Lesson 15 Should Smoking Be Prohibited？
　　Text Passive Path to Death for Non-smokers¹ Alice Trillin was 38 and thought she was in excellent health. Then “this completely crazy thing” happened.“I coughed and a tiny, tiny blood clot² 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 toll³ 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 killing⁴ 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 watery⁵ eyes or headache or nausea⁶, 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 fouling⁷ 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 activist⁸. The new estimate of non-smoker deaths is controversial. Researchers agree it is preliminary and needs to be confirmed.
　　A tobacco industry consultant⁹ 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 pollutants¹⁰ 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 commentators¹¹ 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 advertising¹² 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 counteracts¹³ the decrease in efficiency that typically occurs in boring, monotonou's situations, and that smokers impro-ved their performance in complex choace situations while smoking. There is a growing body of evidence that nicotine¹⁴ can produce a tranquilizing effect during high emotional and shock situations, whil'e on the other hand stimulating¹⁵ con：cen.tration in tedious situations.
　　None of which proves that smoking may not cause cancer or other illnesses. But, as the late Compton Maekenzie wrote, “If cigarettes vanished from. ihe earth today, I believe the world would go to war again within a comparatively short time.”An extravaga.nt exaggeration, perhaps. But certainly tempers would be shorter, nastier and more brufiah. Yours faithfully, Winston fletcher
　　2.Is Smoking a Bad Habit？
　　1, a casual smokery always wonder if smoking is really a bad habit. If it is, why does our country produce such a large riumber of cigarettes every year？ （As you know, Chi.na is the largsst cigarette producing country in the world. ） If it is,. why do so many girls adrnire handsome boys with a cigarette on their lip？
　　My friends tell me, “Smoking is a waste of money, a cause of disease……” Admittedly, these reasons frighten some people into giving up smoking, but can you ensure that non-smokers will live long without dying in an epidemic¹⁶ or getting killed by a drunken driver？ Can you say it is not a waste of money for most non-smokers habitually¹⁷ to spend a lot of money on snacks？
　　In my opinion, smoking is only an amusement, like playing cards, reading, etc. Many years ago, when an adult handed me a cigarette and lit it for me, I felt grown up. When I am with friends and have nothing to say, we smoke, consequently we no longer feel embarrassed. Sometimes, I light a cigarette, watching my loneliness, suffering and nervousness vanishing with the smoke, I can't help saying inwardly： Hello, cigarette, my old friend, I' m coming to meet you again.
　　3. Smokers of the World, Unite It can scarcely have escaped the notice of thinking men, I think, being a thinking man myself, that the forces of darkness opposed to those of us who like a quiet smoke are gathering¹⁸ momentum¹⁹ daily and starting to throw their weight about more somewhat. Every morning I read in the papers a long article by another of those doctors who are the spearhead of the movement. Tobacco, they say, plugs up the arteries²⁰ and lowers the temperature of the body extremities²¹, and if you reply that you like your arteries plugged up and are all for having the temperature of your body extremities lowered, especially during the summer months, they bring up that cat again.
　　The cat to which I allude²² is the one that has two drops of nicotine placed on its tongue and instantly passes beyond the veil. “Iook,” they say. “I place two drops of nicotine on the cat's tongue. Now watch it wilt²³.” I can't see the argument. Cats, as Charles Stuart Calverley said, may have their goose cooked by tobacco juice, but are we to deprive ourselves of all our modest pleasures just because indulgence in them would be harmful to some cat which is probably a perfect stranger？
　　Take a simple instance such as occors every Saturday on the Rugby football field. The ball is heeled out, the scrum half gathers it, and instantaneously two fourteen- stone forwards fling themselves on this person, grinding him into the mud. Must we abolish Twickenham and Murrayfield because some sorry reasoner insists that if the scrum half had been a cat he would have been squashed flatter than a Dover sole？ And no use, of course, to try to drive into these morons²⁴' heads that scrum halves are not cats. Really, one feels inclined at times to give it all up and turn one's face to the wall.
　　It is pitiful to think that that is how these men spend iheir lives, putting drops of nicotine on the tongues of cats day after day. Slavas to a habit, is the way I look at it. But if you tell them that and urge them to pull themselves together and throw off the shackles²⁵, they just look at you with fishy²⁶ eyes and mumble²⁷ something about it can't be done. Of course it can be done. All it requires is will power. If they were to say to themselves, “I will not start putting nicotine on cats' tongue till after lunch” it would be a simple step to knocking off during the afternoon, and by degrees they would find that they could abstain²⁸ altogether. The first cat of the cats is the hard one to give up. Conquer the impulse for the after-breakfast cat, and the battle is half won.

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