THERE'S no reason I should have any special love for the tobacco industry,
because if anyone is a candidate for cigarette induced lung cancer I am. I
learned to inhale in my early teens. I was addicted by my late high school
years. I didn't give up cigarettes until my mid30s, and I've stupidly been
puffing pipes for the two decades since then.
What's more, my father, a longterm smoker of Camel cigarettes before
they had filters and before Joe Camel made the brand out to be cool, did
die of lung cancer.
"Daddy," I said, as he lit up a Camel in a hospital room, "I'm not sure
they'll let you do that here,"
"Damn," he said, aching for a cigarette despite knowing what smoking had
done to him, "they'd kill a man."
But even though I saw my tall, outsized father come to look like an
emaciated victim of a concentration camp and even though I dreamed of
smoking and thereby scratching an otherwise incurable itch for at least a
year after I quit I do not blame tobacco companies.

I refuse to count either my father or me a victim. I consider the recent
industry settlement with state attorneys general possibly a good thing at
least if Congress and the White House don't mess it up. Yet I hold smokers
themselves responsible for the fate of their lungs and hearts just as
people who leap off the Empire State Building are responsible for their
crushed bones.

Jay Ambrose
Scripps Howard News Service