It’s an Addictive Menace--Face It : Real issue in tobacco hearings: nation’s health

“The time for straight answers is here,” said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) on the eve of hearings by his health subcommittee into what the tobacco industry is up to. Ah, yes. But calling for straight answers and getting them can be two very different things.

“Cigarette smoking is not addictive,” testified William Campbell, president of Philip Morris USA, at Thursday’s hearing. “We do not do anything to hook smokers or keep them hooked,” averred James Johnston, chairman and chief executive of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.

Confronted with such straight-faced assurances, the eyebrows uncontrollably lift, the jaw drops, the gorge rises, the mind boggles.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans die every year--many of them in indescribable agony--from diseases caused by smoking. Can anyone truly believe that in the years and decades before their deaths they stuck to their suicidal habit out of rational choice, the way one might choose between soup or salad to start a meal, rather than because they had become helplessly addicted to tobacco and the powerful drug it contains?

The solemn assurances once again given by tobacco industry officials, the suggestion that smoking is no more addictive than watching television or playing video games, are preposterous. The U.S. surgeon general, the American Medical Assn. and the World Health Organization, relying on countless studies by independent researchers, all have determined that tobacco is as addictive as heroin or cocaine. Indeed, some studies have suggested, kicking tobacco addiction is even harder than kicking heroin.

“Smokers are not drug users or addicts, and we do not appreciate being characterized as such,” huffed and puffed one of the industry executives at Thursday’s hearing. Strip any moral or character implications from that statement and assess it simply on the basis of pharmacologic fact: It is plainly false. Nicotine is a drug. It affects body chemistry and the mind, and smokers do become powerfully dependent on it, meaning they become addicted.

Any smoker or former smoker knows all this. To deny a truth that is so painfully evident to so many is impudent and insulting.

A key purpose of the subcommittee hearings is to try to find out whether cigarette makers manipulate the amount of nicotine in their product as a way to hook smokers. If the Food and Drug Administration finds that nicotine content is manipulated it could classify the chemical as a drug and move to regulate tobacco products. Compelling evidence indicates it’s time for that step to be seriously considered.