"Report: Tobacco Companies Studied Ways to Hook Female Smokers."
So reads the headline today. It might just as well say, "Big Tobacco Exploits Stupidity Of Women."

Look, smoking is vile, and frankly, so are smokers. Smokers in Seattle all seem to be overweight, with bad peroxide dye jobs. Or is that just West Seattle? I dunno. But, I've even gone on record supporting an envisioned fall ballot initiative in Washington state to ban indoor public smoking. Some people say, "you can choose not to go into a smoky restaurant or music club." No, actually, I have no choice in the matter at all; I am de facto excluded from such places by the smoke. The indoor ban restores my choice, while still allowing smokers the choice of smoking outside, or on their own property.

But wherever they are allowed to smoke, it is smokers who decide to become smokers; it is not tobacco companies, or even childish peers who pressure or dupe them into their puffery.

Yet the reaction to the study - by Harvard researchers of "smoking gun" tobacco company documents about winning more female converts to the habit - is that government now needs to work harder to prevent women in developing nations from being ensnared by Big Tobacco's propoganda machine.

Worldwide smoking rates among women are expected to increase 20 percent by 2025, "driven by the growth of female markets in developing countries," while men's smoking rates are steadily declining, the Harvard report says.

Jack Henningfield, a professor of behavioral biology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said he hopes the report serves as a "call to action" for government officials to focus their anti-smoking efforts on women, particularly in developing countries.

"It's a time bomb," said Henningfield, director of the Innovators Combating Substance Abuse Program at Johns Hopkins. "They've got to act now to prevent the time bomb from exploding."

The death of free will, or more accurately of the idea of free will, is the raison d'etre of the Social Services State.

In this way, women in developing nations who might smoke cigarettes are thus rendered as worthy of U.S. government protection and moral authority, to just the same degree as the purple ink-stained Iraqi voters struggling toward self-governance amidst the murderous incursions of eighth-century savages bent on civic nihilism.

I think I need a drink. But not a smoke, thanks.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at May 31, 2005 05:50 PM

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