To Our Readers

By John Flanagan

Saturday, December 18, 1999

Crazy to have
waited so long

LUNG cancer deaths among American men peaked around 1990. The surgeon general's first report on smoking and health was published in 1964, 26 years earlier.

Since 1964, some 10 million Americans have died from illnesses related to smoking, including heart disease, emphysema and other respiratory diseases. Two million of these died of lung cancer, including my father, Joe Flanagan, and my Aunt Mildred. Dad was 56.

The American Cancer Society tells us almost half of all smokers between the ages of 35 and 69 die prematurely and every smoker loses an average of 20 to 25 years of life to "the most preventable cause of death in our society."

Somehow, despite its astounding toll, smoking was long an accepted part of life in this country. As a child in the 1950s, I remember John Cameron Swazey's awarding cartons of Lucky Strikes to veterans hospitals on TV. When I was in the Army in the mid-1960s, one perk of an overseas assignment was buying cigarettes at the PX for 10 cents a pack.

Last week, Surgeon General David Satcher issued a ground-breaking report on mental illness. It states flatly that most mental disorders are treatable, just like other diseases, and that anybody who needs help should get it.

"Mental disorders are not character flaws but are legitimate illnesses that respond to specific treatments," the report says. Despite that, of the 22 percent of Americans who are mentally ill two-thirds never seek treatment, mainly because of its stigma or because they can't afford it.

Like smoking, mental illness takes a toll. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among young adults between 18 and 24. Moreover, the closing of public mental hospitals in recent decades has meant more and more of the afflicted end up in jail. "Part of mental illness in America is that you are going to get arrested," says the executive director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

It's time we changed. We'd be insane not to.

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John Flanagan is editor and publisher of the Star-Bulletin.
To reach him call 525-8612, fax to 523-8509, send
e-mail to publisher@starbulletin.com or write to
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, Hawaii 96802.