THIS REFERS to your report "smoking out the anti-smoking lobby" (December 4/5). Here are a few comments.
The Times published, a few days back, a study which reveals that the cost to society from all consequences of smoking was far more than the tax revenue from the tobacco industry. The position would indeed be worse for a developing country like ours. A health ministry official has stated that six lakh Indians die every year because of tobacco-related illnesses with such deaths constituting 13 per cent of the total deaths.
The time is ripe for the Andhra and Karnataka farmers to learn from the changing attitude of North Carolina people. They should slowly move away from tobacco cultivation to other equally remunerative commercial crops which will not only fill their coffers but also not harm the health of its people.
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As early as in 1981, the US Surgeon General in his report The Changing Cigarette concluded that on the available evidence, there is no such thing as a safe cigarette. Pople vs Big Tabacco lays bare the investigation into a tabacco manufacturer who was developing a breed of tobacco which would have more than double the nicotine level permitted under the law. It also described how that company was attempting to maintain or increase the level of nicotine even as it kept the level of tar low. It concluded how this evidence flew in the face of everything the industry had been stating all along.
When a few months ago, a cigarette company announced that it was developing a safe cigarette which could reduce the incidence of lung cancer, the anti-smoking group gave it a guarded welcome. An ASH report said that companies had cynically buried such potential advances because to do otherwise would have implied that their existing products were dangerous. A research reported in the British press that the tobacco industry misleads smokers about the tar and nicotine that can be inhaled from light cigarettes. The Times published a table of several brands with the levels of nicotine content and said that some cigarettes contain about twice as much nicotine as other brands, indicating that tobacco types or blends and tobacco casings can substantially manipulate nicotine content of cigarettes.
Cigarette manufacturers in the developing countries make hay because of the lack of an effective public awareness campaign and the lukewarm interest of the media to this subject Krishna Rao is perhaps health in whatever fashion he wishes. But he has no right to blow his cigaette smoke on others. And that is what the judiciary has done to ban smoking in public.
Lastly, I should state tha