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270 CHAPTER 7 forced large numbers of males into a situation where smoking was not just tolerated but de facto encouraged (recall that the pro portion of men smoking increased, while the average cigarette consumption decreased).53 The Nazis failed to stop the growth of overall tobacco consumption, which culminated in 1942, but they did manage to channel most of that growth away from women. What did cut tobacco use--and dramatically--was the poverty and rationing of the war years and immediate postwar period. One can never know how many women's lives may have been saved by the campaign against tobacco and the 1945 collapse of the tobacco industry. Even so, it is still perhaps worth noting that far more women would have died of lung cancer had German rates continued to grow as rapidly as they did in the United States. American women's lung cancer rates increased by more than a fac tor of six between 1952 and 1990 (see again table 7.1). German women's rates, by contrast, only doubled. Had the German rate increased as rapidly as the American rate, about twenty thousand more women would have died than actually did die. One could plausibly argue that whatever prevented German women from taking up the habit as rapidly as American women, eventually pre vented the lung cancer deaths of some twenty thousand German women. Playing the Nazi Card Nazism remains a powerful symbol, and it is hardly surprising that it has been exploited for a circus of philosophical and commer cial ends. Nazism is the moral low point of many of the "slippery slopes" that bioethicists worry about, the dangerous potential end of everything from euthanasia to abusive experimentation. It is difficult to overestimate the impact of Nazism on medical ethics, race relations, and much else as well; but I would also maintain that the "implications" of Nazi medicine are not as obvious as some would like us to believe. There is no immediate or unprob lematic comparison, for example, between the Nazi extermination of the handicapped and current efforts to allow people to choose THE MONSTROUS AND THE PROSAIC 271 the manner and timing of their death (through "living wills," for example). Bioethical discussions are full of facile identifications of Nazism with everything from abortion and rationalized medicine to doctor-assisted suicide. I would tend to agree with Michael Bur leigh that "the Nazi analogy is pretty marginal to contemporary discussions about euthanasia"; I would also agree with Arthur Caplan that comparisons invoking Nazi medicine must be drawn with care lest we mischaracterize contemporary policies or dimin ish the genuine extremity of the Nazi experience.54 Bioethicists are not the only ones eager to draw out "lessons" from the Holocaust, however. Pro-tobacco advocates have begun to play the Nazi card, with talk of "NicoNazis" and "tobacco fas cism." In 1997, when antitobacco activists in Winthrop, Massachu setts, tried to ban all sale of tobacco within the city limits, an of fended tobacco merchant suggested that the Board of Health was "taking up where Hitler left off."55 A Toronto newspaper has ac cused antitobacco activists of being "NicoNazis" and "health fas cists."56 The most stunningly offensive case I know of came in the summer of 1995, when Philip Morris of Europe ran ads in many European magazines seeking to identify smokers with ghettoized Jews and antismokers with Nazis. The ads showed a map of Am sterdam with an area near the traditional Jewish quarter cordoned off and labeled "Smoking Section." The headline asked, "Where will they draw the line?"--implying that society's efforts to re strict smoking are comparable to Nazi efforts to isolate Jews (see fig. 7.1). We are likely to see more efforts to play the Nazi card, as anti-antitobacco campaigns move into higher gear. Is Nazi Cancer Research Tainted? A great deal of ink has been Spilled over the question of what is to be done about "tainted" Nazi data--the most common conun drum being whether it is proper for contemporary researchers to "use" scientific information generated under suspect circum stances. The debate is often raised amid a number of misconcep tions--as if "the Nazi data" were something singular and well