by The Economist

About the author: The Economist is a liberal British weekly news magazine.

Here at The Economist, people who want to light a cigarette do so where they will not bother others. That is as it should be: smoking is smelly and, to the sensitive, annoying. But that is as far as this liberal (in the British sense) newspaper goes. In America a century ago, Mary Walker, a decorated Civil War nurse who raged against “evil nicotine”, went about the streets using her furled umbrella to bat cigarettes from the lips of unsuspecting smokers. The August 1995 announcement by the Clinton administration that it would mount a heavy- handed campaign against smoking by teenagers is, alas, more in her tradition than in ours.

Measures to Restrict Cigarette Advertising