Word: koop
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Surgeon General Koop strikes sparks with an antismoking broadside that confirms tobacco, like cocaine or heroin, is addictive...
...first time suffer the same 75% relapse rate as recovering alcoholics and heroin addicts. Last week the U.S. Surgeon General made official what everyone has recognized for a long time: tobacco, like cocaine or heroin, is addictive. In a no-holds-barred, 618-page report, the forthright C. Everett Koop not only proclaimed that "cigarettes and other forms of tobacco are addicting" but also urged that they should be treated with the same caution as illegal street narcotics...
Based on two decades of research by more than 50 scientists, Koop's 1 1/2- in.-thick treatise, titled The Health Consequences of Smoking: Nicotine Addiction, earned unanimous accolades from the medical community as well as praise from politicians. "The Surgeon General's report is a clear challenge to all who care about the health of smokers," says Ovide Pomerleau, professor of behavioral medicine at the University of Michigan. "This socially approved habit is going to go the way of the spittoon." Among Koop's recommendations: warning labels about addiction on packages of tobacco products, a ban on cigarette vending...
...Koop's retort was devastating. "I haven't mistaken the enemy," he countered. "My enemy kills 350,000 people a year." In the U.S. in 1986, smoking-related lung ailments accounted for 108,000 deaths; heart disease, 200,000 more. By comparison, Koop continued, cocaine and opiates such as heroin dispatch about 6,000 people a year and alcohol about 125,000. Said he: "I think we're way ahead on deaths." As for nicotine's addictive qualities, the Surgeon General cited several national surveys that reveal 75% to 85% of the nation's 51 million smokers would like...
...Like Koop's straight-shooting AIDS report released in 1986, the HHS primer, which is geared to the reading level of seventh-graders, does not mince words. "No matter what you may have heard, the AIDS virus is hard to get and is easily avoided," the pamphlet says. "You won't get AIDS from clothes, a telephone or from a toilet seat." Instead, the virus is transmitted by "sharing drug needles and syringes; anal sex, with or without a condom; and vaginal or oral sex with someone who shoots drugs or engages in anal...