Smoking Can Cause Male Impotence; Did You Know?

by Marc Oliver

     California is in the forefront once again. It began airing anti-smoking commercials this January, informing the public about the very real link between smoking and male impotency.
     One ad shows a man successfully flirting with a woman until the cigarette in his mouth suddenly goes limp. The message is clear.
     By using such ads the California Department of Health is attempting to get its message across with a new technique: anxiety over sex, not health, may get more men to stop smoking. The ads are surely getting attention!
     In researching this story, however, it is obvious the tobacco industry has done its best to squelch the story, for there are no collateral stories anywhere.
     There are plenty of medical studies corroborating that smoking in fact does cause male impotency. Studies in Europe and in the U.S. all show tobacco use causes atherosclerosis (clogging and hardening of the blood arteries) in vessels supplying penile blood flow. Findings show that such vascular impotence is a major cause of physical impotence.
     That this story is so late being told is scandalous, since many of the medical studies are decades old. Why hasn’t the public been told until now (if only in California and in Baltimore’s own little Chronicle) that smoking causes impotence?
     Need we ask why, really! Tobacco companies and their money have corrupted the news media and our governments. That tobacco kills is not news, but that tobacco has and still is giving millions of men a limp you-know-what is news--real bad news. Impotency ruins the quality of living during a man’s middle years. (And it is thought tobacco use similarly affects women, though the condition is not as obvious and unstudied.)
     Mad? Who are you going to call to get your impotency problem fixed?
     Peter Angelos got 25% of Maryland’s tobacco settlement (for reasons defeating our little brains). Can Maryland’s affected men now see him for money for penis repair?

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This story was published on Feb. 3, 1999.