When I was a small boy in New York City (about 80 years ago), we kids liked the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays the most. They were the times of family dinners, featuring delicious hot turkey with cranberry sauce and dressing and candied sweet potatoes. If any turkey was miraculously left over, we ate it cold the next day. But that was the end. Cold turkey meant it was finished, finally, absolutely.

Somehow, the phrase "cold turkey" crept into the English language, meaning the only real, effective measure for breaking an addiction to lethal drugs. You stopped using or abusing them, completely, once and for all. "Tapering off" didn't work. You either quit, or you stayed hooked. That has been the experience in America and, I am told, in the rest of the world as well.

And so I'm skeptical, and dismayed, when I read of the palliative approaches being employed in China, where diseases induced by cigarette smoking kill 1 million people per year.

Persuade men not to smoke in public places, and they go home and poison their wives and children with indirect nicotine inhalation.

How can you expect smokers to quit or youngsters not to start when you keep enticing them with cigarettes on the open market? Stop manufacturing the filthy weed!

Of course there is the problem of finding new livelihoods for tobacco farmers and the thousands employed in the distribution and sale of cigarettes, as well as the large tax revenues acquired by the lethal trade.

But farmers can be subsidized while learning to raise other crops; new jobs can be found for the hangers-on; national income will rise when the huge medical, hospital and funeral bills are cut as a result of the improvement in public health.

The difficulties are not insurmountable. I've been here since 1947. I've seen China crack much tougher nuts than this.

If there's a will, there's a way.

(China Daily December 20, 2007)