Thank you for publishing my letter in today's Feedback section (The evilness of promoting cigarettes),  but in the light of your latest article on the subject ("Legal setback for ban on tobacco advertising", 16 June 2000), I would like to add a few words to what I said about the behaviour of the tobacco industry being a present-day example of man's capacity for and blindness to evil.

In the light of our knowledge about the addictive, harmful and often fatal effects of cigarette smoking, how can anyone - except John Carlisle, the director of the Tobacco Manufacturers' Association, of course - fail to recognise that encouraging anyone to smoke is thoroughly evil?

Yet the tobacco industry continues to spend billions of pounds worldwide every year doing exactly this.

I wonder whether John Carlisle and his fellow directors are really as evil as their behaviour would suggest, or whether they are merely pursuing their narrow (misguided) self-interests like everyone else? Doing business, securing old markets and creating new, making money and providing employment.

The millions of premature deaths and the immeasurable misery they cause obviously do not figure in their calculations. That would spoil their business (and perhaps prick their consciences), so they simple refuse to
acknowledge it.

Does this degree of blindness, indifference and gross irresponsibility pervade our entire economy? I suspect and fear that it does - in which case our future looks bleak indeed.