Letters to the editor
Don’t let them make you a victim
Dear Editor:
Over the course of my faculty career at Washington University, I have been generally encouraged by the decline in the number of students who are smokers. However, in the last few years, I have noticed that smoking seems to be becoming fashionable again on campus, a trend that I find deeply disturbing.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, smoking costs the U.S. economy over $90 billion a year (this makes it comparable to the expected economic impact of Hurricane Katrina), and it kills over 400,000 Americans every year. This is more than 100 times the number of people who died in the World Trade Center bombing! For my money, this makes Phillip Morris a much more dangerous threat to the United States than Al Qaeda. Talk about an axis of evil!
Moreover, the United States is relatively fortunate when it comes to smoking. In other countries that lack the restrictions on advertising that we have here, smoking is much more prevalent. When I have traveled to Europe and the Far East, I have been amazed to see how common smoking is in countries that lack our consumer protections. The tobacco industry cynically exploits the deeply addictive nature of nicotine to get people hooked and make them victims for life-a life that is made substantially shorter by their products. Don’t let these merchants of death make you a victim. If you don’t smoke, don’t start. Don’t even think about it. If you do smoke, stop-right now. If you have friends who smoke, talk to them about quitting. Let’s eliminate this deadly scourge. Lives depend on it.
Jon Turner
Henry Edwin Sever Professor of Engineering
Popularity: unranked [?]
Related Posts
Print This Post