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The settlement was never about getting people to smoke less. It was nothing more than an extortion scheme by the states and the people who end up paying the bill are those who, by their own free choice, want to smoke. It's not about healthier people. It was and is about the MONEY.

Yep. A friend of mine who went to take a junior faculty position at the U of Miami told me that his research was to have been funded from the tobacco settlement money. The state had pledged to devote a certain amount of it to research into health impacts of smoking. It didn't take them very long to go back on their word and say, oh, we're going to devote a certain percentage of the interest we get on the settlement money. It didn't take long for them to tell the university, "Oh, wait. We're not getting as much in interest as we expected we would; so you have to refund what we gave you and which you've already used to hire people, start up labs, and start doing research; and in addition, in order to get more money for research, you'll have to show some publications on the results by the end of the first year--Now we know that it takes that long to get a lab and cell lines established and the protocols written and approved by institutional review boards for human and/or animal research and that it's unreasonable to expect publications, but we're just stupid, greedy bureaucrats who wouldn't know scientific research from our own butts and want to have as much of this money as possible to buy favors with in order to ensure our continued position in this sinecure called "public service"."

This is supposed to be a nation where we have personal liberty, but so long as we are taxed for our free choice of what we want to consume, the smoking, drinking or eating habits we want to pursue, that concept is meaningless.

This is the most important line in the entire article...

No one knows what freedom is anymore...

It is no longer taught, certainly no longer practiced, and every move that the government makes is to continualy reduce what little freedom individuals have left...

The sheep are slaves...

Whether or not you sheep realize that you are slaves is irrelevent to the reality that you are...

May you one day become aware of the chains that hang around your conscious neck...