The U.S. should adopt Britain’s bold new plan to end smoking |
Students light up in a smoking area at San Francisco State University in 2016. The world has known smoking can kill for 76 years; when will we do something about it?
In August 2002, an 89-year-old man sat in a California courtroom and did what he had been doing, in one form or another, for more than half a century. He told the truth about cigarettes.
Sir Richard Doll was white-haired and frail. He had come to Los Angeles to testify against Philip Morris in a case brought by Betty Bullock, a 64-year-old lifelong smoker dying of lung cancer. Doll was, more than any other living scientist, the reason the world knew what cigarettes did to human lungs. Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, watching him on the stand, called him “David to Big Tobacco’s Goliath.” The industry, Doll told the court, had been “thoroughly immoral, and they deserve whatever they get.” The jury convicted Philip Morris of oppression, fraud and malice.
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Last week, nearly a quarter century later, the British Parliament did what Doll’s life’s work demanded. It voted to raise a generation that will never legally buy a cigarette. The bill, expected to soon receive royal assent, permanently bans the sale or supply of tobacco and vape products to anyone born in 2009 or later. Britain’s health secretary, Wes Streeting, put the logic in five words: “Prevention is better than cure.”
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Americans should pay attention, because this is not only a British........