How Smoking Bans Serve the Corporatocracy

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/How-Smoking-Bans-Serve-the-by-John-Jonik-100803-435.html

We are often told of things on the plus side of smoking bans. We hear about clean air, protecting workers, protecting the kids, nicer breath, non-smelly clothes and hair, fewer heart attacks, lower public health costs, and so on. You'd think the smoking ban movement was a rare leftie success story. But many other pluses, rarely if ever mentioned, would not be seen in a positive light by the left. It's a good idea to look at things in a balanced way, from both sides, and to be suspicious of claims of "pluses" that come from commercial media and from public officials who are so well-funded by and otherwise in cahoots with private industry, including parts of the cigarette cartel.

It is time to list just some of the smoke-ban pluses that somehow are not announced publicly.

- The smoking ban crusade distracts from cigarette makers' contamination of products with residues any of hundreds of pesticides registered for tobacco use. That's a big plus for cigarette makers. The many tobacco pesticide providers (including pharmaceutical firms that also make tobacco pesticides) see this as a plus as well. They've evaded questioning, indictments, and seriously bad PR.

- The bans distract from the contamination of typical cigarettes with cancer-causing radiation (PO-210) from use of certain still legal phosphate fertilizers. The entire radiation industry sees this as a plus because rads are not, once again, given a bad name.

- The bans and the "crackdowns" on unwitting victims and utterly non-complicit bar and restaurant owners and the like, distract from the still legal use of any of about 1400 untested, often toxic non-tobacco cigarette additives.

- They distract from the decades of the "legal", government-approved, use of added burn accelerants in cigarettes despite all the fires, injuries and deaths. Burn accelerants speed up use of a cigarette, and help increase usage, sales, and "sin tax" revenues.


Much more at the link ---

[katandmoon]

1. Senseless article. How does it follow that if there were no smoking bans,

the tobacco industry wouldn't still be getting away with murder?

[Ozymanithrax]

2. Yes, but for those of us that don't smoke, it makes public spaces more pleasant...

Smoking bans are about providing clean air to people who otherwise have to smoke some persons exhalations.

[madrchsod]

5. is`t it wonderful not to smell smoke ...

when you are in a bar or restaurant. some bars around here are banning smoking in the outdoor patios.

[virgogal]

3. Very interesting perspective.

[madrchsod]

4. well that was one of the wtf ? i have read in a long time....

[nosmokes]

6. This is a hella stretch, trying to blame big tobacco's usual behavior on smoking bans

and some dubious distraction that the bans supposedly provide. Got data that backs any of these claims up? Thought not.

OpEd can be a great site but sometimes they publish any damn thing.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

7. opednews, eh?

have they always been big defenders of big tobacco?

Or is that a new thign?

[Warpy]

8. What a load of rubbish

from some clod who thinks the rest of us should just suck it up because his habit is more important than our health.

Hey, asshole! You can dip or chew where you want, but set fire to that crap outside, m'kay?

[SteveM]

9. Don't worry: prohibition may lead to a black market in "all natural" stuff.

Better hope for a legalization of grass; I believe the tobacco prohibitionists want to put sot weed into the same category as the stuff I smoke.

And believe me. It's all about prohibition. American culture, Left or Right, can't get enough of it!

[Brickbat]

10. I swear if it weren't for the zero-sum game argument, the left would be fucking ruling this world.

NOTHING CAN POSSIBLY BE GOOD BECAUSE THERE'S ALWAYS SOMETHING ELSE BAD HAPPENING!

[damntexdem]

11. Crap and nonsense alert! The smoking bans help keep smoke out of MY lungs.

They keep it out of the lungs of employees of establishments.

They keep it out of the lungs of patrons of establishments.

They are a major public health victory.

Doing something about tobacco products is a separate issue, but any actions should pay attention to the following truth: PROHIBITION DOES NOT WORK! This proved true with alcohol; and it has proved painfully true with the so-called War on Drugs. We don't need to prove it yet again with tobacco.

[misanthrope]

12. It makes it non-life threatening for emphysematics like myself...

...to do something as innocuous as listen to live music.

What a monster I am...

[Baja K]

13. Reference material..

One person thought that there was no evidence to back up the points in the article.
Well, first of all, just about all of it can be found with simple Google search for relevant terms. Try "tobacco pesticides", for example, or "radiation tobacco", or "dioxin chlorine" and "Insurers Invest Tobacco", "dioxin POPs Treaty" and "DDT tobacco" and "GAO tobacco pesticides" and so on.
References for that and plenty more are collected at http://fauxbacco.blogspot.com or just Google "Fauxbacco".

Bill Drake has a site called "Smoke and Illusion" with tons of material about tobacco pesticides and other crimes and scams of the cigarette cartel....but that site's down until it will be replaced at his new site, "The Cultivator's Handbook of Natural Tobacco".

Besides that...I think many people instinctively dislike the smell of PESTICIDE (etc) CONTAMINATED tobacco. Apparently, all the additives the industry uses to camouflage the smell of what might be worse than exhaust fumes don't work to trick everyone's noses.

I wonder how many out there EVER smelled smoke from PLAIN tobacco. How many also hate the smell of burning leaves, campfires, incense, or bar-b-que?

In any case, personal tastes aside...the important thing is too widely overlooked. It is that typical cigarettes are no more tobacco than the man in the moon by the time they are processed and contaminated and adulterated...and that millions of people have been deceived, secretly poisoned, experimented upon without Informed Consent, insufficiently-warned, unprotected by their own sworn and paid public officials, and then unjustly blamed for the effects of substances they know nothing about...and then denied compensation.

Another thing is that, so far, the perpetrators are getting away with it, the entire public is being denied fortunes in possible penalties, and everyone's vital medical system remains overly controlled by the very same industries involved in cigarette manufacturing...even up to the health insurers that invest billions in the industry. How does that little detail smell?

And don't forget the severe threat of Prohibition...and the effective loss of a perfectly legitimate, traditionally-used, medicinal natural plant. And don't forget that there's no justification for bans on plain tobacco. It has NOT yet been studied for negative effect. It's being Convicted Without A Trial. This is part and parcel of the global corporate war on nature where just about all PUBLIC DOMAIN things, even our public lands and water supplies, are being stolen by private interests.

Some find the smell of gross injustice and corporate crime far more unpleasant that even the smoke from the most contaminated cigarette.

[Starbucks Anarchist]

14. So we would know about this stuff if the bans weren't in effect?

Funny how after decades without bans, we still didn't hear about this. :rofl:

[dionysus]

15. jesus christ, what a load of garbage...

[fishwax]

16. nonsense

Smoking bans needn't distract from those things. I don't see the connection at all.

[dionysus]

17. exactly. he lists a bunch of facts... that have absolutely nothing to do with bans

[MajorChode]

18. False dichotomy fail

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dichotomy

[CarolT]

19. The issue is anti-smoker scientific fraud

Every smoking ban, everywhere, has been rammed down the public's throat by falsely framing the issue as "freedom versus public health," and CONCEALING ANTI-SMOKER SCIENTIFIC FRAUD.

More than 50 studies have implicated human papillomaviruses as the cause at least 24.5%% of non-small cell lung cancers. This equals over 30,000 cases, which is over ten times more lung cancers than the anti-smokers pretend are caused by secondhand smoke. Passive smokers are more likely to have been exposed to this virus, so the anti-smokers' studies, because they are all based on nothing but lifestyle questionnaires, are cynically DESIGNED to falsely blame passive smoking for all those extra lung cancers that are really caused by HPV. A significant proportion of lung cancers blamed on active smoking are actually caused by HPV as well. Obviously, there is a corrupt, politically-motivated coverup of a far larger cause of lung cancer than radon or secondhand smoke!

http://www.smokershistory.com/hpvlungc.htm

Viruses are etiologically linked to approximately 20% of all malignancies worldwide." (Human retroviruses: their role in cancer. WA Blattner. Proc Assoc Am Physicians 1999 Nov-Dec;111(6):563-572.) And this is a conservative estimate.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Retrieve&list_uids=10591085&dopt=Abstract

Meanwhile, despite their reliance on scientific fraud designed to assign false blame, the American Cancer Society can only pretend that "about 6 percent of all cancers in the United States -- 34,000 cases a year -- are related to environmental causes (4 percent from occupational exposures, 2 percent from the community or other settings)."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/health/research/07cancer.html

In fact, your whole "controversy" with the Cancer Society is a sham, designed to mislead the public that infections are not important. This is fake opposition that they want people to believe in, because it endorses their scientific fraud.