Reflecting the gravity and addictiveness of the health problem, two dozen area doctors and nurses are appealing to a higher authority to curtail cigarette use.
The Vatican City
When Pope Benedict XVI visits the United States in April, they plan to come armed with a petition with thousands of names asking the pope “to declare the Vatican the world’s first country to ban tobacco in its entirety.”
They are asking the pope to also “condemn the production, distribution and sale” of cigarettes and all tobacco products.
They are citing nicotine’s addictive force and that more than 5 million deaths a year worldwide is traced to smoking.
Dr. Claude Curran, a city psychiatrist treating addicts and co-founder of Physicians and Nurses Against Tobacco, pointed to the World Health Organization’s report one month ago stating that smoking killed 100 million people worldwide in the 20th century with the prospect of the numbers increasing ten-fold this century.
“We hold in our hands the solution to the global tobacco epidemic that threatens the lives of 1 billion men, women and children during this century,” said Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO director general.
Pope Benedict XVI
A WHO official that directs its tobacco-free initiative said the estimate of 5.4 million smoking-related deaths a year could rise to more than 8 million annually by 2030 if nothing is done.
While the WHO report advocates dramatic efforts to stop young people from starting smoking, helping others quit and reducing second-hand smoke, the PANAT activists attack the nicotine addiction problem.
Working for the American Tobacco Co. in the 1920s, long before the health dangers of cigarette smoking became known and accepted, Bernays used female models and the Easter Day Parade in New York City to sell his product.
On his signal, the models lit Lucky Strike cigarettes in a successful effort to erase the stigma of women smoking, the wikipedia Web site documents.
