Today is the Great American Smokeout, one of those media-anointed days designed to nag people into doing the right thing. It’s an annual event set up by the American Cancer Society. For a wealth of good information on why you should quit and some help in doing so, log in to www.cancer.org.

Yet on the eve of the smokeout, a national survey by the Center for Disease Control found that smoking actually ticked upward for the first time in 15 years.

The gain (really, a loss) was relatively infinitesimal. The overall figure still shows that about one out of every five Americans smokes.

See tomorrow’s paper for the complete editorial.