Pub Owners, Patrons Scapegoated

national | miscellaneous | news report Tuesday February 18, 2003 02:03 by Watchdog

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.
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See http://ktc.com/~bdrake for much info.
And: http://http://www.tobacco.org/Documents/shameful.html
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No Iraqi Blood for Oil-based Tobacco Pesticides!