Let's take them in order.
As Insight reported in June 1997, "many also wonder if the demonizing of cigarettes will lead to a 'slippery slope' in which caffeine, fatty food, chocolate and anything else the public-health community might deem bad or politically incorrect becomes subject to regulation or prohibition" [see "Fighting the Tobacco Wars," June 16, 1997].
Can you say,"We TOLD you so."?
Longtime antitobacco crusader John Banzhaf ridiculed this notion. Cigarettes were a uniquely dangerous product, he and other lawsuit supporters maintained.
Of COURSE he ridiculed the notion. Don't give any OTHER business a heads up that they are coming after you NEXT.
But there's no other industry in the United States that kills anywhere near 500,000 people a year."
My, my, where DO the numbers come from? first it was 300,000, then 400,000, now it's 500,000, even though according to them LESS people are smoking.
That was then and this is now. Five years later, fresh from his victory over tobacco companies, Banzhaf is a leader of a movement of trial lawyers and public-health activists who are marshaling the strategies used against tobacco to go after fast-food restaurants and food processors that sell "fatty" food, candy, soft drinks and other consumables deemed politically incorrect.
Ah, another 'leader'. Sieg Heil!
"Hit junk-food junkies where it hurts: in their wallets" by "slapping high-fat, low-nutrition foods with a substantial government 'sin' tax."
What do you say we hit KELLY where it hurts. Like, upside the head!
the states have been hurting for revenue in the Clinton economic downturn, and public-health activists are pitching food excise tariffs as small taxes that could be turned into bigger ones after the pubic gets used to them.
The old boiling frog method.
To compound this, the IRS in April classified obesity as a "disease" for deduction of medical expenses. This reminds many observers of when Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler shifted the blame from individual smokers to the tobacco companies by calling smoking a "pediatric disease." Tort reformer Schwartz says, "That's important, because if obesity is a disease, then it's not your fault. That's a very important step because the plaintiffs' lawyers and those who want to make an assault on fatty food have to move away from the concept of individual responsibility just like the antitobacco people had to move away from the idea that you choose to smoke."
What is the IRSdoing classifying ANYTHING as a 'disease'?
Yes, just as the classification of 'addictive' was changed for tobacco so will the classification of 'fat', 'obese', and 'food' be changed.
If your a smoker, you die because you smoke!
For example;
My mother had rheumatic fever as a child, and was told in her teens she would probably not live to be 20. The fever damaged her heart. She later had an artificial valve implanted in her heart and took massive quantities of blood thinner.
When I was born she had TB, and later discovered she also had myesthinia gravis (sp?).
BUT..because she also smoked for several years, her death certificate said she died from smoking.
She was 64.