Anti-tobacco lobby still blows smoke/If This Doesn't Make You Mad, Nothing Will!

A coalition of health groups -- including the Heart and Stroke Foundation, Canadian Cancer Society and Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada --yesterday condemned Canada's anti-smoking public education program, claiming it should be directed at the tobacco industry, not at smokers. In an open letter sent to Health Minister Anne McLennan, they demanded anti-tobacco advertising that is "ambitious, hard-hitting, explicit and in your face."

That's a good start. Making smoking illegal would be a better solution, but apparently the rights of too many yellow-toothed people would be stomped in order to ensure the rest of us have clean air. The ghettoization of smokers, reducing them to pack animals huddled together in parking garages and in back alleys , has been wonderful to watch but it hasn't gone far enough. It seems ardent smokers, the sort who claim they enjoy every cigarette (yes, even the ones stolen outside in minus 40 weather) are too hopelessly addicted or willfully stupid to quit.

"More than a year ago," a portion of the letter reads, "Ottawa established a fund of $480-million to be spent over five years to reduce tobacco-related disease and death. It earmarked 40 per cent for mass media initiatives. The first year of this five-year program has already expired, deepening our concern for the implementation of an effective strategy to deliver this mass-media campaign."

The letter condemns Canada's use of ads that preach to young people, saying those nagging messages simply ensure smoking is seen as an adult activity that mean big people want to deny adolescents. Having figure skater Elvis Stoyko declare he's chosen not to smoke is about as effective as those hectoring messages (complete with pictures of diseased lungs) on cigarette packages.

"Smoke from a lit cigarette contains toxic substances. These include hydrogen, cyanide, formaldehyde and benzene," reads a typical warning. Smokers already know butts are harmful. They don't believe a lit cigarette emits vanilla and kitten's breath. They just don't give a tinker's damn.

So what do they health experts suggest? Nothing less than the demonization of the tobacco industry, explaining in blunt language the consequences of smoking and the deliberate misrepresentation by tobacco companies who lied to smokers even as the hazards of smoking became abundantly clear.

"Industry denormalization works because it is powerful with non-smokers and smokers alike," the letter to Ms. McLennan reads. "It helps direct the frustration smokers feel about their addiction away from themselves and toward the tobacco manufacturers. It helps non-smokers understand why they should care about this public-health problem."

Most non-smokers care because second-hand smoke clings to our clothes, causes our chests to constrict and imperils our asthmatic children, but I digress.

"Industry denormalization also helps young people understand that smoking is not an expression of free will, but rather a form of submission to an unscrupulous industry," the letter continues. "This new perspective puts the health messages they have been taught in a different light and encourages them to rebel against the tobacco companies instead of the health establishment."

In short, these health-care professionals are hoping to pull off an end run around the tobacco industry, reducing their complicity with young smokers, stripping their effectiveness as purveyors of something illicit and desirable. Big bad tobacco should be revealed as the money-grubbing, heartless industry it is, content to sacrifice lives in a quest for a better market share.

There are two questions that need answering. First, does the Canadian government have the will to change course and launch a head-on attack against the tobacco industry? Second, is a leering villain all it will take to reduce smoking, especially by young people?

As long as our government permits the sale of a drug that has been proven to kill 45,000 Canadians every year, it seems unlikely a propaganda war will be the most effective method of saving lives. To its credit, the coalition of health-care groups is willing to use the best means available until common sense finally reigns.

Boomer Columnists Suddenly Jaded

" We suck" says three pro-Boomer writers

Winnipeg -- Three of the city's most popular columnists. Gordon Sinclair, Morley Walker and Lindor Reynolds, have come clean and admitted their unending pro-Baby-Boomer columns about life in the idyllic 60s and the lack of similar styles and tastes in the contemporary world, are a weak facade that holds up their own self-awareness that they are shallow, materialistic drones who cannot let go of their childhoods.

"Basically," says Walker," we suck."

For years the columnists have been writing about Baby Boomers in the modern world and the prediciments they faced.

Walker is the entertainment editor of the Free Press. His columns usually have to do with saccharine, laughable laments on the breakup of the Beatles and how Marilyn Manson couldn't hold a candle to Alice Cooper circa-1970.

Sinclair, most famous for his let's-placate-the-indians book, Cowboys and Indians, writes short, meaningless columns about the Winnipeg social scene, socialites and how the younger generation takes such things as electricity, food and water for granted.

Reynolds is an optimistic writer who often showcases comfortable, white, suburban soccer-moms who have faced some sort of tragedy that she makes feel like only they have suffered in the world and no on else. She is also famous for her melodramatic, fear-mongering expose on child pornography on the Internet, and any other universal fears that effect white, upper-class WASPs in Winnipeg.

Now, however, the truth behind these stories has emerged.

The columnists all admit that by focusing on their history as Boomers they are avoiding the fact that they are completely inept at dealing with modern problems, both external and the ones they created themselves.

Like most women of her generation, Reynolds was rasied by a cold, dispassionate mother who placed practicallity and a fear of emotions before anything else.

" I feel that I have failed as a mother, " she says, " I raised my kids to be practical and narrow-minded, to fear minorities and the unknown. To take no chances and not to rock the boat because life is too scary and bad things happen all the time no matter how nice your home is."

Sinclair agrees." The Boomers have tried to take over the world and have failed. All we are now is a demographic that advertisers aim for. It's effective because deep down inside I am a shallow, practical person who wants to be treated special because I was the son of a war vet and had to live through the Cuban Missle Crisis. I deserve to be worshipped because I saw the Beatles on Sullivan and I know exactly where I was when Kennedy was shot. Unfortunately, the world does not agree with me and I think they are right. As I get old I realize how dysfunctional and screwed-up my generation really is.

For Walker, the lack of old-fashioned politics in art is what makes him feel useless.

" When I was growing up we had Dylan plugging in for the first time and that was radical. That was a political statement. The Beatles, who are the greatest musicians in the history of the universe, were exploring Hinduism and drugs. All this was politically charged and we made a difference by listening to this music. Although now I realize that I didn't really do anything but listen to the music and get high. It wasn't like I actually changed anything. Vietnam still went on, inflation increased and Nixon lied to us all. But the music was great and we made a difference man. Nowadays, with this focus on non-political music, all this worry about just having fun and enjoying music, its so wrong. Music is meant to be a medium for change, like we did in the 60s.Not for people to play out of enjoyment."

No one knows what the future holds in store for these three columnists. As the Boomer demographic eases into retirement with the RRSP's garnered from the sweat of their children's alienated, dispossesed generation, the future is bright.

" I just want to go on living in Tuxedo," says Reynolds, " and teach my grandchildren that the time they live in is completely irrelevant because man has already walked on the moon and there will never be another Woodstock"

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