L15:Should Smoking Be Prohibited?

Passive Path to Death for Non-smokers

Alice Trillin was 38 and thought she was in excellent health. Then "this completely crazy thing" happened.
"I coughed and a tiny, tiny blood clot took me to get a chest X-ray. Ten days later I had my lung removed."
Trillin had lung cancer, the kind smokers get. But she had never smoked a cigarette.
The cause of her cancer remained a mystery until a doctor friend asked if her parents.had smoked. They had.

"Nobody had ever said anything about passive smoking. I hadn't worried about the question much," she says.
Most scientists hadn't worried about it much either, until studies in recent years showed that passive smoking was causing 3, 000 to 5, 000 lung cancer deaths a year among Ainerican non-smokers. Now a study estimates that the toll from passive smoking, including deaths from heart disease and other cancers, may be 10 times that.

Tobacco smoke in the home and workplace could be killing 46, 000 non-smokers each year in the United States, the study concludes. That's 3, 000 lung cancer deaths, 11, 000 from other cancers and 32, 000 heart disease deaths.
That would make passive smoking the leading preventable cause of death in the United States after alcohol and smoking itself, said Dr. Ronald M. Davis, director of the US Office on Smoking and Health. Smoking kills 390,000; alcohol, 120, 000.
"No longer are we talking about runny nose or watery eyes or headache or nausea, but a fatal disease," Davis said.

Passive smoking has become the principal battleground for the tobacco industry and its opponents in the 1980s. It is no longer merely a health issue, but political and environmental. Cigarette pollution is fouling the air.
"We know that the indoor environment is far more polluted than the outdoor environment, " said James Repace of the Environmental Protection Agency indoor air programme. "We've seen that again and again wherever we've looked all over the United States."

Many people believe smokers have the right to smoke. But they also believe that others shouldn' t have to pay a price.
"When you talk about an involuntary risk, the society becomes much more cautious, " said University of California-San Francisco biomedical engineer Stanton Glantz, an environmentalist and anti-smoking activist.
The new estimate of non-smoker deaths is controversial. Researchers agree it is preliminary and needs to be confirmed.

A tobacco industry consultant said the emphasis on passive smoking was misplaced. Many public health officials disagree.
The risk of tobacco smoke " is greater than the risk of radon gas is to non-smokers", Repace said. "We're talking maybe 40 per cent greater. And if you're talking ahout all the carcinogenic air pollutants that EPA regulates, it,s l00 times
greater."

II . Read
Read the foltowing passages. Underline the important viewpoints while reading.

l. Benefits of Smoking

Sir, The. essential fact about smoking, which most commentators of recent years seem to have ignored is that cigarettes give a vast number of people a good deal of pleasure a lot of the time. That is way the world smoked almost 5, 000, 000, 000, 000 of them last year; approximately 1, 200 for every man., woman. and child on earth.
It is not high pressure advertising that makes the Chinese smoke heavily-any more than it was wicked merchants who.persuaded ihe seventeenth century Persians to smoke, despise the Shah's ingenious punishment of pouring molten lead down their throats when they were caught.

There is considerable evidence, surprisingly little publicized. by cigarette manufacturers, that smoking produces certai'n beneficial effects in human beings. Frankenhauser showed that smoking counteracts the decrease in e