While you're thinking about possible holiday gifts, instead of looking in a catalog, you might want to take a look at a recent report from the National Cancer Institute.
The report tells us that Americans of all ages - and especially women and girls - bought the idea that if you smoke "light" or "low tar" cigarettes, you're doing the next best thing to quitting. But the report makes it clear that it's just a delusion - light cigarettes are "safer" for the machines that the government uses to test them, but not for our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons or daughters who smoke.
Since smokers are addicted to the nicotine in cigarettes, they just puff more or harder or smoke more "light" or "low-tar" cigarettes in order to get the nicotine they need.
The message is clear: If you're a smoker, the best gift you can give your loved ones is to quit. And if you're not a smoker, the best gift you could give is to help prevent our children and grandchildren from ever starting to smoke.
One out of every four Americans smoke, so chances are someone you love is a smoker - and probably they are one of the 90 percent of American smokers who smoke "low-tar" or "light" cigarettes. Women and girls are especially likely to smoke these so-called safer cigarettes, and advertisements are often targeted to them, urging them to switch if they don't "choose" to quit.
It's a clever strategy, perhaps based on research showing that young women are more easily addicted to nicotine than young men and therefore find it harder to quit.
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What better gift, for those of us who smoke or who don't want our loved ones to smoke than to finally take this public health tragedy seriously? Most smokers started smoking as children or teens, not understanding that the nicotine in cigarettes is more addictive than heroin or alcohol. And, if we continue to look the other way when children experiment with cigarettes, thinking it's just a rite of passage, and ignore the power of billions of dollars of advertising aimed at persuading teens and young adults to smoke, we will continue to mourn the unnecessarily premature deaths of 400,000 smokers and ex-smokers every year.
That's why, in addition to giving up smoking ourselves, supporting the efforts of others to quit, and telling our children that smoking is unacceptable, we need our government's help.
Now that government scientists have told us that light cigarettes are no safer than other cigarettes, what will they do about it? An obvious solution would be to ensure that future cigarette ads don't mislead consumers, and that the meaningless terms "light" and "low-tar" can no longer be used.
Those terms have already been banned in Europe and Canada. But, to make these and similar changes in the United States, we need the FDA to regulate tobacco the way the FDA regulates the terms "light" for margarine and cream cheese.
FDA has no authority to do that. We need a new law to enable the FDA to require tobacco companies to prove claims they make about "safer" cigarettes. Without such a law, unsubstantiated claims will continue to be made, and our friends and family members will suffer as a result.
Giving up smoking and preventing smoking are the best gifts we can give to our friends and family. Personal will power is essential, but it's not enough. We need the help of government to fight the power of misleading advertising, and finally overcome the delusion that smoking can be safe.
by Diana Zuckerman
Knight Ridder-Tribune Columnist
Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Policy Research for Women & Families, can be reached at 1444 Eye Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20005.
