that secondhand smoke is responsible for a single death, let alone 44,000 annually.

You chastise the tobacco industry for trying to get a statewide smoking regulation in effect, instead of each city and county having its own. What we have now is the most unfair treatment to restaurant owners in cities where there is a ban. How would it work if you applied the same method to the seat-belt law or the helmet laws for motorcycles and bicycles? Should cities have their own regulation?

You say gross human stupidity could be prevented by fighting the tobacco industry. I believe a greater amount of stupidity will take place if we kill our tobacco industry, as the anti-smoking Establishment would wish by the year 2000. Some research should be directed toward the devastating financial impact such a move would bring about.

OTTO J. MUEKSCH

North Hollywood