Medicine: Cloven Smokers

Dangers in a teen-age fad?

At 17, Tim Cislaw of Costa Mesa, Calif., seemed to have it all: suntanned good looks, natural athletic and artistic talent, and popularity. One night last March, while recovering from the flu, he took a few drags on a kretek, or clove cigarette, an Indonesian concoction of tobacco and cloves that has become popular with teen-agers across the nation. Soon he was gasping for breath, and by the next day he was in an intensive-care unit suffering from what appeared to be an unusually severe type of pneumonia. "He had cysts the size of golf balls in his lungs," says Thoracic...

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