• tobacco related deaths
• statistics

Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral baked meats
 Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables

          William Shakespeare,
           Hamlet, Act I, Scene II

The king dies and his son Hamlet mourns. Hamlet's grief is increased by his mother's unseemly haste to marry her late husband's brother. She has calculated too coldly. Health advocates are not evil plotters, but their motives and actions have sometimes been likened to those of Queen Gertrude and King Claudius. The question arises: should they profit from tragedy? And can the tobacco control community appropriate dramatic images for its denormalisation campaigns and not alienate the public?

The 11 September attacks in New York and Washington, and the subsequent anthrax scare, have provided twin lessons in the perils and possibilities of tragedy. The bonds of faith, family, and community can be shattered or strengthened in suffering's wake. In similar fashion, tobacco control advocates' messages can be emboldened, weakened or even repudiated by their proximity to disaster.

Tobacco control has had the dismal luxury of unimaginably “great” statistics to make its case. Globally, an estimated four million people die each year from tobacco related illness,¹ compared to 2.7 million from malaria,² and 2.8 million from AIDS.³ After deaths from malnutrition (5.9 million in 1990)¹ and violence and injury (5.8 million),⁴ tobacco claims more deaths than any other single cause. Between 1950 and 2000, it was estimated that smoking caused about 62 million deaths in developed countries (12.5 % of all deaths: 20% of male deaths and 4% of female deaths). More than half of these deaths (38 million) will have occurred at ages 35–69 years. Currently, smoking is the cause …