DEAR EDITORS... - "The below story ran in the media a few weeks ago. It states that you know you have a problem with lack of objectivity, sensationalism, inaccurate reporting and too much emphasis on the bottom line. So, what are you going to do? No one would dispute that the group hardest hit by the above stated sins is smokers." - By Dave Pickrell-President and founder Smokers Fighting Discrimination, Inc.

YUM-YUM! -- 14 MEDICAID RECIPIENTS SEEK SHARE OF TOBACCO SETTLEMENT - Hmmm... Here's a creative sort of lawsuit which might prove interesting. Earlier in the week the same sort of suit was filed in Florida and the legislators are freaked -- so freaked that they are quickly trying to pass legislation to block the suit.

We can't blame the medical recipients too much, though. In a system where fraud and loot are now institutionalized, why not a lawsuit to have at least a piece of the pillage? If we have to be all thieves, we may as well be rich ones!

RETRO STYLE - I'm no fan of the old Prohibitionists, but they're starting to look better all the time. The Anti-Saloon League inveighed mightily against the "Rum Trust" of distillers and tavern keepers. But at least it didn't propose to jail these persons or seize their businesses as punishment for having enslaved drunkards for so long before the nation turned against boozing. Instead the 18th Amendment prohibited the sale of intoxicating liquors from a certain day forward, providing an orderly period of a year in which to convert distilling assets to other uses. The endeavor, in short, proceeded with a nod to the basic rule-of-law precept that, whatever government may choose to ban as a prospective matter, it may not punish people for behavior they engaged in before it got around to enacting its law. Their moral successors today, the anti-tobacco crusaders, have fewer scruples (article by Walter Olson, Reason Magazine)

TOBACCO ANALYSTS MEET THE PLAINTIFF'S LAWYERS - "...Call them the Wall Street Five. Tobacco analysts Marc Cohen of Goldman Sachs, Gary Black of Sanford C. Bernstein, Diana Temple of Salomon Brothers, Roy Burry of Oppenheimer & Co., and Rebecca Barfield of CS First Boston are the latest to discover that when you rain on the parade of the litigation lobby, you'd better pack a legal umbrella of your own. "(article by Walter Olson)

HOW GREEDY CAN YOU GET? - "...What happened to the other $ 1.5 million? Why, that went to Minkoff's lawyer, Richard Greenfield of Haverford, Pennsylvania, as legal fees per the terms of the settlement. And that explained everything. Greenfield is very, very well known in America's boardrooms. His firm has turned up as attorney of record in scores of other suits against American corporations whose common feature was that the legal fees billed vastly exceeded the sums recovered for the named clients."(article by Walter Olson)

WE'RE ALL IN CALIFORNIA NOW - When the tobacco industry capitulated to the anti-tobacco cartel, smokers were hit with an immediate price hike to pay for the shakedown. Now smokers, as well as all citizens, are becoming subject to an odious hate campaign that slanders one quarter of the population.

Californians have been subject to this hate for over 10 years. The results of anti-tobacco propaganda in that state have included loss of property rights, demonization of smokers, a thriving black market, contempt for the law, abysmal educational scores and big fat wallets for ad agencies and the anti-tobacco criminals who feed off their fellow man. The underage smoking rates are skyrocketing. Welcome, USA, to a nightmare.

ANTI-CHOICE - The anti-tobacco cartel ruined Amherst, Massachusetts by pressuring the town to ban smoking in bars and restaurants. Predictably the ban is not going down well with the citizens who are lighting up as they always have. Now the geniuses who are causing havoc in Amherst wish to impose their unpopular and unenforceable law on the rest of the state. Considering that the Environmental Protection Agengy's Report on Secondhand Smoke, the justification for Amherst's ridiculous smoking ban, has been ruled a fraud by a federal judge, the anti-smoking zealots must resort to political thuggery to impose their will.

THERE IS SOME JUSTICE... ONCE IN A RARE WHILE - "A Williamson County judge, who ordered a 14-year-old girl to submit to a physical examination and perform 80 hours of community service after the girl was caught smoking cigarettes, is now the subject of a state judicial investigation."

This is just one of the daily stories about the persecution of smokers, young and old. But this time the hatred against tobacco users backfired. A 14-year old "caught" smoking should not go to court -- regardless of the penalty imposed by the judge. The parents should handle the matter -- exclusively.

But the criminal anti-tobacco cartel and its sympathizers (such as the judge in question) have created crimes out of nothingness to intimidate youth and adults into submission. The legal machinery then becomes the means for this putrid persecution, so that the state replaces the parent more and more when it comes to teaching children moral values and discipline. In a truly healthy family parents are the ONLY people who should have authority in these matters.

Passing a child through the court system for a transgression as minimal as smoking causes the child to resent society sometimes for a lifetime, often seeding new anti-social elements. But the irresponsible criminals of the anti-tobacco cartel do not care about the consequences, as long as they can implement their hatred, and fill their dirty pockets. As a matter of fact, they'll use the anti-social behaviour cause by their own actions as confirmation that smoking "causes" criminal offspring ^{[1] [2]}

And at that point, the resentment of the youngsters against society can only be but well justified.

CONSEQUENCES - All to often, elected representatives listen to special interests to the detriment of the constituents. What happed a few years ago in Mesa, Arizona is a classic example of the anti-tobacco cartel bullying a town council into passing a smoking ban that the people didn't want. After smoking was banned from all workplaces including restaurants and bars, profits diminished, workers lost their jobs as smokers stayed home. The law has been watered down due to popular demand. These two letters to The Arizona Daily Star are from real people who have seen first hand the results when representatives buy the lies from the anti-tobacco cartel.

POTS OF GOLD - Although this editorial by Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe doesn't address the fraudulent premise of the tobacco settlement, he does offer some of the logic that is missing from America these days. It's very simple: If the settlement funds are for reimbursing the tax-payers, then every single penny should go back to those citizens. Not one dollar must go to the anti-tobacco cartel.

SMOKE DOESN'T PRODUCE TUMORS - In this dispatch from the Florida class action suit against the tobacco industry we find that cigarette smoke pumped directly into the lungs of rats did not cause tumors. The class action suit is another effort by Stanley Rosenblatt and his wife to rip off the tobacco industry. Their last effort was quite successful when the tobacco industry, on its never ending quest to curry favor with its enemies, succumbed to the shakedown by coughing up $300-million for a research facility. The Rosenblatt's collected almost $50-million and their clients received absolutely nothing. Will the tobacco industry cave in this time? Who can say? Until the CEO's in the tobacco industry develop some spines and counter these baseless suits with suits against the con artists, the courts in this country will continue to be scenes of grand larceny on a colossal scale.

TOBACCO TAX TAKES ITS TOLL - More of the same from The Los Angeles Times. Taxes lost to out-of-state sales, smokers having a hard time making ends meet, businesses going broke. Just routine in a state that has turned over vast portions of its public policy to the anti-tobacco cartel. Of course anti-tobacco operatives like the thugs at Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids are making out like the bandits they are.

A MOST FEARED LAW - Several university "researchers," and the anti-tobacco cartel are hard at work to stop a law that would deliver many of them to state prisons, or at least destroy them politically.

The OMB (Office of Management and Budget) is receiving public comments on a regulation to implement a new law that should give the public access to the data and research behind the studies used by the government to regulate our private lives.

The taxpayers paid for this research, and we should be allowed to see it and make our own conclusions about whether it is valid or phony. Needless to say, the universities are very opposed to this law and comments currently received by OMB are 15 to 1 against the public's right to know. The law was passed last year, but the OMB regulation will determine whether or not it becomes useful to citizens.

Why the opposition? What is there to hide? These are, of course rhetorical questions, and we should not be surprised about the opposition.

IT IS NOT THE NICOTINE, YOU DUMMIES -- IT'S THE PLEASURE! - When it is not dishonesty, it is stupidity.

" At the annual meeting of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco conference held in San Diego, CA, Scott Leischow, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Public Health for the University of Arizona, presented research findings indicating that over-the-counter (OTC) nicotine patches resulted in low quit rates of 4-5% at one year, which is in the range of naturally occurring smoking cessation. Published in the January/February 1999 issue of the American Journal of Health Behavior, the study also found that brief physician intervention, did not improve on these rates."

We are supposed to believe the "Professors" and the "Institutions" that, with great arrogance, profess to be "in the know" about tobacco (and most of them don't even smoke!). We are supposed to finance these leeches with hard-earned tax dollars. They are analyzing us. They are running statistics and pools. They are wasting billions of dollars in conferences, travels, and get-togethers while they are enjoying the good life. They are persecuting us. They are lying to us.

All this to stop a non-existing "epidemic": smoking. The mechanistic approach to this non-existing problem brings inevitable failure, for it is tried to intervene on something that does not exist. And anybody knows that administering a medicine for a non-existing disease is dangerous. But the liars end up believing (or pretending to believe -- to get more public and private money) and acting on their own lies. Smoking is not an addiction. It is pure pleasure. It is joy of living. Nothing beats the great taste and aroma of tobacco. And this pleasure has a fundamental social value, for it tends to prevent the search for really dangerous and destructive forms of pleasure. But when has America known about humanism, and the true nature of man?

We all know that nicotine substitutes were developed to contribute to the pharmaceutical companies' bottom line. People who wish to stop smoking quit on their own. It's no big deal as millions have discovered but no one gets rich by that method. Pharmaceutical nicotine pushing has become such a big business that the drug companies hold conferences to figure out how to hook more customers. The problem with their products is that they don't work as advertised. The solution? More products, more intervention and more smoking restrictions.

PATHOLOGIST: CANCERS IN THE LUNG MAY HAVE ORIGINATED ELSEWHERE - It's hard to tell if cancer found in the lung is associated with smoking, a retired pathologist testified Tuesday, noting that tumors found in the lung may have originated elsewhere and traveled there." ... "It's not unusual for a patient to walk into a hospital with a metastasis that's thought to be cancer of the lung," Hensley said. "In a great majority of cases (doctors) can't tell."

That's right. We don't know everything there is to know about cancer -- any cancer. But the criminals of the anti-tobacco cartel want us to believe that smoking and lung cancer are one, and undivisible. The fact is that we don't even know exactly how cancer works, and where it is really coming from. And THAT being an established fact, it also explains why there is no cure. And it also explains why the tobacco trials are nothing more than money-grabbing coverups by criminals who know how to use the law in their favor, and by totally corrupted medical associations that let us "undestand" there is PROOF that smoking causes cancer, where there is NONE -- just circumstantial evidence, however strong it may appear to be. And until there is PROOF, the tobacco trials are loot -- and the fact that smoking "causes" cancer must stay in the field of popular folklore.

THE DEAFENING SILENCE OF THE MEDIA, SERVANTS OF THE UNITED STATES REGIME - It is now an established fact that most of the North American media has become nothing more than an instrument of propaganda for the American regime. Still believing that they are living in a working democracy, too many Americans do not realize that their opinions and beliefs are DRIVEN by state policies, as opposed to the other way around. And the media, as always, play an important role in the formation (should we say "conditioning?") of public opinion.

With the exception of the Wall Street Journal and very few others, the media has been totally silent on two important victories in the war against the anti-tobacco cartel.

Even us, who are watching carefully for any new information on this lurid war, missed these ones at first.

The first article is of particular importance for us (click on the title to get inside). Millions of taxpayers' dollars have been spent by the anti-tobacco cartel and its operatives to sift with the finest screen millions of documents from the tobacco industry, in the desperate attempt to find something they can use for their criminal propaganda against tobacco, and to justify more legal action against it.

We have been told that even possible links between FORCES and the tobacco industry were looked for with great diligence -- and, of course, with negative results.

And what have these criminals found? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

And now, like thieves in the night, the bastards are quietly winding down their investigation.

TOBACCO TAX TAKES ITS TOLL - More of the same from The Los Angeles Times. Taxes lost to out-of-state sales, smokers having a hard time making ends meet, businesses going broke. Just routine in a state that has turned over vast portions of its public policy to the anti-tobacco cartel. Of course anti-tobacco operatives like the thugs at Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids are making out like the bandits they are.

ANTI-SMOKER TERRORISM - This lawsuit is bereft of merit. It is inimical to property and privacy rights, opens the door and promotes the notion of a police state where the loudest or the most wily can dictate how others should live every facet, no matter how minor or personal, of their daily lives.

Strong words from The Salt Lake Tribune. Even the main stream media is finally waking up to the danger of the anti-tobacco hate campaigns. The editorial addresses the vicious persecution of a smoker by a pair of psychotic hypochondriacs who have driven the man from his home. Unless action is taken to halt this persecution, Hitler's Third Reich will be resurected in the U.S.A.

CESSPOOL OF GREED - What do Skip Humphrey, David Kessler and C. Everett Koop have in common? Aside from being among the most detestable men in America, they all stand to make a ton of money from Minnesota's settlement with the tobacco industry. This editorial from Pioneer Planet traces the money from that shakedown into the hands of politically favored individuals. To those still naive enough to believe that the anti-smoking agenda is operated for the good of society, read about an insidious blueprint for enormous financial gain.