Smoking gun ignored
NORWOOD -- It was hard not to notice her, the woman lighting up in the funeral home parking lot after paying her last respects to a woman who lost her life to lung cancer.
Denial can be more lethal than cigarettes.
That might explain, as well, why The New York Times managed to expend some 2,000 words on an obituary for Peter Jennings without ever mentioning that the ABC anchorman who also succumbed to lung cancer this week had been a smoker. Or why the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute failed to anticipate the outrage earlier this year when it appointed a tobacco industry executive to its board of trustees.
At my Aunt Peggy's funeral yesterday, a few smokers took pains to point out that the good-humored mother of eight never smoked herself. That she was married for 55 years to a veritable chimney was presumed to be beside the point.
Lung disease took Uncle Vincent, too, as it had taken his brother, Daniel, my father, and a score of other McNamaras, including my mother, Frances. Most of them, like most Americans who die of lung disease, had been smokers.
To be reminded of the frightening numbers compiled by the American Lung Association is to be astounded by the continued tolerance of this killer in our midst. Lung cancer is the number one cancer of men and women. Smoking causes 87 percent of the estimated 160,440 lung cancer deaths in the United States each year. More than 440,000 Americans die each year from all illnesses related to tobacco use. Secondhand smoke causes thousands of additional deaths annually, as well as the hospitalization of hundreds of thousands for respiratory ailments. Smoking contributes to premature birth, low birth weight, and the epidemic of childhood asthma. It lowers economic productivity and raises healthcare costs.
If mercury levels rise in swordfish, we yank it off the menu and out of the market. Why then do we still sanction the sale of tobacco products? Why are our anemic public health efforts aimed at eliminating smoking in public places or restricting tobacco sales to those over age 18? Why do we talk about tobacco control instead of tobacco elimination? Why do we spend precious research dollars trying to develop screenings for early detection, instead of focusing scarce resources on prevention efforts?
Ninety percent of smokers pick up the habit before they turn 21, an age at which no one fully appreciates either the consequences of their risky behavior or the nonnegotiable nature of personal mortality. That is why, despite health education classes and hovering parents, 22 percent of American high school students in 2003 identified themselves as smokers and every day more than 5,000 youngsters sample their first cigarette.
State and federal governments are failing to protect our children. After tobacco companies were prohibited in 1998 from using such cartoon figures as Joe Camel to hawk cigarettes to kids, the industry began marketing candy-flavored cigarettes to them. That practice would have been prohibited by legislation buried last year by members of the House and Senate disinclined to give new power to the Food and Drug Administration to regulate an industry that contributes so generously to their reelection campaigns. Prospects for the bill, reintroduced in March, are little better this session.
In Massachusetts, a Republican governor and Democratic legislature for years have slashed funds for groundbreaking antismoking campaigns developed a decade ago by the Department of Public Health. A paltry increase in this budget cycle is unlikely to improve the record much from last year, when the American Lung Association gave the state an F for its smoking-prevention efforts.
With such mixed signals about the dangers from the public sector, it is little wonder that an obituary writer might neglect to mention the real cause of Peter Jennings's death and a mourner might fail to see the irony of leaving Aunt Peggy's bier and lighting up a butt.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 
