(FORTUNE Magazine) – More than any of its predecessors, the Surgeon General's latest report on smoking is a treasure trove of nicotinic esoterica. Flipping randomly through the pages, one learns, for example, that the heaviest-smoking ethnic group in America is Alaskan Natives, 56% of whom were recently on the weed. Estimates for miscellaneous other groups: Mexican-American men, 43%; Puerto Rican men, 40%; all blacks, 34%; all whites, 29%; college graduates, 16%. Currently employed persons are more likely than the unemployed to have quit smoking. Among cigarette users, the incidence of smoking declines as socioeconomic status rises. With cigar and pipe smokers, the reverse is true. (Among men with family income over $40,000, more than 5% smoke cigars or pipes.) Proportion of all regular smokers expected to die of smoking-related diseases: about 25%. As in his previous statements, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop states that his objective is a ''smoke-free society.'' In a bow to reality, however, this is now identified as a long-term objective rather than as our target for 2000. In recent years, the number of cigarettes smoked annually by Americans has been declining by maybe 1.5% a year. At that paltry rate, the country in 2000 will still be consuming 470 billion cigarettes -- enough for 64 million Americans to sustain a pack-a-day habit. What might turn the situation around? Reading the report, you get to wondering whether our public-health establishment is terribly imaginative. Huge chunks of text are given to the need for still more educational programs, more federally funded research, more regulation of smokers' behavior, more restrictions on tobacco advertising. In other words, more of the same. The report also includes an excellent, but maddeningly abbreviated, report on the possible use of economic incentives (a.k.a. taxes) to reduce smoking. Anyone focusing hard on these incentives could conclude rapidly that excise taxes represent the one available strategy that might curtail smoking sharply. The report includes a summary of ''price elasticity'' studies, i.e., studies estimating the effects of higher prices on demand for cigarettes in the U.S. As has long been known, the elasticities are highest for young people, who are both less habituated and less affluent than the middle-aged. One study shows, for example, that among beginners in the 12-17 age zone, a 10% increase in prices results in a 14% decline in smoking. But even for older smokers, the effects of price increases are nonnegligible. Looking at a range of elasticity studies, you get the sense that for smokers as a whole, consumption has typically declined by around 6% to 7% when prices rose by 10%. Next question (not considered in the report): What if federal excise taxes pushed up prices by a lot more than 10%? By, say, 50% or 100%? Nobody knows exactly what would happen, since all extant elasticity studies have been based on much smaller tax increases. But we could be pretty sure of this much: A diet of steady price increases could move far beyond 10% while continuing to (a) substantially reduce smoking, especially among young people and (b) substantially increase federal tax revenues. Needless to state, it would be no cakewalk putting any such federal program in place. In addition to not making Jesse Helms's day, the program would cause 50 state governors to apoplectically observe their own excise-tax revenues declining along with consumption. Tough sell, eh? Still, we like the idea of an outsize excise tax on cigarettes. Although not ordinarily in the business of proposing federal tax initiatives, we claim that this one comes with uniquely powerful logic. And unlike all those inane rules about restaurant smoking zones, it would really make a difference. Even in Alaska.