TWO TALES OF SMOKE, DEATH, AND DECEIT

摘要

There may come a day when people look back on the history of the tobacco industry and marvel that such a thing ever existed. This is a business, after all, that slowly kills its best customers. It argues that smoking is an exercise of free choice—but knows that habitual smokers are addicts. The point has now arrived where the industry is arguing in state lawsuits that smoking imposes no net health-care cost because smokers' premature deaths save states money in the long run. Like plague victims, smokers get separated from the normal population—glassed inside airport smoking lounges or banished outdoors to suck their death sticks.