Posted on 02/18/2003 1:31:16 PM PST by Just another Joe
Big OIl, top impetus for Blair and Bush plan for illegal Iraq Invasion, is PART of the cigarette industry. Yet it's Pub proprietors and patrons, all victims of toxic/cancer-causing cigarette contaminants, who must bear burdens of law. Big oil, pesticides, chlorine and other parts of Big Cig industry not even scolded...or noticed.
PESTICIDE PEGS & DIOXIN DOWELS
Pub owners may have grounds for a suit against not only the cigarette makers but the government officials who allowed the tobacco to be, for so long, secretly contaminated with some of the world's worst industrial substances. Pub patrons and workers have the same grounds...as do ANY smokers who were never informed, protected or sufficiently-warned about the many harmful, addiction-enhancing non-tobacco cig elements.
The plague of prohibitions and taxes is intended to do the following: To blame the virtually unstudied tobacco plant for the harms, to blame the victims for harming themselves and others, to distract from and minimalize the crimes of the cigarette industries, to preserve the "good name" of the pesticides/chlorine industries, to make the complicit public official look as if they "care" about our health, and to minimize public money being spent on public health care so that the money can instead go to the "wars" and to industries...often the very ones who are part of the cigarette cartels.
Bottom line re/ Pub smoking bans: Before any such prohibition is even thought of, it is necessary to FIRST prohibit secret or ANY contamination of smoking products by non-tobacco toxins and carcinogens. If someone puts poison in the wine, we don't ban wine and prosecute the victims. But if they put poisons in tobacco...well, we see what's happening. If they say "tobacco" does this or that, it is integral and required that they must show the evidence before making a law. If they MEAN dioxin-delivering, pesticide-contaminated, multi-ingredient, addiction-enhanced, artificially-sweetened, artificially-flavored processed cigarettes that are NOTORIOUS for causing harms, they need to say THAT. Anything less is an injustice and is devoid of scientific, medical or legal integrity. If officials or others know about the nature of non-tobacco cig substances yet still call it a "tobacco" problem, they are lying. If done under oath, a crime.
By the way..."smoking" is a useless word. Compare to the word "drinking". Consider the easily detected difference between "drinking" water or booze or even battery acid. It's all drinking, is it not? Ditto for "smoking". It is all about WHAT is being smoked...and it is not just tobacco by a country mile. Some cigs, in the US at least, may not contain any tobacco at all...but they MAY have "fine tobacco taste".
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The anti-"smoking" crusade is painted as being about health and wholesomeness, and, interestingly, even about being anti-corporate. It is nothing of the sort. It serves a host of health-damaging, environmentally-destructive corporations...and it serves the cigarette industry itself. The cig cartel has created a Fake Enemy...to minimize the indictment to virtual nothingness, to distract from wide complicity by the many players, and to prevent public outrage at what has been wrought by corporate-funded public regulators. This is the evil grandchild of Reefer Madness, which was designed to keep the cannabis plant from competing too well with toxic petrochemical synthetics and environmentally-destructive extractive industries. What may be called "Tobacco Madness" serves the same industries. It focuses blame for health problems on a natural plant while distracting from the hundreds of tobacco pesticides from oil and pharmaceutical industries, the dioxin-producing chlorine contents of typical products, the hundreds of untested, often toxic and carcinogenic non-tobacco additives, the added Burn-Accelerants that are part of so many fires, the addiction-enhancing additives, the candy-store of sweet & flavorful stuff added to attract those kids, and even soothing/numbing additives that, despicably, short-circuit one's natural defenses against irritation.
We are told by corporate media, corporate-financed officials and mysteriously-funded "grassroots" groups, that the villain is "Big Tobacco", the very name the industry gives itself. But, according to U.S. patents, a cigarette may not necessarily contain tobacco at all. No law requires it. And no law requires testing or even disclosure of any ingredient. That "anti-smoking" forces ignore this is a clue to either deep ignorance or inhumane complicity in helping the cigarette cartel dodge it's deservedly massive liability obligations...not to mention criminal charges.
"Anti-smoking" groups in the U.S. do not condemn the fact that State "settlement" money (which comes from price-hikes on unwittingly-poisoned consumers) may go right back to cigarette interests in pharmaceuticals (tobacco pesticides, remember), food producers who may supply ingredients, cig advertisers, and any of their insurers or investors. Who notices that so many "anti-smoking" legislators are up-to-here in funding from non-manufacturing parts of the Cig Cartel, pharms, insurers, etc. as described above?
Questionable points abound. Documentation about alleged harms of the ostensible target, tobacco (as opposed to processed cigs), has never been brought to a court or legislature. No one has been charged with perjury for saying, under oath, with knowledge and intent to deceive about cig ingredients, that tobacco causes this or that.
"Concerned" legislators and others have not even asked for repeal of U.S. Federal Law that forbids revealing non-tobacco ingredients...even those that are known toxins and carcinogens.
Many diseases said to be "smoking-related" are not known to be caused by any natural plant, even tobacco and even incinerated. Many of these pathologies, however, are already known effects of dioxin exposures... inhalation being the worst possible exposure route. This crusade is about corporate Tort Deform. It scapegoats victims, proprietors of public establishments, and an unpatentable plant for crimes of lawless, indeed, homicidal industry. It may well lead to a new Prohibition, as if we haven't been socially disrupted enough by such things. It threatens the health of everyone by tolerating private corruption of science and medicine where real and potential corporate liability situations are ignored, not diagnosed, or not researched at all. It lets complicit officials and media seem like "they care". This is part of the corporate war on nature, whether or not we like tobacco...and whether or not it presents, like anything, some inherent risks. It deprives millions of people vital health information and protection and compensation. It co-opts evidence against the chemical industries by attributing so many diseases and deaths, unscientifically, to "smoking". Smoking of what, precisely, is not mentioned.
Dioxin may be at the Achilles' Heel of this fraud. The U.S. gov't recently classified this deadly chlorine by-product a Known Human Carcinogen, the worst level. The U.S., facing ridicule if it didn't, also signed a treaty in Stockholm to globally phase out dioxin and 11 other worst-of-the-worst industrial pollutants. No government official, no legitimate business, no journalist, and no "anti-smoking" group can now claim ignorance. There can be no excuse for the still legal presence of dioxin-producing chlorine in these miniature, hand-held industrial incinerators.
The morning newspaper, made from tree pulp, is far more closely a Ponderosa Pine than the stuff in a typical cigarette is tobacco. These dioxin-delivering, "tobacco-like", pesticide-pegs are no more genuine articles than are the "concerns" expressed by the voices of the corporatocracy.
They fall through the cracks now between the authority of various agencies, so no one has the power to require content labeling.
That could be true but when you look at almost anything that you put in your body nowadays (food, liquid) it almost always has on the package the 'ingredients' with all the manmade stuff there.
Why NOT do the same with prefabricated cigarettes?
That was the other thing I thought he brought out really well.
To me it all came down to the fact that there hasn't been any study on cigarette TOBACCO, only prefabricated cigarettes with all the additives thrown in.
NO, the question is, why should the govt. be sticking it's nose into everybodies business requiring lists of ingredients on any package.
So9
It's the law. I read an article on this many years ago. By law tobacco companies are required to give a list of additives to the government once a year. They don't have to say which additives are in which cigarettes or what quantities just a list of all the additives they use. Another federal law requires the bureacrat/agency/department that collects this (I forget who) to put those lists under lock and key. Releasing that info is punishable by federal law.
The number of additives that all cigarette manufacturers use is something in the neighborhood of 800+. They include such things as acetone, saltpeter (one of the ones that keep cigs burning), ketones, menthols, sugars. Canada required American companies to disclose what additives were in what cigs in order to import them so, rather than reveal their proprietary recipes, they simply removed the chemicals for exports to Canada.
Nice little scam, eh? It has to be the biggest fraud and coverup the U.S. government has ever perpetrated. The tobacco lobby is king.
I didn't say the government should.
I said that almost everyone else does. Whether it's the govt that requires it of them or they do it on their own.
IMO, the govt is into a lot of stuff that they shouldn't be. That doesn't mean that a company should be able to get away with anything at all.
I agree that if you don't know, by now, that there is a chance of cigarettes doing harm you probably can't read the ingredients.
Shooting lead bullets in indoor ranges can result in lead poisoning if exposure is prolonged and repeated. If bullet manufacturers added something to their lead that was a thousand times more toxic than lead alone but kept that an industry secret wouldn't you be a little PO'd?
A lifetime of beer drinking can possibly lead to liver damage. Everyone knows this. So is it just too bad if beer makers put a flavor enhancer in beer that causes liver damage ten times faster but keep that an industry secret?
Reading comprehension is not your strong suit.
Really? Could you point out to me where I erred?
I think you may be on to something here.
Sue the pants off "Big Tobacco" and get rid of the additives.
I agree on the latter part; but that doesn't mean that smokers didn't choose to take on the risks and let the chips fall where they may.
My grandfather (who smoked) called cigarettes "coffin nails." This was a term in common usage.
But of course, he was from the old school of "pick your poison" and never would have considered blaming anyone else for his choice.
I have a lot of respect for those whine-free old-timers.
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