That report, published in no less a credible publication than the Journal of the American Medical Association, states, "[W]e estimate that persons with a diagnosable mental disorder .. consume nearly half of all cigarettes smoked in the United States."  Yes, folks, you read that right - it says half.

     No one who has watched television in the past few years has missed the commercials touting the apparent good deeds of Big Tobacco.  One such series of ads shows a tobacco company loaning out executives and sending money to needy people in times of crisis, kind of a private Red Cross at work.  If true, those deeds are admirable.  However, are they  motivated by genuine philanthropic urges or, rather, by a wish to rehabilitate the damaged image of an industry purveying slow death to millions of people?

     The issue raised by all of this is whether the company sending out its employees with checkbook in hand to needy people (and then filming self-serving television commercials touting its generosity) should more properly be addressing the implications of the almost unbelievable findings by the Harvard Medical School regarding the use of cigarettes by mentally ill persons.

     Tobacco's response to the statistic is, predictably, that mental illness causes people to smoke, not vice versa.  However, it has been suggested that the opposite may be true: that smoking causes depression and mental illness.  Naomi Breslau, director of research at Henry Ford Health Systems, reported that most people think that those who tend to be depressed "self-medicate by smoking.  This is probably not the case .. [new findings show] absolutely no evidence that depressive symptoms per se increase the risk for smoking .. The do find very clear evidence in the other direction."

     Perhaps those dollars spent by tobacco companies trying to do good deeds should be given to those people trying to research the causes and cures for the mental illnesses which, according to the Harvard report, causes the people who suffer from them to consume a highly disproportionate amount of the poisons produced by the cigarette industry.  Of course, to do that would be to undermine half of its market base -- and we all know the tobacco industry always puts public health concerns ahead of its profit margins, don't we?

     One can never underestimate the power of the tobacco lobby to protect its markets.  A while back, Food and Drug Commissioner David Kessler declared nicotine to be a drug in need of regulation by the FDA. In making this judgment, Kessler said that a cigarette is nothing more than "a nicotine delivery system" not unlike a hypodermic syringe or a pill delivers other drugs to the body.  Kessler began to take steps to regulate the sale of cigarettes.  However, in its usual wisdom and under the whip of the Big Tobacco lobby, Congress quickly amended the Food and Drug Act to exclude tobacco products from its jurisdiction.

     These matters bring to mind en even larger issue: Is there any moral duty on the part of advertisers to avoid promoting products which they know may be harmful to the users of it?  Watch any pro game on television and you will see endless beer commercial selling everything but the beer. Ads for beer used to talk about taste and foam and color and water.  Now, they suggest: Drink Schotzenheimer Beer, and you will be forever twenty-one and live on a tropical island, surrounded by drop dead gorgeous, barely dressed Victoria's Secret models who will drape themselves over you and your Gatsbyesque pool outside your mansion.  To whom is that appealing?  People who drink beer or those who wish to implicitly acquire a better lifestyle by drinking beer?

     I am not so naive as to suggest that sex and image will cease being used to advertise products.  However, as in the case of tobacco and alcohol commercials, our two mainstream legal drugs, at what point does a consideration of the morality of the act of promotion of the product arise?  If the tobacco industry knows its products cause illness and death and knows that half its sales are to those people already suffering from serious mental illness, does not some duty beyond maximizing corporate profits arise?  A public duty to not perpetuate or aggravate these profound tragedies?

     So, the next time you curl up with the popcorn and pretzels before your TV to watch football or a movie and some big tobacco company shows a commercial congratulating itself on how it "helps" people, perhaps you will view such self-promotion with a slightly jaundiced eye and think of the millions of mentally ill people from whom the tobacco companies extract half their profits without so much as a twitch of conscience.