The death of a newsman — and an addiction

In the weeks after I quit, my friends, family and colleagues rallied around me, and I was touched. I’d get these e-mails saying “Call me!” if I had an urge to light up. Once, rushing into my office on deadline, I found a package on my desk with a card taped to it: “Thought I’d buy you the next few rounds.” It was from a colleague, a two-month supply of quit-smoking patches.

It turned out I didn’t need them. I was done smoking, though I’d really just begun to think about it. And about how the relatively paltry funding for lung cancer research suffers from the impact of smoker’s guilt — the "we bring it on ourselves" lament that even Peter referenced in his very last broadcast, saying he’d “been weak” and had gone back to smoking after 9/11. Less than 1/10^th of the research dollars spent on breast cancer are spent on lung cancer per death, for example. I thought about how there’ve been few celebrity-led commercial campaigns for lung-cancer research — because so few lung cancer patients, only about 15 percent, have a five-year survival rate or ever get healthy enough again to lead the fund-raising charge or the next 5K run.

So 160,000 Americans died of lung cancer last year, at least as many will be newly diagnosed this year, and unless its next victim is a Peter Jennings or Dana Reeve — who would also be taken by the disease — it remains a largely invisible mass killer whose opponents have no champion or spokesperson, and whose cures and treatments seem as distant or feeble as ever.

A few months ago a longtime acquaintance of mine asked me how I’d finally been able to kick the habit. I said I didn’t know, that maybe it was just my time to quit. Or, maybe, that I’d just been frightened into quitting by what had happened to the man I’d worked with (and smoked with) all those years ago: diagnosis to death in a mere four months. Then I said something I’d never said before, words I’d never spoken to anyone: “I guess what’s different is that now I want to live as long as I can. There are stories I want to cover or at least see how they turn out.  More things I want to write, places I want to travel to. I want to sail some more, get better at golf, enjoy my marriage and continue being a father.  Forget about getting hit by that bus: I want to live.”

Mike Taibbi is an NBC News correspondent.

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