Dole is either woefully ignorant for a man who wants to be president or so deep in the pockets of tobacco lobbyists that he may as well scratch the pimples on their butts for them while he's down there.
Any legitimate debate on whether cigarette smoking is addicting ended 20 years ago. Beyond the scientific evidence, everybody who has ever had a cigarette habit knows it's addicting. Even Dole admits he's a former smoker who had a difficult time quitting.
The vast majority of smokers would like to quit but can't. They have made many painful attempts. The vast majority of former smokers say quitting was one of the toughest things they ever did. They failed in many attempts before they finally succeeded.
A visit to the Tobacco Institute in 1979, when I was reporting for the Star-Bulletin in Washington, D.C., inspired my decision to quit.
I was offended by the way a tobacco spokesman on TV so blithely dismissed the latest surgeon general's report on the health hazards of cigarettes. I made an appointment to ask how he could in good conscience defend with such dubious information something that was causing so much harm to so many people.
When I arrived at the Tobacco Institute, the offices were thick with smoke and foul-smelling even to a heavy smoker. Employees had weeds in their mouths and overflowing ashtrays. If someone had asked, "Who let the haole in here?" I would have sworn I was back in the Hilo High boys' restroom during lunch break.
The spokesman I had gone to see repeated the industry's line with glazed eyes. I couldn't get a rise out of him with my cutting questions. I left determined not to give these people any more of my money.
Ten years later, I was still smoking. I had tried going cold-turkey. I enrolled in a hospital's program. I submitted to both individual and group hypnosis. I bought self-help books and nicotine gum.
Each time I would quit for a short time and then revert. I later figured out that I had been running a mental calculator. I would resume smoking to the day I had saved enough from cigarettes to cover whatever I had shelled out for the latest treatment course.
In 1991, a heart doctor visiting the Star-Bulletin saw me smoking in the lobby and said I should try the new nicotine patch coming out.
A few days later, literature from him arrived in the mail. I read about how the patches mainlined nicotine into your blood 24 hours a day; about how you had to move the patches often because nicotine is a powerful poison that damages the skin.
AS I drifted off to sleep that night, I wondered how I had lost so much control that I would have to subject myself to that. I must have done a lot of dreaming because I woke up with no desire to smoke and have not been seriously tempted since.
When I later realized I had I actually quit, my greatest satisfaction came not from how much better I felt, but from knowing I had finally beat the tobacco boys. They already had about $25,000 of my money and a good percentage of my lung capacity, but they would get no more.
And Bob Dole won't get a break from the talk-show ridicule until he ends his sleazy affair with these guys and gets back into bed with Elizabeth, where he belongs.
