Rewind to '94: Smokers dwindling
Monday, June 30, 2008 (GST)

The skirmishes go on all over the country. A plant here shuts down its smoking room. An office building there moves smokers off the front sidewalk. A restaurant somewhere else enlarges its smoke-free area by a few tables. No-smoking areas are beginning to grow in taverns and other watering holes that have been about the last indoor venues for the nicotine addict. And that is just what most smokers are now, by the lights of a scientific advisory committee to the federal Food and Drug Administration. The panel determined forMally that nicotine is the substance in Cigarettes that makes addicts of smokers and tobacco users. The notion of smoking as an addiction has been abroad for years. It was officially pronounced in 1988 by then Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. It has been the working theory of the FDA for even longer, and the incumbent FDA chief, David Kessler, made it even More official. “We keep hearing from the tobacco industry that smoking is free choice,” Kessler said. “What is the free choice of an addictive product?” The tobacco industry is a long way from surrender and shows every sign of fighting the most recent FDA scientific finding as if the industry’s life depended on it. Which it may. If the FDA goes along with the advisory, a strong possibility is that nicotine will be regulated as an addictive substance. It will be increasingly hard for the industry to sell Cigarettes on the domestic market. The price rise has driven away most non-addicted smokers. Programs to break the nicotine addiction are improving. The mean irony is that More government effort is paid for by a dwindling coterie of addicts. What with health-care reform, the load on smokers surely will get heavier as their numbers continue to dwindle. — Columbian editorial, Aug. 7, 1994 In Washington, adult smoking has declined from 24 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2006. (doh.wa.gov)