Smoking bigger threat than illicit drugs

How much sense does this make?

Using cocaine and heroin is a serious crime in this country. Smoking cigarettes in public places is not. But if the U.S. surgeon general's recent report on the effects of cigarette smoking is right, Americans have more to fear from smokers than from junkies.

Exposure to secondhand smoke dramatically increases the chance of developing heart disease and lung cancer, Surgeon General Richard Carmona said a few days ago.

"There is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke," Carmona said in releasing a new report. "Breathing secondhand smoke for even a short time can damage cells and set the cancer process in motion."

Exposure to secondhand smoke also increases a nonsmoker's risk of suffering a heart attack, the surgeon general said.

That sounds to me as if cigarette smoking is a far greater threat to American lives than cocaine and heroin.

The United States long ago declared war on drugs, spending billions of dollars over the past couple of decades to interdict the flow of illegal drugs, hunt down dealers and hassle users.

The justification for all of this has been that drug users and the traffickers who supply them are a scourge on our society. The violence spawned by the drug trade takes thousands of lives each year. There were 15,517 murders in this country in 2000, according to the FBI. Many were drug-related. And 17,000 people died from illicit drug use that year, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported.

As troubling as those numbers are, they pale in comparison to the number of people known to have been killed by cigarettes. Tobacco was this country's leading cause of death in 2000, taking 435,000 lives, according to a JAMA report.

Put another way, an American was 28 times more likely to be killed by cigarette use in 2000 than to be murdered — and 26 times more likely to die from the effects of smoking than from drug use.

While scientists and doctors have warned us many times about the harm done by secondhand smoke, states have been slow to respond. Only 11 of the 50 states have enacted laws banning smoking in all workplaces. Fifteen states have outlawed smoking in restaurants, and 11 have banned it in bars, according to the American Nonsmokers' Rights Foundation.

But now that the surgeon general has established a strong link between secondhand smoke and heart disease, cancer and even SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome), it's time for states to start treating secondhand smoke like the serious threat it is.