America's Worst-Kept Secret Wafts Toward A Big--And Unnecessary--Legal Showdown. By Jeff Smith BACK IN THE days when Bob Newhart was still working on his stammer, the device he employed to achieve this delayed reaction style of timing was the telephone. I suppose this goes back far enough that Al Bell was still around to get a laugh at Newhart's use of his new invention. I know it wasn't so long ago as to antedate television, because I saw it on the Ed Sullivan Show. Anyway it was the funniest thing anybody had done in public since the French Revolution. It was Newhart's take on Sir Francis Drake's report to the court of Queen Elizabeth I, on his trade mission to the British colonies in America. Bob is playing the part of the Duke of Earl or some such limey poobah, listening on the phone while Sir Frank the Flake is trying to impress upon him the immense profit potential in this marvelous agricultural discovery the indigenous peoples have put him onto: "Ah hah, and what do you call this stuff?...tobacco? Tobacco. ahhh ha. So what do you do with it?...I see. You dry it out and shred it into little bits...okay. And then you roll it into a little paper cylinder. Okay...so then what? "Frank? Frank, you're gonna have to speak louder; we've got a bad connection. Okay we've got this paper cylinder full of dried weeds, and now what?...you put it in your mouth... "And then you do WHAT!?" That apocryphal report from colonial Virginia, delivered in the silence of the unheard half of a telephone conversation, said more to me about the ludicrousness of cigarette smoking than any of the Surgeon General's pronouncements dating back to the first apocalyptic tidings of 1964. And I was a pack-and-a-half-a-day smoker myself. Winstons. My swim coach, Art Niemi, told me if I didn't quit he'd kick me off the team. I didn't and he did. Even before the Surgeon General came right out and said the damn things probably caused cancer, I and everybody else in the world knew they were bad for you. We all grew up believing they'd stunt your growth. We all knew they gave you a wracking cough. We knew they hurt your wind, gave you bad breath, morning mouth and made a hangover a hell of a lot worse. Why do you think they called them coffin nails? And everybody knew it was mighty nigh impossible to quit them. Reduced to its simplest terms, as Bob Newhart so viciously, and hilariously synthesized it, what cigarette smoking come down to is this: You take a dry, noxious weed, wrap it in paper, stick it in your mouth...and set it on fire. Well gee, when you put it that way... But wait, there's more. It gets worse. You've set fire to this combustible mess in your mouth, but rather than spit it out and pee on it, you suck it right down until it almost blisters your lips, and you inhale all the smoke. Does this sound like the rational act of the most intelligent species on the planet? Not hardly. And even before we knew it gave us cancer and slow, painful death, we knew it stunted our growth, ruined our athletic careers and made us feel like shit. But we couldn't quit, because we knew it was habit-forming. Not quirky little ritual habit-forming, like throwing a pinch of spilled salt over your shoulder, but slow suicide habit-forming. Like cocaine. And every year our government gave millions of dollars, in the tens and hundreds thereof, to the farmers who grew the weed, to help keep prices up and sustain this money-making, job-creating industry. And every so often another Surgeon General would release another, more damning report on the killing effects of tobacco, and more tens of thousands of smokers would sicken and die, and the tobacco companies would continue to deny their products were addicting and killing people, and the government would rail against tobacco out of one side of its mouth and pledge crop supports and tax incentives out of the other, and dying smokers and surviving families would sue for damages, saying they never knew a couple packs a day could be bad for a body... ...And somewhere some deity or some cosmic sense of the ludicrous was laughing its ass off. And finally, today, one smallish tobacco company 'fesses up and admits it has known for some time that nicotine in tobacco is addictive and that tobacco causes cancer and kills. And finally, today, the biggest tobacco companies are negotiating to cut a deal to quit lying about what everybody has known all their lives, to get the states and the dying smokers to quit suing them for hundreds of billions of dollars, and maybe keep their CEOs out of jail, or at least out of court--criminal or civil--in trade for quitting their targeting of kids and other susceptible markets, and manipulation of the addictive properties of their products. All of which is a terrific idea in my book. I've only got maybe .5 of a scintilla more respect for a civil plaintiff who smoked two packs a day for 40 years and now wants a shitload of money from RJR, than I do for RJR itself. They're all going to hell, or whatever serves that function. Nobody with brains enough to be allowed to roam around loose can have escaped the knowledge that smoking is real bad for you, and I still believe that each of us is individually responsible for the things we do--and do and do again--to ourselves. Nor is our government in any position to be chastising or punishing tobacco companies for lying. The government, and all of us, by way of our democratic participation and complicity in governmental affairs, have been co-conspirators in the common lie. So how about let's cut the deal, stay out of court, quit being hypocritical and recognize the obvious: Animals, from mollusks to upright apes, are going to do things--swallow things, inhale things, rub up against things--that are not necessarily in their best, long-term interests. That's just the way things are. The way we are. And as long as we aren't actively hurting someone else while we chip away at our own best interests, it really isn't in the public interest to try to interfere.

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