A recent article in the New York Times opened thusly:

“The Justice Department is demanding that the nation’s biggest cigarette makers be ordered to forfeit $289 billion in profits derived from a half-century of ‘fraudulent’ and dangerous marketing practices.”

This is only Washington’s most recent salvo at the tobacco industry. For years, the feds and the states have been trolling the courts for tobacco money to pay for the diseases among grown adults who freely chose to smoke.

But note some key words from the Times: “profits,” “fraudulent,” and “dangerous marketing practices.”

A little walk through history reveals how cavalierly the do-gooders in Washington use those words, given the government’s own intimate affair with the evil weed. And government’s deadly habit of making war is a significant part of that history.

Most Americans might not have thought of it, but it’s not exaggerating to say the government is as responsible for deadly lung cancer and other diseases as the tobacco companies.

A few facts:

According to research gathered by Dr. David Moyer for his Tobacco Reference Guide Web site, the government included tobacco and paper in rations during World War I, and continued the practice until 1975.

In his history of cigarettes, Dr. Frederick Grannis reports that the tobacco companies gave away free cigarettes to soldiers during World War I, and that “it was only after the war that large numbers of Americans smoked cigarettes.”

But cigarette companies didn’t make the decision on rations. The government did. Millions of fighting men from World War I, through World War II, Korea and Vietnam, would never have gotten hooked were it not for the government.

And Leviathan, the all-powerful state, has greedily taken its own share of “profits” on cigarettes via federal and state taxes. The more cigarettes the tobacco giants sold, the more tax revenues government collected.

So government at all levels took “profits” from giving people cancer and emphysema. It still does.

“Dangerous marketing practices?” What, pray tell, do we call the government’s six decades of giving cigarette rations to millions of young military men with little to do in their spare time but smoke?

As for the “fraud,” given all this history, government’s masquerade as the avenging angel for tobacco’s victims is the most egregious fraud of all. And let’s not forget negligence. Even after its own surgeon general issued his infamous warning about cigarettes in 1964, the federal government packed them in military rations.

The state joined in the fraud, profits and marketing practices of which it accuses the tobacco giants. It too ignored the evidence that gave us the slang for cigarettes: coffin nails.

You wonder why one of these litigious lung cancer victims hasn’t sued the federal government.

Point is, cigarette smoking didn’t become a national habit, and national health problem, merely because some Madison Avenue marketing man and tobacco tycoon hatched a clever campaign in the executive suite.

Government helped. Its wars were a marketing opportunity for cigarettes, its imperial army the captive market.

On the subject of health-care costs and “profits derived from a half-century of fraudulent, dangerous marketing practices,” it ain’t the tobacco companies blowing a lot of smoke.

It’s Uncle Sam.

R. Cort Kirkwood is managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Va. His e-mail address is: [email protected].