Vaper Strain

National Review, September 2, 2013

As I write, I am vaping — yes, that’s the word — inhaling an odorless vapor from a plastic facsimile of a cigarette, battery-powered, bought for $10 at a local store, and good, it is claimed, for 400 puffs. The business end is fashioned to look like a filter. In another nod to nostalgia, the tip glows as I inhale. It’s not the real thing, nothing like. Plastic is neither leaf nor paper. It holds no memories of that old bar down on the Lower East Side, that conversation once upon when. There’s no tobacco, no combustion, none of the warmth, none of the evocative transience, none of the mouth-feel of cigarette or cigar, and it looks just a bit dumb. Walk into Rick’s with an e-cigarette and Rick would laugh. Then again, Bogie died at 57.

Whatever the aesthetics of e-cigarettes, as nicotine-delivery systems go they are a lot safer than the cancer sticks of old. There’s no carbon monoxide, no tar, very little, in fact, of tobacco smoking’s carcinogenic stew. To be sure, the Food and Drug Administration has detected tobacco-specific nitrosamines (a carcinogen) in the e-cigarette cartridges that contain the treats to come. A 2009 study revealed about the same quantity of TSNAs in cartridges as might be found in a nicotine patch, a total about one-nine-hundredth of the level found inside Joe Camel. The vaper (I know, I know) will inhale an even smaller portion, a tiny fraction of a minuscule amount. Furthermore, TSNAs were the only carcinogens detected in this study. Boston University’s Dr. Michael Siegel, a 25-year veteran of tobacco-control work (and a Centers for Disease Control alumnus), has noted that smokers of conventional cigarettes may inhale maybe 40 other carcinogens, not to speak of “thousands of [other] chemicals.”

But what about the antifreeze? This substance, more happily associated with autos than lungs, has seeped into the e-cigarette debate, setting up a scare or 50. The truth is that the FDA found some diethylene glycol — an important ingredient in antifreeze — in just one of the cartridges surveyed in the 2009 study, a dismaying result but almost certainly a rogue finding. E-cigarettes generally do contain, however, a base of propylene glycol to “hold” the nicotine and any added flavoring. Propylene glycol is used in antifreeze, but as a kinder, gentler alternative to its rough diethylene cousin, particularly when there is any danger of contact with food. As is explained in the compound’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry toxicological profile (September 1997), “the [FDA] has classified propylene glycol as ‘generally recognized as safe,’ which means that it is acceptable for use in flavorings, drugs, and cosmetics, and as a direct food additive.” Move along, there’s nothing to see here.

As an alternative to propylene glycol, some e-cigarettes use vegetable glycerin as their base. This common food additive will affect their taste, but not your health.

And so far as the ingredients lurking in an e-cigarette are concerned, that ought to be about it. This is not, of course, a reason for arguing that research on these products should cease, or that stricter quality control should be opposed. Nor is it a claim that e-cigarettes are risk-free. They may, for example, inhibit lung capacity, at least temporarily. Beyond that and those pesky TSNAs, there is also the matter that most e-cigarettes will be used to deliver nicotine, a potentially addictive substance — albeit one that has been given up by tens of millions. Then again, much of nicotine’s famously powerful addictiveness can be attributed to the fact that it is being delivered via tobacco, a medium with naturally occurring monoamine oxidase inhibitors that seem to have a great deal to do (it’s a long story) with the difficulty of quitting smoking. Divorced from its leafy accomplice, nicotine is not that addictive, nor under those circumstances, to quote John Britton, who leads the tobacco advisory group for Britain’s Royal College of Physicians, is it even a “particularly hazardous” drug.

What about secondhand smoke, butcher of innocents, enricher of laundries? E-cigarettes give off little or no odor, and, although the research is still at an early stage, the health risks of secondhand vaping likely rest somewhere between zero and infinitesimal.

Considering all this (Dr. Britton has been quoted as saying that if everyone switched over to e-cigarettes it could save “millions” of lives), the medical world ought to be cheering the swift rise of a hugely safer alternative to demon tobacco. E-cigarettes are, so to speak, catching fire. In the U.S., sales are expected to hit $1 billion in 2013, twice the total of a year ago. That’s still only about 1 percent of the total spent on tobacco products, but it says something that Altria Group Inc. (parent company of Philip Morris USA), Reynolds American Inc., and Lorillard Inc. (which paid $135 million for blu eCigs in 2012) have all entered this market. Non-U.S. e-cigarette sales have been expanding rapidly too, reaching an estimated $2 billion in 2012.

But e-cigarettes have given tobacco’s fiercer foes, well, the vapors. Brazil, Norway, and Singapore have banned them. Others have imposed strict controls, including the prohibition of vaping in public places. Some British railway companies have exiled vapers from their carriages on the carefully considered grounds that they make other passengers “uneasy.” Such stupidities are not confined to abroad. A growing number of America’s politicians, bureaucrats, and other nuisances are on the offensive against e-cigarettes, including — if recent reports are true — New York’s nanny-in-chief, Michael Bloomberg. And he won’t be the last.

There are some legitimate concerns. There is a wide range of e-flavors, some of which, cherry crush, say, or chocolate (I’m not sure — on many grounds — about maple bacon), might appeal to a younger set, but such worries are best addressed by prohibiting sales to minors. Other objections — that e-cigarettes might act as a gateway to the real thing (in reality, they are more likely to represent an exit from it) or that they might re-glamorize smoking — are feeble stuff. This suggests that the real agenda is driven by the precautionary principle run amok, or, ominously, by something darker still.

Cynics might point to the loss of valuable tax revenues as the motive, but there’s much more to it than that. The campaign against tobacco began with the best of intentions, but it has long since degenerated into an instrument for its activists both to order others around and to display their own virtue. And with that comes an insistence on a rejection of tobacco so absolute, so pure, that it has become detached from any logic other than the logic of control, the classic hallmark of a cult. So mighty is the supposed power of this anathematized leaf that anything — even when tobacco-free — that looks like a cigarette or provides any approximation of its pleasures is suspect.

It’s too much, of course, to expect any respect these days for the principle that adults should be left to decide such things for themselves, but the chance that the e-cigarette could save an impressive number of lives should count for something. Europe’s sad snus saga suggests that that might not necessarily be so. For generations Swedes have taken a form of oral tobacco, a snuff known as “snus,” cured in a way that sharply reduces its TSNA content. Snus is available in the U.S., land of dip and chaw, but, within the EU, where no such tradition exists, it can be sold only in Sweden. Taking snus is not without risk, but it’s far less harmful than smoking. Its popularity in Sweden, especially with the guys, goes a long way to explaining why that country has Europe’s lowest incidence of lung cancer among men. It has been estimated that introducing snus elsewhere in the EU could save some 90,000 lives a year, but the EU’s capnophobic leadership has rejected the idea. Anti-tobacco jihadists are quite content, you see, to accept that the perfect can be the enemy of the good.

As America’s vapers might be about to find out.

Goodbye to All That

National Review Online, April 27, 2004

They banned Ulysses, the authorities did, they banned it as "obscene" in Britain, and they banned it as obscene in America, and they banned it as obscene just about anywhere else where English speakers could be shocked, offended, or otherwise appalled by James Joyce's strange, lovely mix of prose poetry, incomprehensibility, genius, and naughty talk. That was then. Nowadays, Leopold Bloom's Dublin odyssey is revered, a masterpiece, a monument, a part of our high culture, but its author would still be in trouble. Not for his book, but for his lunch. Times and taboos change, but killjoys and scolds do not.

Joyce used to eat in Davy Byrne's pub, a meal he later bequeathed to Bloom, a Gorgonzola sandwich, a glass of burgundy and a cigarette. The sandwich? No problem, so long as the cheese had been labeled as required by EU regulations. The Burgundy? Well, "glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress grapes of Burgundy. Sun's heat it is." Who's going to argue with that? Not you, not me, not even Brussels. But that cigarette, oh dear, that cigarette.

Since late March, those addictive little sticks of dangerous delight been banned from Davy Byrne's, and every other pub in Ireland. They've been banned in restaurants, they've been banned in offices, they've been banned in factories and they've been banned just about anywhere else the Irish government considers a workplace, even banned, let Willy Loman howl, in company cars. There are exceptions, but most of them are not a lot of fun—prisons, nunneries, the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum and, with grim, but kindly logic, hospices.

And Micheal Martin, the instigator of the ban? He's the typographically challenging busybody-in-chief, a bore, and a smug, self-righteous zealot. His one experience of a cigarette, as a foolish "teenager" naturally, was "disgusting." While he may have a drink now and then, he never, never gets "tipsy." Of course he doesn't. He's too busy planning his next crusade, pondering ways to restrict the advertising of alcohol. And when he's done thinking about that, this nanny, this ninny, this drone, this nosey, hectoring clown is "very tentatively" mulling a fat tax. Ireland's tragedy is that this monstrous figure has the job of his dreams—and everybody else's nightmares. By being appointed Ireland's Minister for Health and, wait for it, "Children," Martin was given a blank check for bossiness. On January 30, 2003, he cashed it.

On that dark day, Martin made a speech. Citing the findings of an "independent scientific working group," he announced that, "on the best of international scientific evidence...there is harm in Environmental Tobacco Smoke. Proven harm about which there is not only a consensus in the worldwide scientific community, but a significant substantial consensus." What's the difference between a "significant substantial" consensus and an ordinary consensus? Who knows? All we do know is that the Martin consensus evidently does not include all that awkward, inconvenient research showing that the health effect of passive smoking on adults is minimal, nonexistent, or statistically irrelevant. That data does not count.

And while we're talking data, let's chat about dosage. A substance can be perfectly safe, even good for you, in low quantities, but lethal in large amounts. Martin has no time for such quibbling. So far as this Einstein, this Galileo, this prince of precision, was concerned, all that we simpletons needed to be told was that in a smoky room, we'd be breathing in "a load of" dangerous chemicals that "do us enormous damage." This horrifying state of affairs had, Martin explained, led him to take "radical new measures.... I'm banning smoking in the workplace...I am publishing draft regulations.... I'm doing this because—as this report makes inescapably clear—I have no choice. There is no other option open to me...as you know, I've already taken a number of initiatives to reduce tobacco consumption...I've raised the age limit for buying tobacco.... I've stopped tobacco advertising in newspapers and magazines.... I believe that in every decade, we are presented with one major choice where...we change the future for the better.... I'm making the call the way it must be made."

"I", "I", "I", "I", "me", "I", "I", "I", "I", "I". Did I mention that our Mr. Martin is a tad self-important?

To be fair, there wasn't a lot of "we" about it. Martin may have had "no choice," but nor did members of the Irish parliament, let alone their electors. There was no vote approving the ban. The minister simply exercised the discretion given to him by an earlier piece of legislation. It's a well-known trick to anyone familiar with the way that the EU imposes its rules and in a way, that's only fitting. For while, behind the (forgive the phrase) smokescreen of healthcare concern, the real motives behind this move include Martin's ego and the uncontrollable urge of politicians to control their fellow citizens, one critical additional element has been the Irish establishment's determination to prove to the outside world how their country is modern, "European," Communautaire, international.

Turn again to that January 30 speech, with its reference to consensus in "the worldwide scientific community", the "best of international scientific evidence and to "the use of internationally recognized experts on tobacco control." A year later, Martin was boasting (not inaccurately) that his initiative had triggered "significant momentum across Europe." Foreigners impressed! That's what counted. The ban he had earlier described as "a massive cultural change" was (the Belfast News Letter reported) marking Ireland out as a "forward-thinking, modern society." "Ireland had," Martin said, "transformed itself in many ways over the last decade...Irish people have demonstrated their capacity to change and to adapt." Indeed they have, but as anyone familiar with the destruction of Georgian Dublin will know, unthinking modernization, or what passes for modernization, can come at a high price.

Writing in the London Independent late last year, a journalist recalled walking one rainy day into a pub in County Clare:

"A warm miasma...reached over and enfolded us in its arms. It was a heady mélange of smells—of burning turf and spilt beer, of mushroom soup and cigarette smoke and wet tweed slowly drying...The atmosphere was extraordinary—thick and savory and textured, like anchovy toast, like the barmbrack spread with butter that my aunt gave us every teatime. The embracing fog of fragrances was practically visible in the fumes that rose to the murky ceiling from every corner of the room. Fumes of sweet turf-smoke, fumes from our drying clothes, fumes of burning tobacco and exhaled smoke, all of it drifting lazily upward like a sacrifice to the household gods. We stuck around. What else could you do?"

History be hanged. In Micheal Martin's antiseptic, go-ahead Celtic tiger there can be no place for messy, awkward anachronisms such as the fug, the fellowship and the fumes of a country pub on a rainy day. The much-heralded choice, 'diversity' and openness of the New Ireland do not, it turns out, mean very much. If, as is always claimed, most drinkers prefer no-smoking pubs, then the market should be left to provide them with that choice. To argue that some supposed fundamental freedom to hang out in a smoke-free bar means that all pubs have to renounce tobacco is to make a mockery of liberty in a country where generations fought, and died, for the real thing.

You'd think that, in the land of craic, cussedness, conflict, and Cuchulain that there would have been more opposition, but while there was some grumbling, some debate, some jeering, only the splendid Deirdre Healy of John Player & Sons (the manufacturers of Eire's most popular cigarette) struck a note that, in its defiance and its poetry was, somehow, very, very Irish. The impact of the ban on her company's business would, said this warrior queen, be no more than "a slap in the face from a butterfly's wings."

Some butterfly, some wings. Prohibition has been introduced, on schedule and on the lines that Martin wanted. Worse still, like so much nanny state nagging, the new law seems to have been accepted, something that was even acknowledged by two visiting statesmen, two giants of our time, Gerrit Zalm, Holland's finance minister, and Jean-Claude Juncker, the premier of mighty Luxembourg. The two men were in Ireland for an EU summit and, in what was possibly the most supine diplomatic gesture seen in Europe since Neville Chamberlain boarded that plane to Munich, they smoked their cigarettes out in the cold.

But, in Ireland's worst moments a hero usually emerges to inspire, enchant, and Irish history being what it is, come to an unfortunate end. On March 30, John Deasy, a member of the Irish parliament, did just that. He committed an unthinkable act in one of the Dail's bars. He smoked not one cigarette, but three (some say two). The whole story remains, so to speak, cloudy, but it appears that Deasy first asked for a fire door to be opened so he could step outside into an alleyway. Request denied! It had not yet been designated a smoking area (it has now—too late for Deasy). Thwarted, the MP remained at the bar, enjoyed his three (or was it two?) cigarettes regardless, washed down, quite possibly, with three pints of beer (whether the barman served this outlaw, this smoker, is still under investigation). Retribution was inevitable. In Micheal Martin's Ireland, such open defiance could not be left unpunished.

And it wasn't. These days there's no smoking without a firing. Deasy was promptly removed as Fine Gael's justice spokesman. More was to come. On April 13 this wretch, this reprobate, this renegade, this rebel, was questioned for half an hour by officers from Dublin's feared South West Area Health Board. He runs the risk of prosecution and a fine of over $3,000. Yes, yes, yes, I know. As an MP, let alone a justice spokesman, Deasy should, of course, have complied with the law (which, disgracefully, he had done nothing before to oppose). But, when you read how this freedom fighter has refused to apologize and, better still, has told the media ("a bunch of hypocrites") to take "a running jump," it's impossible not to cheer.

James Joyce, I suspect, would have felt the same way.

Doctor’s Orders

National Review Online, April 15, 2001

If you thought that the million moms were bad, just wait until you hear from the six hundred thousand docs. Next time you go for a check-up, you just might. Doctors Against Handgun Injury (a new coalition of organizations representing two-thirds of this country's physicians) is suggesting that "health professionals and health systems should ask [patients] about gun ownership when taking a medical history or engaging in preventive counseling." By itself, intrusive questioning is not enough, of course. The interrogation has to be followed by a lecture. "Patients should be provided with information about the risks of having a gun in the home, as well as methods to reduce the risk, should the ignorant peasants continue to choose to keep them." OK, so I added in the "ignorant peasants," but, have no doubt, a snooty assumption of technocratic superiority is indeed what underpins this latest anti-gun initiative. To the folks at DAHI, the rate of gun-related injury is an epidemiological issue, and like any other infectious disease, it is best to leave its control to the medical profession. It is a ludicrous argument, but to the people making it, it comes with one great advantage: Skill with the scalpel or the stethoscope is magically transformed into the right to act as an arbiter in a far wider field than the ER or the hospital ward. Those who are not as qualified are expected to watch in awe as these lab-coated loudmouths issue their self-important prescription for "public safety," a series of policy initiatives that have little or nothing to do with the practice of medicine.

With the exception of the proposed weapons counseling, DAHI's prescription itself is fairly standard gun-control boilerplate, the usual thin end of the anti-Second Amendment wedge. DAHI's agenda includes an extension of the Brady background checks, restrictions on the number of guns that can be bought within a given period, and, of course, that stalker-friendly favorite, the imposition of an interval "between the time an individual purchases a weapon and the time s/he takes possession of it."

As ideas they are nonsense, of course, but what makes these suggested "interventions" (as they are pretentiously labeled) particularly offensive is the way that they are an abuse of the aura and the authority of the physician. By pretending that these measures are a "healthcare" issue, DAHI is attempting to push through a partisan program without the bother of going through the normal political debate. Such debate may be messy, but it is essential part of democracy. These lordly doctors, seem to above such petty considerations.

Perhaps even worse, they also appear to consider themselves to be above the standards of accuracy and objectivity that we are traditionally entitled to expect from our physicians. To take a couple of examples, visitors to DAHI's website will, amid talk of "carnage," grudgingly be told that there has been a fall in gun-related deaths since 1993. It is explained, however, that this fall is at least "partly" attributable to the Brady Law. The fact that the decline began a year or two before the law came into force is not referred to, nor is there any analysis of how many lives might be saved by the defensive use of guns. Similarly, there is plenty of focus on accidental death from firearms, but no mention of the fact that, between 1980 and the late 1990s this total fell by nearly a half, despite rapidly rising levels of gun ownership. Tragic though it is, the death toll from firearms accidents is smaller than that from drowning, burning, or even simply falling over. It is not much larger than the number who come to their end while engaged in recreational boating, and it is less than one-thirtieth of the total killed in motor vehicle accidents.

DAHI's selective use of statistical data might be acceptable in the normal course of political polemic, but coming from people who are portraying themselves as participants in this debate on the basis of their "expertise and experience as physicians," it is a disgrace. DAHI tell us that "presenting basic facts and helping patients make informed decisions" is part of the doctor's job. If their website is any indicator as to how they judge the "basic facts," these physicians have a very strange way of going about their work.

After seeing what he had to say to the press, I would not even accept an aspirin from one of DAHI's leaders, Dr. Jeremiah Barondess, without a second opinion. In an interview with the New York Observer, Dr. Barondess, president of the important-sounding New York Academy of Medicine, felt able to claim that the pressure group was "neutral politically, academically and intellectually," an assertion that reveals the contempt he must feel for the reasoning powers of that newspaper's readers.

The extent of DAHI's "intellectual neutrality" can be seen from its approach to the "basic facts" discussed above. Quite what is meant by "academically neutral" is unclear, but it seems to include the publication of a key position paper that manages to cite such sources as the New Republic, the ABA's Coordinating Committee on Gun Violence, Congressman Patrick Kennedy, Senator Robert Torricelli, the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, the American Prospect (twice), the Handgun Epidemic Lowering Plan, and the Cincinnati Post. The work of prominent gun-control skeptics such as Yale's John Lott Jr. does not, however, even merit a mention. Professor Lott is not alone. There's no room for the work of obscure gun-control skeptics, either. What of DAHI's supposed political neutrality? Of all the politicians who have looked into the issue of gun control, the organization only chooses to quote two liberal Democrats.

Dr. Barondess prefers, of course, to avoid such matters, preferring to repeat DAHI's dishonest dogma, "handgun injury…is like a disease…and we're going to introduce mandatory immunizations for this disease." It is difficult to decide which is the more repellent, the fraudulent assertion of "neutrality" or the creepily totalitarian claim that "we" are going to introduce these "mandatory" immunizations.

It can be no surprise, therefore, that in their legislative crusade, DAHI's physicians reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the doctor/patient relationship. As private individuals they are free to campaign for any legislation that they choose, but when they do so in their capacity as doctors, they should take care. Laws are coercive. The physician who uses his professional qualification to press for DAHI-style legislation is, essentially, arguing that he has the right to tell his patients what to do. This is not what doctors are for. The role of a physician is to listen, to diagnose, and to give advice. A course of treatment is a suggestion, not an order. It must, in the end, be left to the patient, however misguided, to decide what to do.

That would be true, even if the advice were good. In this case it could be lethal. The proposed legislative changes will make it harder for law-abiding people to exercise their Second Amendment rights, something which flies in the face of evidence that such a development may in fact cost lives, evidence that Dr. Barondess and his friends are either too arrogant to consider or too disingenuous to discuss.

Worst of all, even if DAHI is unsuccessful in promoting its legislative agenda, the organization's supposedly objective "counseling" will, in the meantime, be likely to discourage people from keeping the means of self defense that they already have. As is noted on the DAHI website, "there is precedent for the view that [the counseling] would be helpful…in the context of removing guns from the home." That is probably right. To the people in their care, doctors can be very persuasive, especially when the "basic facts" are presented in such a one-sided way. And when patients are misled on the advantages and disadvantages of gun ownership, truth may not be the only casualty.

Bullying someone into giving up an effective means of self-defense may prove, quite literally, fatal. For the patient, that is. The consequences for the doctor will be rather less severe. In an unlikely, but deserved, worst case, he may risk a malpractice lawsuit, a threat to livelihood rather than life. Presumably it is in response to this somewhat remote danger that DAHI's cyber-offering includes the disclaimer that, "nothing in this web site is intended to be construed or to serve as a standard of medical care." Like all the best disclaimers, it contradicts everything that has gone before.

But it's a start.

Big-Screen Smoke Screen

National Review Online, April 8, 2001

Medical science used to be about test tubes, dissection, and ugly moments in the mortuary. Not any more, it seems. At New Hampshire's Dartmouth Medical College, researchers had a very different project. They sat through 178 movies, and it wasn't fun. For, doubtless to their disgust, these selfless men and women of science were forced to witness something that they would probably prefer never to be shown on the silver screen. It was a spectacle more repulsive than Hannibal Lecter's skillet, a freak show more sinister than Freddy Krueger's grin. Yes, they had to watch cigarette smokers at play. Lots of them. Worse still, many of these puffing perverts seemed to be enjoying their nasty vice. This would be bad behavior at the best of times, but coming from movie stars, the consequences could be devastating. Cinema's sinning celebrities, worried the Dartmouth team, could lead "The Children" astray.

So they interviewed "The Children," 632 in total, all based in schools within two hours drive of Lebanon, New Hampshire. What the Lebanese had to say was shocking. A disturbing number of their favorite film actors scored far too many points on the Dartmouth survey's roll of dishonor, "the star tobacco use index," a system devised by the researchers for recording how often a particular individual can be seen smoking on-screen.

Now, as surveys go, an interrogation of a handful of New Hampshire high-school students is not the most comprehensive, but an analysis of the youngsters' replies led the research team to a horrifying conclusion. Students whose favorite actors came near the top of the index (in other words, the stars who were most often shown smoking) were, allegedly, more likely to smoke themselves. There "was a clear relation between on-screen tobacco use by movie stars and higher levels of smoking uptake in the adolescents who admire them." We can assume that these findings are meant to have implications beyond the Granite-State Bek'aa. Across the nation, mesmerized schoolchildren are, it is suggested, being lured by images of smokin' Brad Pitt into a short, stupid life of wheezing, nicotine-driven hell.

Of course, it is possible to argue with the methodology, the conclusions, and the researchers' choice of professional priorities, but I would not recommend trying this with Jennifer J. Tickle, the lady in charge of the study. Ms. Tickle, a Ph.D. candidate with a double major in psychology and, impressively, interdisciplinary women's studies, sounds like a stern sort. In a recent interview with the New York Post she warned that, "Movie stars should seriously think whether smoking is central to the character they are portraying." And they should also behave themselves off the set. Maybe they could "try not to be seen so much in public with a cigarette in their hand."

Leonardo DiCaprio, that means you.

Ms. Tickle, however, faces an uphill struggle. "The movie industry knows there is a relationship between teen smoking and what they put on the screen, but they seem to turn a blind eye to it," she scolds. She should not be surprised. Showbiz is filled with self-centered individuals, incapable of doing anything for the public good. Who among us, after all, can forget the Petaluma petition? This was drafted in 1997 by the scholars of Casa Grande (a Californian high school that clearly attracts students of a more refined type than the Skoal-chewing, chain-smoking, movie-crazed barbarians of Lebanon, N.H.). The petitioners called on local girl Winona Ryder to renounce smoking on the silver screen. Callously, she chose to ignore them.

But Ms. Tickle, it is you who should ignore Winona. For every Winona you wean off the weed there will be another Christian, Keanu, or Drew who lights up. In our straitlaced times tobacco use has become a symbol of rebellion, an easy symbol of cool for any new actor trying to win an audience. So, rather than trying to retrain these hopeless stars, find a role model of your own, an individual who smokes and yet who is so repellent, so horrible, and so utterly lacking in any good qualities, that no one will want to have a bad habit in common with him. Ms. Tickle, I know just the man.

Adolf Hitler, smoker.

There is, of course, one teeny problem with this idea. Hitler did not, in reality, smoke. Although the future Fuhrer was disciplined for smoking as a child, by the time the little tyke had his Reich, he had turned against cigarettes. On at least one occasion, he claimed that had it not been for the decision to give up smoking in his youth, Germany would not have been lucky enough to have him as savior. Well, thanks for that, anti-smokers.

In Adolf's view, tobacco was "one of man's most dangerous poisons." Even poor Eva Braun, the future Mrs. Hitler, was not allowed to smoke in the presence of her husband-to-be. Other acolytes had to wrestle with a similar prohibition. In a precursor of current rows over portrayals of FDR, Hermann Goering came under the Fuhrer's fire for permitting the erection of a statue that showed the Luftwaffe boss with a cigar in his mouth. But it was not all doom and gloom in the Chancellery. Hitler believed in the carrot as well as the stick. Friends who quit were rewarded with a gold watch.

This anti-smoking fervor was not just confined to the party's inner circle. Hitler's government imposed wide-ranging restrictions on smoking in the workplace and on public transport. It was made difficult for women to buy cigarettes, and SS officers in uniform were forbidden to smoke in public, as were youngsters under the age of 18. Tobacco advertisements were subject to the sort of strict control of which the FDA can only dream. There would have been no room for Josef Kamel in the clean-living Third Reich. Certain media, such as billboards, were often off-limits for the tobacco companies, and (take note, Ms. Tickle!) cigarettes could not be advertised in films.

This historical truth is, of course, a problem for those who would promote the idea of a nicotine Nazi, but it is not insurmountable. Anti-tobacco activists, who gave us the junk science of "passive smoking" (itself a term, "Passivrauchen," first coined in Hitler's Germany) will have no ethical qualms about reinventing the Fuhrer as a smoker. As a reverse role model he would last a thousand years. The National Socialist leader would be a perfect spokesman for the evils of the coffin nail. A Marlboro cowboy in reverse, Swastika Man was an unwholesome, unhealthy, mass-murdering, war-losing hysteric. No one sane would want to emulate him in any way.

The creation of a smoking Hitler would be easy. The technology that today is used by the Postal Service to remove cigarettes from the images of icons such as Thornton Wilder, James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, and blues man Robert Johnson could, at last, be put more to more constructive use. Let us take the cigarettes out of the mouths of American heroes and jam them between the teeth of German villains. The sight of a frenzied Fuhrer furiously chewing on a stogie as he rants and raves at a hate-filled Nuremberg mob would horrify all but the most recalcitrant teen. Images of defeat would underline the message that smoking is for losers. We could enjoy newsreel of a pallid chain-smoking Hitler contemplating the annihilation of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, or maybe gloat over those few last photographs of a disheveled dictator grubbing around for butts on the squalid bunker floor. Add in a Soviet-autopsy report doctored to reveal that the dead man showed signs of emphysema as well as a bullet, and the off-putting picture would be complete.

Mention of an autopsy is, however, a reminder that Adolf Hitler is, like so many other smokers, no longer with us. While he will be the best long-term reverse role model, it would be better if his efforts could be supplemented by those of a contemporary villain. Saddam Hussein (a Virginia Slims man, I like to think) is one candidate, but it might be better to have a home-grown bogeyman this time round. Mercifully, there are no American Fuhrers, (outside Idaho, anyway) but there is one domestic political figure who, with a little work and a lot of cigarettes, might manage to achieve both the unpopularity and the association with Big Tobacco that is essential if this country's youth is to be scared away from Marlboro Country.

This prim, grim, grating grandee is a ruthless political operator who has forced a way to the top over the broken careers of friend and foe. We are talking about someone who is no respecter of laws or borders, someone whose latest triumph was to take power in another state far from home, someone who it is easy to dislike. Currently, this person does not smoke, but if it was in the interests of "The Children," she might be persuaded to take it up.

Sen. Clinton, may I offer you a light?