Jump to full article: Louisville (KY) Courier-Journal, 2012-03-24
Intro: at the United Nations, which has drafted the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, a treaty endorsed by more than 174 countries as a tool to reduce the amount of smoking.
Not surprisingly, tobacco manufacturers have initiated legal challenges to that treaty all over the world. As Americans have seen, the cigarette companies are ruthless in their efforts to entice people to smoke, and then to keep them hooked once they've started. The pernicious efforts to lure young people into the fold through advertising and other technqiues have been especially dispicable.
The 25-year study reported by the NCI Journal has an ominous figure. Although changes in smoking habits mean that roughly 790,000 Americans are alive today who wouldn't have been otherwise, the number who died during that same period was three times that number.
So while we wink knowingly about the smoking of Don Draper and company on "Mad Men," sadly their counterparts are puffing away actively around the world. And dying.
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