I want to be very careful here, because I believe Bob is sincere. But we have no idea why that poor woman had 3 heart attacks. Consider these names: Jim Fixx, Florence Griffith Joyner, Lawton Chiles, Reggie Lewis. One of the reasons I'm really concerned about the focus on tobacco is that we seem to think it causes everything. The Surgeon General's last report (timed, I believe, for Bush-enhancing press at a point when his ratings were plummeting) listed so many deathly conditions one wonders why non-smokers die at all. As for the lawsuit danger, it's true that litigious Americans have cleaned up some ugly polluters and unsafe products, but to say we are free of all these " we would have filthy air, filthy water, exploding gas tanks, rolling over vehicles, carcinogens in cleaning products, lead in paint and gasoline and childrens toys, investment brokers who cheat some clients to enrich others, child car seats that don't work, tires that blow up, mercury dumped in rivers, industrial solvents dumped in sewers, workers routinely killed and maimed on their jobs, burning rivers, coal miners (including children) digging in mines with no protection, e. coli in our beef, salmonella in our chicken, tobacco marketing to children, and pesticides that destroy eagles as well as cockroaches" seems sadly innocent. We have all of those and more. We have a great gaping hole in the ozone layer that was not caused by cigarette smoke. I truly believe smoking kills and badly ventilated second-hand smoke can put people at risk, especially if they are already diseased. But if we get so we suspect that's the reason everyone dies, we won't pay enough attention to all the other threats that harm us. Moreover, don't we to some degree detract from the grief for the dead? I don't know how to express this, but we seem instantly to want someone to blame. "Did he smoke?" someone asks of a sudden death. Does that make his loss any less painful or deserving of our sympathy? Is it that we unconsciously want to say "it was his own fault" so we can feel safer ourselves? And in the case of suspecting a smoky environment of killing Julitta are we looking for a culprit rather than facing the inexplicable and terrifying fact of our mortality? My sister died at 32 of a cerebral aneurysm. Yes, she had smoked both pot and tobacco, but not for some years. Yes, she dropped acid when she was 22. Yes she drank alcohol and lived in the chemical soup of New York and yes, she had started putting on weight. The autopsy said "congenital weakness" had caused the hemorrhage. Did we care? The people who loved her have never recovered, and knowing the exact cause wouldn't help. Gail O'Hare St. Paul
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