Many of my friends have recently become addicts. They have not taken up some new drug or habit. They're doing the same thing they have been doing for years. They smoke.

They became addicts because of a push, socially and legally, to "medicalize" smoking -- that is, make their habit a medical problem.

This kind of thing has happened before. People who drink too much on a regular basis, for example, have long since ceased to be regarded as moral failures or sinners. Now they are viewed as diseased.

Children who can't concentrate on their homework were once thought of as bad students; now they might get a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder.

For years, smoking was viewed as a harmful choice for which one took personal responsibility. But now many states are trying to force tobacco companies to pay smoking-related health costs, and implicit in their argument is the belief that smoking is a medical condition.

We normally do not blame sick people for their illnesses. We have understood them as victims of chance or some evil power. But calling a smoker a victim of an addiction shifts responsibility away from the individual. It blames tobacco companies for smokers' habits -- while helping others to profit from that addiction.

Doctors, for instance, profit when behavior is turned into a medical condition. Their responsibilities expand, along with their status and power.

Companies that develop therapies certainly profit. For example, the manufacturers of Ritalin have benefited from the increase in the number of cases of attention deficit disorder.

Turning smokers into addicts has given government a new justification for expanding its authority. Federal, state and local governments now have a reason to regulate behavior, by limiting where people can smoke, and to penalize tobacco companies, by censoring their advertisements.

The motives for medicalizing smoking may not be as pure as they are portrayed. Indeed, there are even cases where they may have little to do with improving the public health.

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This essay appears in the NY Times (11/20/97) By Kevin Wm. Wildes, a Jesuit priest, associate director of Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of Ethics.