Physicians say the health implications of the tobacco boom in Asia are nothing less than terrifying, and there are frequently comparisons here to the Opium War of the mid-19th Century, when the British went to war to force the Chinese to accept imports of a dangerous addictive drug—opium, an important cash crop for British merchants. Richard Peto, and Oxford University epidemiologist, has estimated that because of increasing tobacco consumption in Asia, the annual worldwide death toll from tobacco-related illnesses will more than triple over the next two or three decades, from about 3 million a year to 10 million a year.