Seriously, how bad do things have to get before the denial crowd start to acknowledge that this “myth” presents a very real danger to the future of our species as a whole? How big a body count does it have to rack up before it ceases to be something that “scientists are making up”?

I’m too young to have been around when people got the memo that cigarette smoking was bad for you, but I’ve read enough to realize that this is like so much of a rerun. Scientists of every stripe were out there, year after year, sending up the flag and declaring that smoking was a very real danger and needed to be tackled. And yet, the public yawned and listened to the handful of scientists funded by the cigarette companies, who assured folks that there’s no link between smoking and lung cancer, that it’s actually beneficial to smoke, and that those who were sounding the alarm were being paid to do so.