Yet despite the evident seriousness of this addiction and its long-term consequences, tobacco consumption continues relatively unfettered even today. Smoking rates, having plateaued for decades, have begun to rise again in certain demographic pockets, and lackluster antismoking campaigns have lost their grip on public imagination. The disjunction between the threat and the response is widening. It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America—a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance’s link
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