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Excerpts from: Odd silence about the drug that killed George

By Paul Munshine nj.com [12/04/01]

After George Harrison died last week, the news shows had a lot of footage of the Beatles in the 1960s. I was amazed at the blatant drug abuse, the way the Fab Four openly used the deadliest, most addictive drug known to man.

But it wasn't pot or LSD that killed Harrison. It was cigarettes. The Beatles smoked cigarettes as much as or more than any band in the history of rock music. They picked up the habit in Liverpool, which has one of the highest rates of cigarette smoking on Earth and also one of the highest rates of death from cancer.

If it had been some illegal drug that killed a Beatle, we'd be awash in blather from inside-the-Beltway moralists like George Will and Bill Bennett. So far I haven't heard a peep from those two or from any of the other anti- drug crusaders in Washington.

We didn't have to listen to Bennett who, incidentally, was a chain smoker when he took the job of drug czar tell us how Harrison's end was tragic but somehow fitting because of his role in luring a generation of young people into the evils of recreational drug use. I suspect this is because the pusher of the recreational drug in question happens to be a major contributor to Bennett's political party.

I came by this habit around the time the Beatles were making their best albums. I was amazed then, as I am now, at the hypocrisy of a bunch of tobacco-loving politicians pretending they had some sort of moral superiority that permitted them to denounce pot smokers.

Their defense then, as now, is that cigarettes are legal. They are. But just because something is legal does not mean that the people promoting it are not dirtbags. Dirty magazines are legal too, but Larry Flynt's not welcome at a Republican convention.

And Flynt's product never killed anyone. The tobacco companies kill Americans at the rate of about one World Trade Center tragedy every five days. The rate is even worse in Liverpool. Liverpool has one of the highest rates of death from lung cancer in the world. This led a doctor there named Ray Donnelly to create the Roy Castle Foundation to research lung cancer prevention. The foundation (online at www.roycastle.org) is named after a noted British trumpet player, a nonsmoker who died of lung cancer that he blamed on years of playing in smoky Liverpool bars.

The reason the Beatles were all chain smokers is that just about everyone in Liverpool was at that time, said Donnelly. It's still that way.

'In the poorer areas of Liverpool, the smoking rate is probably 70 percent," Donnelly said. "The lifetime risk of a man in Liverpool getting lung cancer is one in seven."

That's one of the highest rates on Earth. The rate for women is also unusually high.

John Flynn, a geneticist at the foundation, notes that Liverpool is a port city and therefore was the recipient of great amounts of tobacco from the United States. Free cigarettes were given away at the dock and smoking was almost universal. To this day, even little kids pick up the habit.

'Smoking is even common amongst children 10, 11 and 12 years old," Flynn said. "We can see a whole new cohort coming along even among children."

Donnelly noted that Harrison smoked cigarettes right up until he was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1997 and that the ex-Beatle blamed the disease that killed him on the habit. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2000, not long after he had survived a stabbing by a deranged intruder into his home.

'It's so ironic he survived this attack with a knife very bravely but he didn't survive the silent killers, the carcinogens in cigarettes," Donnelly said. "It's a tragedy that the world has lost a great musician at the age of 58. If it wasn't for tobacco, he'd still be with us."

Indeed he would. It wasn't the illegal drugs that killed him. When Bennett was drug czar, he went out of his way to find slippery rationalizations for cigarette use. But when it came to illegal drugs, he was fond of trotting out terms like "moral clarity."

Here's some moral clarity for you, Bill: "Smoking was devised by the devil himself," said Donnelly. "It is so heinous, so wicked. Kids are using tobacco all over the world, and the tobacco companies are distributing it to them. And they know exactly what they are doing."