Still Smoking

Remember the 90s war on smoking? FDA commissioner David Kessler browbeat the tobacco companies about their marketing tactics. Big Tobacco chief executives found themselves before Congress, exposed as liars when they said their products weren't addictive.

The shame campaign, coupled with a massive legal assault by federal and state prosecutors, worked. Smoking dropped sharply. The filthy habit was banished from indoor spaces. And public health achieved what a half century's research into new cancer therapies could not -- it finally got the cancer death rate to begin dropping.

Well, guess what? The Bush administration has turned that "mission on the way to being accomplished" into a fiasco, too. A new report from the Centers for Disease Control shows that the percentage of Americans who smoked last year was no different from the year before -- the first time in a generation that this vital statistic did not decline. The arrested decline may be an artifact of this trend: adolescent smoking stopped declining in 2002.

But there's other factors at work. Cigarette prices aren't rising much these days, largely because taxes are holding steady. State programs for tobacco control and prevention fell 26.5 percent between 2002 and 2006. And, tobacco advertising rose from $6.7 billion in 1998 to $15.1 billion in 2003.

You'd think the president's Surgeon General would be up in arms over the resurgence of this public health menace. You know, what's his name?