The Times of London explains how: “Tobacco production, adopted throughout the Third World as a cash crop, is raising cancer rates, causing deforestation and occupying land that could grow much needed food crops for home consumption.”

■ Smoke and Cancer

In 1986, at the 14th International Cancer Congress in Hungary, experts estimated that 3,500,000 people would die of cancer that year. “According to WHO [World Health Organization] statistics,” reports the German medical journal Ärztliche Praxis, “one million of these deaths will be caused by smoking.”

Sir Richard Doll, emeritus professor of medicine at Oxford University, warned that of the 3,800 chemicals in tobacco smoke, 50 have been identified as causing cancer in animals. Some of these chemicals were found to be most concentrated in noninhaled smoke. Smokers thus expose others, who become passive smokers, to the more carcinogenic substances. A British study of nonsmokers living with smokers found that every second person killed by lung cancer was a passive smoker.

The surgeon general of the United States urged companies to provide a smoke-free workplace for nonsmokers. In his report for 1986 on the health effects of smoking, he said: “Involuntary smoking is a cause of disease, including cancer, in healthy nonsmokers,” and “simple separation of smokers and nonsmokers within the same airspace may reduce, but does not eliminate, exposure of nonsmokers to environmental tobacco smoke.”

Also, the British medical magazine The Lancet recently published the results of a study of childhood cancer. The study found that the more cigarettes smoked per day by the mother during pregnancy the greater the cancer risk in her offspring. “When all tumour sites were considered,” The Lancet reported, “the overall risk for cancer in children exposed to 10 or more cigarettes per day during pregnancy increased by 50%.”