The doctor snuffed out his cigarette, the young beard was - abashed, I suppose is what the Victorians would have said. Actually he was petrified. I don't know if the attribution was ever proved but the stewardess got some financial compensation and the airline quickly banished all smoking. The stewardess's triumph led the medicos to start considering people with lung disease who did not smoke but who lived in a house or flat with a smoker or smokers, and once this research got under way the surgeon general was not the only medical authority to find or declare that it was possible to pick up a respiratory or a lung disease from somebody else's smoke. Many doctors have joined the chase on behalf of non-smokers.
Many doctors think much too much has been made of either close or remote contact with smoky air.
But now this new story will stimulate more sufferers and, you may be sure, a plague of lawsuits. This will add more fuel to an ex-surgeon general and more influential doctors who want to bring tobacco under the control of the Food and Drug Administration and thereby make smoking a criminal activity. The Food and Drug Administration is the government body that approves and licences new drugs of all kinds, allows them to be put on or taken off prescription, certifies the purity and safety of foods and in many other ways is an admirable public institution. But there is strong opposition outside the tobacco companies to having tobacco declared illegal. Because by now, surely, the only people licking their lips over the prospect of a national prohibition of tobacco must be the rising generation of Al Capones and Dutch Schultzes and Lucky Lucianos who for 13 long years ruled over the huge underground criminal empire of bootleggers, created to satisfy the appetite for alcohol in people who formerly had never had any taste or desire for it.