Stop youth smoking; it prevents addicted adults

Tony Moschetti's letter mentioned that only 2 percent of cigarettes are consumed by teenagers (June 30). While this may be true, teenage smoking is much more important to the health of our citizens and to the tobacco industry than that percentage would imply. Ninety percent of smokers start to smoke before they reach 18. If a person does not start before 18, there will be little likelihood of that person becoming a smoker.

By preventing the 90 percent of smokers from becoming addicted to nicotine, one can eventually prevent 90 percent of the 400,000 deaths a year attributable to tobacco.

I agree that alcohol and drugs are problems that should not be ignored, and they cause the deaths of innocent people, but the total damage from tobacco is greater. Seventy percent of adult smokers want to quit, and if raising the price of cigarettes by a tax provides incentive to make many of them quit, that would be great.

The tobacco companies would not have achieved immunity from future lawsuits had the scuttled McCain Bill become law. With the revelations exposed by the recently released documents (discussed in Doug Campbell's article June 28) it is doubtful immunity from lawsuits will ever be provided to the tobacco companies by Congress.

I applaud the News & Record for printing that article, which provides a glimpse of how vulnerable the tobacco companies are, and why they sought the agreement with the states' attorneys general. How fortunate we are that Congress is so deliberate.

Richard J. Rosen
Greensboro

News & Record
July 8, 1998