U.S. President Barack Obama's doctor confirmed last month that the president no longer smokes. At the urging of his wife, Michelle Obama, the president first resolved to stop smoking in 2006, and has used nicotine replacement therapy to help him. If it took Obama, a man strong-willed enough to aspire to and achieve the U.S. presidency, five years to kick the habit, it is not surprising that hundreds of millions of smokers find themselves unable to quit.
Although smoking has fallen sharply in the United States, from about 40 percent of the population in 1970 to only 20 percent today, the proportion of smokers stopped dropping around 2004. There are still 46 million American adult smokers, and smoking kills about 443,000 Americans each year. Worldwide, the number of cigarettes sold — 6 trillion a year, enough to reach the sun and back — is at an all-time high. Six million people die each year from smoking — more than from AIDS, malaria, and traffic accidents combined. Of the 1.3 billion Chinese, more than one in 10 will die from smoking.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it would spend $600 million over five years to educate the public about the dangers of tobacco use. But Robert Proctor, a historian of science at Stanford University and the author of a forthcoming blockbuster titled "Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition," argues that to use education as one's only weapon against a highly addictive and often lethal drug is unpardonably insufficient.