Thank you for summing up the tobacco industry in one easy sentence. Either they lied or they're too stupid to know they sold poison all those years.

So the GIs were being shot at, some of them. Their immediate peril doesn't excuse putting addictive, useless, health-eroding substances in their Red Cross packages as standard issue. That's building a captive market. Some of those soldiers never smoked before they got cigarettes with their Spam. Not all of them would be killed; not all of them would even see combat. But they came home smoking.

I don't smoke, either. I wanted to. My dad smoked like a chimney, and I loved the way those few forbidden drags felt. Never coughed once. I looked forward to seeing-my-breath cold days so I could get my pack of candy Lucky Strikes and blow "smoke" and gesture like Bette Davis. In high school, I had friends who smoked; they always had dates with sophisticated college men.

The reason I didn't smoke had nothing to do with my health and everything to do with economics: I added up the price of Dad's habit just in cigarettes consumed and decided I wanted to go to college instead of date it. Like every teenager, I believed in my heart that my health would never fail and that I would live forever, even though I understood mortality as a concept.

I've watched people die of emphysema and lung cancer. They started out with Lucky Strikes, too. And Pall Malls and Marlboros, snuck from Dad's drawer or Mom's purse, when they were 12 or 13 years old.

Any adult who starts smoking, that's their lookout. The tobacco companies went after the kids, their keeper customers. They still do, knowing kids still know the way to Dad's drawer or Mom's purse. They lied to get the kids to use, and only came clean after relentless pursuit by the American Lung Association and others. They are grown-ups; their marks are kids. To put the burden of resistance on the kids is as unjust as it is unrealistic.

And I'll be frank about this: I don't care about compensation for the victims. It's too late for them. What I want to see is the day when these companies, who still prey on the young, except they go abroad to do it openly, are driven into bankruptcy. I want their stock to be just as poisonous as their product. If lawsuits hurry that process along, I'm for it. That's my agenda.

Regards--
Mary Anne