Martin Dyckman: Decline in smoking-related deaths shows government works

 Strictly speaking, we don’t save lives. We prolong them. Death is inevitable. The variables are the time and the reason.

Will it be one of the disorders that are by far the leading causes of death?

Or will it be some abrupt tragedy, such as accident, natural disaster or homicide?

We admire the heroes who risk their lives to save others.

Most often, these are professional first responders: police, firefighters, the Coast Guard.

Sometimes they’re courageous bystanders like Lenny Skutnik, the U.S. government office worker who jumped into the icy Potomac River 32 years ago to rescue the lone survivor of an airliner crash.

But let’s not forget that lives can be saved in ways that may not be as spectacular or dramatic, but are just as meaningful.

In that light, there has never been a greater hero than Dr. Luther L. Terry, the U.S. Surgeon General whose report, 50 years ago, established definitively that smoking causes lung cancer.

That was the beginning of a campaign against death, as historic as the discoveries of penicillin and other life-saving drugs.

It led to learning that lung cancer is one of only many ways in which tobacco can be lethal–to non-smokers as well as those who indulge; to laws banning smoking in public places; to differential health and life insurance premiums; and to stigmatizing–properly so–what was once considered an innocent social pastime.

At least 8 million premature, smoking-related deaths have been prevented in the United States since 1964, according to a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Eight million!

On average, these people lived 20 years longer, for a total of nearly 160-million years of life saved.

Terry was a government employee.

Think of that the next time you hear some half-wit sound off like a half-baked anarchist about how evil government is.

Like any other human device, government can make mistakes.

When it comes to the basics, however–protecting and enhancing the lives of people–nothing works better.

It was government action, by Florida’s Lawton Chiles and other state governors and attorneys general that forced the tobacco industry to cough up hundreds of billions of dollars to reimburse the states for Medicaid expenses and to be used, with varying degrees of diligence, to discourage children from smoking.

In 2006, Florida voters overwhelmingly approved an initiative, financed largely by the American Cancer Society, that earmarks some of that money to the tobacco-free campaign. Florida’s adult and teen smoking rates are significantly lower than national averages. That can’t be coincidence.

But even more remains to be done.

This month, the current Surgeon General, Dr. Boris D. Lushniak, marked the 50th anniversary of Terry’s report with a warning that smoking “remains the leading preventable cause of premature disease and death in the United States.”

Nearly half a million Americans die each year from heart disease, lung cancer and other smoking-related causes, and that’s even more than earlier estimates.

That’s because a lot more has been learned about tobacco in the last 50 years.

Lushniak’s new report adds to smoking’s toll the diseases of age-related macular degeneration, colorectal and liver cancer, tuberculosis, erectile dysfunction, cleft palate, ectopic pregnancy, rheumatoid arthritis, type-2 diabetes, and immune deficiency. It is now also a cause of strokes among non-smokers forced to breathe other people’s poison.

Bladder cancer and cervical cancer made the list earlier.

Some 18 percent of adults still smoke, far fewer than the 42 percent in 1964. Still,an estimated 3,200 children light up for the first time every day.

Everyone reading this knows and loved people who died from smoking. We best serve their memory by helping to save others.

We can insist that the Food and Drug Administration use to the fullest its new powers to regulate tobacco.

We can make it illegal to sell tobacco to anyone under 21. In all but three states, it’s 18.

We can insist on a nonsmoking environment as an inflexible condition in child custody determinations.

We can insist on higher tobacco taxes. Every 10 percent price increase cuts consumption by 4 percent.

We can prohibit smoking in public places and work places everywhere.

We can discourage the merchants we patronize–especially drug stores, of all people–from continuing to market death.

We can offer encouragement and support to those who are willing to fight their nicotine addictions.

As it was written long ago, whoever saves one life saves the whole world.