Wait…Smoking Causes Cancer?
By Via Edroso, Ann Althouse (DHing for Instapundit) sez:
IF YOU SMOKE AND DIE OF CANCER, every obituary will take advantage of your death as an opportunity to remind the living to quit smoking.
The alleged propaganda in question consists of this paragraph:
Jennings had not been on the air since April 5, when he revealed he had lung cancer. He had been conspicuously absent from the coverage of Pope John Paul II’s funeral in Rome. A smoker until about 20 years ago, he said he relapsed under the pressure of Sept. 11, 2001, but later quit again.
Wow, it’s like an after-school special! Certainly, I can’t see any reason to bring up the fact that someone who died of lung cancer was a smoker. It must just be hatred of the tobacco industry.
I’m not a puritan. Almost everybody does things that are suboptimal for their health for pleasure, and certainly if I could be guaranteed five years of life for living an ascetic lifestyle I wouldn’t take it. But smoking does increase your risk for cancer, and there’s no reason for an obituary not to mention it. Do you think that an obituary of someone who died of liver failure is propagandizing if it mentions that the person was an alcoholic? What a silly argument. (I also wonder if Tech Central Station will start trying to argue that the evidence that smoking has bad health effects is really ambiguous, like global warming and evolution.)
Peter Jennings, RIP.