George M. Anderson  Smoking began for me at 16. My friends
started then too, and because it was forbidden on school
grounds, the incentive of rule-breaking made it all the more
attractive. After starting with Pall Malls and then Marlboros, I
went on to Salems in graduate school, where any nonsmoking
student was viewed as something of an oddity. I recall an
evening seminar in a professor’s apartment so filled with grey-
blue haze that one older (and wiser) student got up and left.
But then at age 30, I myself stopped. Why? Because that same
year the U.S. surgeon general released the first report
definitively linking tobacco use with cancer and heart disease.
Now, four decades later, the current surgeon general has
released another report that links smoking with additional
illnesses. With this information widely publicized, you might
think that smoking would find few new adherents nowadays. And
yet, walking home from America House, I pass office workers—many
of them young—puffing away in doorways on their brea