A new Op-Ed by Martin Lindstrom in the NY Times reveals a few amazing facts about smoking. Among them are:

1. Approximately 5.7 Trillion cigarettes are smoked each year world-wide.
2. Currently there are 1.3 billion smokers in world. By 2025 there will be 1.6 billion
3. Health warnings on cigarette packages (including the graphic pictures of lung disease and other nasty shit on cigarette packaging in some European countries) aren't just ineffective in turning people off from cigarettes, they actually make people want to smoke more.

"Surely," you say, "this last point is crazy - someone has misinterpreted some data." Apparently not. Apparently they do these fancy tests with diodes and brain-scanning equipment, and they have proven that when people are shown signs on cigarette packs warning that the product causes cancer and depicting a tracheotomy victim with a black lung growing out his ear, it actually makes them want the cigarettes more.

Lindstrom argues that upping the ante on cigarette warnings actually promotes smoking. How can this be? Do the majority of people harbor a death wish that these warnings bring out? It seems unbelievable at the level of the individual, but when you step back and look at the broader society, this seems to be exactly what we're doing: We build an industrial/ economic system that destroys the environment despite years of evidence that we're irrevocably killing our own ecosystem. Then when that system fails, instead of changing it fundamentally, we bail it out. But hey, we did elect Barack instead of McCain - that's a start.

What would it mean to the environment and economic system if we got rid of smoking altogether? What are the carbon emissions from 5.7 trillion cigarettes? What if 1.3 billion people were suddenly not prone to the health risks of smoking - would that have an impact on global medical operations? If we all cast aside our collective death wish and quit smoking, would we allow all that revenue (I'm guessing $500 billion annually on a global average of 10 cents a cig) to simply disappear, or would we feel compelled to bail out the smoking industry, too? Maybe they could tie it into the auto industry bailout: a free carton of smokes included with purchase of every new Dodge heavy-duty pickup truck. Who says American manufacturing is dead? -AM