Everyone can agree that teenagers and younger children should not smoke. Even the tobacco industry can safely join in that refrain, and frequently does, with characteristic and clamorous hypocrisy as it turns its marketing machines loose on the young. Most current smokers were hooked in their teens or earlier. It was a model of reverse psychology, tempting teens at the same time it offered false assurance to their elders. If we pretend that adult smoking is a consumer choice like any other, we fall prey to the trap laid by Big Tobacco.
Addiction makes the very notion of choice moot.
Yet cigarette smokers of all ages continue to die prematurely at the rate of more than 400,000 a year. If not one single young person started smoking from this day forward, these losses would continue unabated for 30 years. Imagine 1,000 jumbo jets emblazoned with Marlboro and Winston and Camel insignia crashing each year for the next three decades. We must not focus our efforts so narrowly on preventing tobacco use by youth that we send adult smokers the message that we have abandoned them - that their addiction is their own fault and that we don't care about them. This is exactly what the tobacco industry wants them to hear.