There have been 50,000 studies documenting the hazards of tobacco smoke, and people are getting the message. Slowly. "More people now than ever before consider smoking to be outside the social norm," said Dr. [Robert E. Windom], assistant secretary for health. [CORRECTION-Dr. Robert E. Windom was misidentified in a story about smoking in yesterday's Discovery section. He is a medical consultant in Florida and is no longer assistant secretary for health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (6/28/89 2 NS)!

The health risks of smoking have been suspected for hundreds of years, but it has only been since the 1930s that researchers seriously began to make connections between smoking and disease. In 1929, one of the first clinical studies appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, saying that heavier smoking was more common among cancer patients. By 1950, the links between smoking and cancer grew even stronger. Seven years later, government researchers had enough evidence to say that smoking directly caused lung cancer.

This attitude has led to friction between smokers and nonsmokers. Smokers say they have a right to smoke, anytime and anywhere. People who don't smoke point to the studies on passive smoking that suggest that involuntary smoke is not just bothersome but physically dangerous.