Tobacco Regulation

Regarding the article "Congress: Regulate Tobacco" [June 12, front page], stopping the use of tobacco once you are addicted is unbelievably difficult. It may be even harder than killing a drug habit.

I remember going into a patient's room once. He was dying of lung cancer, lying in an oxygen tent and smoking a cigarette, and telling me that this was the best cigarette he had ever smoked. Sitting in a chair beside him was his chain-smoking wife. This new tobacco legislation will be difficult for many. It will be worth it.

Let me applaud the stand on the tobacco issue taken in this congressional vote by Sens. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., and Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Reps. Adam Putnam, R-Bartow, and Ginny Brown-Waite, R-Brooksville.

Tobacco is a poison that still kills millions of people each year. Our members of congress will surely take some heat for their actions taken this week on limiting the availability of nicotine.

As a young man who grew up in the tobacco fields, as a family practitioner who for 25 years depended on tobacco farmers for income for years and did not recognize the deleterious effects of tobacco, I am proud of my what representatives did.

In 1952, I was hired by the tobacco companies to do research on tobacco. Working with and under the direction of renowned doctors in toxicology and physics, we found in four experiments that nicotine had a strong relationship to the causes of many health problems. Not knowing at the time that my pay came from the Tobacco Institute, I soon found that we would not be allowed to publish our results.

[If] those people addicted to tobacco live a few years longer, they will see the death rate from lung cancer decrease. For nonsmokers who regularly breathe nicotine-containing smoke, their quality of life will begin improving almost immediately.