To the editors:

Stephen Helfer, recalling the general consensus among his friends in the '50s, concludes in his letter ("Tobacco Risks Widely Known," Oct. 14), "For as long as anyone can remember, smoking has been thought to be very harmful."

I suggest that Helfer would be wise to expand his sample size. Such casual empiricism is not warranted in light of available evidence. In 1954, 41 percent of adults in the U.S. thought that smoking is one of the causes of lung cancer, compared to 66 percent by 1964. Similarly, awareness has increased over time of the link between tobacco use and 25 or so other diseases. The causality is not rationally challenged today. In the '50s, however, the harmful effects of smoking were certainly not, as Helfer glibly declares, widely perceived.

Informed adults should be free to take informed risks--including taking up smoking. Smoking initiation, however, often occurs during adolescence, when awareness of the health harms of tobacco use is limited. Neither is the addictiveness of the habit widely perceived. Furthermore, many studies show that, while youth may be aware of the risk of addiction, they may not personalize the risk.

Among youth, then, cigarette advertising unduly influences free choice. The tobacco industry maintains that its ads are not focused upon this most vulnerable market. Is it coincidence that cigarette marketers target youth-oriented magazines? Is it coincidence that teenage youth are twice as likely as adults to smoke the most heavily advertised cigarette brands? The data has swamped any lenient prior belief I might have held.

Unfortunately, the tobacco industry has turned its eye towards developing countries to compensate for an increasingly hostile regulatory environment and declining market at home. In many countries abroad, cigarette makers, unhampered by even the lightweight regulations that exist in the U.S., are free to advertise or package as they wish--in the process, misleading both adults and youth about the dangers of smoking. A recently published study revealed, for example, that lung cancer was recognized as related to smoking by only 40 percent of both smokers and nonsmokers in China. This sort of documentation is pervasive, from Sri Lanka to Poland to Fiji.

A glaring weakness of the 1997 tobacco settlement is that it did not do enough to prevent the tobacco industry from exporting its death and deceit abroad. I do hope that this federal lawsuit finally solves the problem.

Alexander C. Tsai '98