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November 5, 2003
Legal Drugs, Illegal Cigarettes?
By Todd Seavey
Should cigarettes be made illegal and currently—illegal drugs be made legal?
Defenders of cigarettes used to joke about such a scenario coming to pass, but with smoking
bans becoming more popular and the idea of medical marijuana gaining some ground, it doesn't
seem like such a far-fetched, mirror-universe idea anymore. And much as I hate to sound like my
own thinking is on the cutting edge of absurdity, that outcome doesn't sound as unreasonable to me as it once did...
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September 29, 2003
Addicted to Love—and Cigarettes
By Todd Seavey
Robert Palmer died suddenly of a heart attack last week at the age of fifty-four, which is a
bit young to die of a heart attack—at least for non-smokers. But Palmer, who performed
"Addicted to Love" and other hit songs of the 1980s, was a smoker.
We cannot be certain what caused his heart attack, of course, but we know that smokers
are two to four times more likely to develop cardiovascular disease and are 70% more likely
to die from it than non-smokers. Smokers also tend to die from heart disease about a
decade earlier than non-smokers (it is only their tendency to get heart attacks at a
younger age that accounts for the statistic, which would otherwise be puzzling, suggesting
that smokers are more likely to survive individual heart attacks than non-smokers).
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