Guest editorial: Smoking bans

The French thought so, too.

Now, as part of what many of them deride as the "Americanization" of France, French do-gooders have gotten serious about smoking and health. It has been uphill going. French smokers are a dedicated lot. Typical of the chauvinistic resistance is the spokesman for the French tobacco industry who dismissed the threat of secondhand smoke as an "American fabrication."

But smoking-related illnesses claim 66,000 French lives each year. So laws were enacted banning smoking in many public places and requiring non-smoking areas in restaurants. Heaping insult on injury from the smokers' standpoint, anti-smoking groups have resorted to that dreaded American export, the lawsuit.

The government has gone to a more Gallic weapon, taxes. The price of a pack of cigarettes went from $4.60 to $5.40 last month and another 20 percent hike is due in January.

The French can't do what American smokers do when faced with costly state and local taxes on their addiction -- buy their cigarettes on an Indian reservation -- so they have, according to the Associated Press, resorted to more direct action: force. A spokesman for the nation's tobacco vendors complained of a wave of attacks on smoke shops -- armed holdups and cars ramming into storefronts.

America must shoulder its share of blame for popularizing smoking, but we should remind the French that the addictive ingredient in cigarettes, nicotine, is named after a Frenchman, Jean Nicot who in 1559 introduced tobacco to Paris.

So there.