Whatever the flavor, it's bad

It's hard to argue with the Food and Drug Administration's decision to ban the sale of flavored cigarettes. To be honest, I always thought cigarettes came in regular and menthol, not chocolate and strawberry.
The legislation passed earlier this year giving the FDA authority over tobacco products authorized it to ban flavored cigarettes, while protecting the kind I got hooked on.
The justification for the ban is that the cigarette companies have been using kiddie flavors, as they've used cartoon characters, to appeal to teenagers. The tobacco industry faces unique challenges - given that so many of its best customers die - which makes recruiting new smokers an economic necessity. And studies have found that 17-year-olds are at least three times more likely to puff on fun-flavored cigarettes than are those over 25.
It sounds like a major step until you read the fine print: The biggest tobacco companies don't even make these cigarettes; the folks who did had pretty much stopped after Congress acted; and the ban doesn't touch menthol, the most popular flavor.
So will banning flavored cigarettes, which made up some 1 percent of the market, stop teens from opening the door to addiction?
I wouldn't bet on it.
Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in this country. Nearly half a million people die every year from smoking-related illnesses. About 50,000 of those are people whose only exposure to smoke was secondhand.
None of that seems to mean a lot to teens and young adults, especially girls, who start smoking to be cool or lose weight or find something to do with their hands when they're nervous.
I started at 15 and quit at 33. I tremble every time I have a chest X-ray. I lost my best friend to lung cancer, and she didn't smoke. The woman I am closest to is being treated for lung cancer. She didn't smoke.
When I was 15, I didn't worry about getting emphysema or cancer or heart disease. Yet I begged my father to stop smoking; his cough terrified me. He half-tried a few times and stopped smoking in the house, but he never really quit. By the time I started, he'd given up trying. He died at 53.
And that was not, I should add, enough to get me to quit for 10 more years.
Mortality isn't much fun to contemplate. Luckily for them, most young people don't. Even when you lose someone you love to cigarettes, you can convince yourself that it has nothing to do with you. From the perspective of a 20-year-old, 53 looks very far away. Until it isn't.
In a recent speech, President Obama sought to enlist young people in the fight for health-care reform, relying on a University of Michigan study that found that about 40 percent of Americans would lose health-insurance coverage in the next 10 years.
The Joe Wilson wannabe I debated on TV that day kept attacking Obama for using a bad study as a scare tactic. As far as I could tell, the study was fine. The real problem was it wasn't a very good scare tactic: The young - among those most likely to lose insurance when they age off their parents' plan - don't get scared about their health. If they did, you wouldn't need to ban chocolate cigarettes, because no one would be buying them.