Anti-smoking advocate fires up area students

Area school children and residents are currently hearing "What the Tobacco Industry Doesn't Want You to Know" after the North Arkansas Partnership for Health Education, Boone County Hometown Health Improvement Coalition and Boone County Tobacco Free Coalition brought a former tobacco researcher to Harrison. Dr. Victor DeNoble, Ph.D., spoke to the Harrison High School students at 10 this morning about the chemical dangers of tobacco.

"I'm a scientist but I deal mostly with animals about how tobacco effects them in dangerous ways," he told a packed auditorium.

He showed slides and even showed the students a monkey brain as well as the actual brain of a long-time smoker who died from years of tobacco abuse. "Oh, that was too cool," said one student sitting on the front row.

According to an interview with the Law Vegas Review-Journal, the researcher said, "I was never an opponent of the tobacco industry. Nor a proponent. I think people have a right to smoke if they want. I think the tobacco industry needs to stop marketing to kids and make a safer product. End of story."

DeNoble, whose billing says, "A tobacco company hired him to research nicotine. He was so successful, he lost his job," is scheduled to make seven appearances during his visit to Harrison on Monday and Tuesday. After three speeches Monday, Tuesday's schedule includes: 10 a.m. speech to Hometown Health Improvement Coalition and public at the John Paul Hammerschmidt Center on the South Campus of North Arkansas College, 11:30 a.m. luncheon with hometown health leaders and community partners, 1:15 p.m. speech to area fifth and sixth graders at Pioneer Pavilion on the South Campus of North Arkansas, and 7 p.m. speech to the public at the John Paul Hammerschmidt Center on the South Campus of North Arkansas College.

A press release about the speech says that DeNoble was recruited by Philip Morris in the 1980s to develop a safer cigarette. He promises to offer facts on the tobacco company's expenditures to keep smokers addicted. "After Dr. DeNoble's lab was seized and he was fired, he became one of the first 'whistle blowers' to being tearing down the wall of secrecy built by the tobacco industry."

He promises that the seminar will offer information and insight into at least four topics: the tobacco industry's ongoing efforts to get people (especially youth) hooked, the addictive nature of nicotine and why people can't quit, the dangers of second-hand smoke to others, and methods to help people quit.

DeNoble told the News-Journal that tobacco executives knew nicotine was addictive and that it helped cause heart disease. His job was to find a nicotine alternative - a substance that could keep smokers just as addicted but without causing heart problems. DeNoble said he worked on a restricted-access floor with windows painted black. He eventually was fired, his lab seized, and he was sworn to secrecy.

His story will include details about how findings of his research were finally leaked.

Honestly, anyone who can pay for their own cigarettes and is a hypocrite about it really needs to grow up! Closet smokers! Now I've heard everything!

My grooming is impeccable, and I wash my hands frequently...there are non-smokers who assume I'm one of them, because they don't smell it on me...are they shocked when I tell them I am a proud smoker.

I even told one of them that I might have quit, except the smokenazis annoyed me so much I was determined to KEEP the habit.

Me too, Judith Anne! Part of me wants to quit--and part of me just wants to irritate people like my stupid sister-in-law, who, good liberal 'progressive' that she is (I'm not kidding, her radio is always tuned to NPR and I thought she was going to explode when she saw a copy of Bernard Goldberg's 'Bias' in my house) voted to ban smoking in bars in her hometown. When I asked her why, she said, "What if Taylor (her daughter) walked into a bar, or she wanted to work there, and she had to be around smoke?" I replied, "Well, she's 18, and she wouldn't be in a bar. Second, by the time she's 21, I'm sure she can make her own choices. You know, being tolerant of what other people do with their lives. Isn't that what the '60s were all about?" That shut her up, because God knows that's the topic of every conversation you have with her, all of the great things she did in the 1960s, the activism, the freedom, etc. It's all lies, because my husband tells me that in the 1960s she was a good student who lived with their Mom and never had a boyfriend and still wore curlers in her hair every night. I'm beginning to think that anyone who reminisces about the good times they had in the 1960s are making it up.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.