ARTICLES FROM OTHER
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ARCHIVE 52
Articles logged from September to September 2000
 "TRUTH" CAMPAIGN IS ANYTHING BUT
- Added September 29, 2000
- We have all, nonsmoker and smoker, been assaulted
by the jerky, poorly produced Truth advertisements polluting the TV airwaves. Most
ignore the incomprehensible and idiotic dialogue the losers spout on screen but attention
should be paid to the serious misuse of public funds producing these indulgent exercises
in self-indulgency. The National Review Online sums up the problem with the Truth Campaign: There is very little Truth and a hell of a lot of demagoguery. Tobacco education, if it is to be considered a legitimate activity, should once in a while educate. The Truth Campaign's only purpose is to divide people and attack American corporations. It must be eliminated.
While no one should be surprised that tobacco criminalization has advanced so far, it is surprising that parents of children attending this school haven't stormed the school board demanding the heads of those responsible for this outrage. Anti-tobacco has made no secret that it regards people, adults and children, as property of the state, completely subservient to rules and regulations that govern every aspect of what used to be called private life. When parents passively tolerate the inferior education being dispensed while supinely tolerating the brutal invasion of their children by administration bullies, the deviancy of anti-tobacco must no longer be ignored.
We still have a long way to go. Laws, such as that being proposed in Ames, which govern smoking on private property, have no place in America. The EPA's secondhand smoke study has been ruled a fraud by a federal court meaning that there is absolutely no proof to the canard that ETS poses any risk to nonsmokers. The Ames restaurateurs and pro-choice advocates should ask the Ames City Council why, if ETS warrants banning smoking in their town's restaurants, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), after spending six years and millions of dollars, has been unable to find a justification to ban smoking in all work places.
Doug Blanke, Director, Tobacco Law Project, working in a Minnesota college of law, is so addled he admits that teenage smoking has dramatically risen during the past seven years. As everyone knows, anti-tobacco propaganda has also dramatically increased in the past seven years. Instead of validating anti-tobacco education, Mr. Blanke makes the case that not only is such education a failure, it actually is responsible for the rise in underage smoking rates. He then enters the zone of absurdity by theorizing that smoking rates have risen because smoking is portrayed in the movies. He even alleges that the cigarette manufacturers are responsible even though they are forbidden to participate in product placements in film. Shannon C. Brewer, an operative in training, weighs in from Washington touting an unaccredited claim that underage smoking rates in Florida have dropped 40 percent since the inception of that state's Truth Campaign. The entire nation has been treated to several months worth of Truth's anti-tobacco messages. The Truth campaign is an incoherent, ineptly produced tirade, not against smoking but against the tobacco industry. Most viewers don't realize what Truth's message is and those who do ask themselves why public money is funding what appears to be a drunken frat boy's home movies. Brewer, just sweet 16, is perhaps unaware that the 40 percent drop in Florida is due to a law that prevents teenagers from acquiring a drivers license if caught smoking. How many eager teenagers are going to answer a survey question truthfully when they think obtaining their drivers license depends upon their answer? The final letter is like a cool drink of water after a bumpy and dusty drive through a wasteland of stupidity. Rosalind B. Marimont, retired from the National Institutes of Health, provides the common sense view that teenagers do not believe the lies deluging them from the Blankes and Brewers of the world. Only the feeble minded buy the hysterical view that smoking a cigarette is tantamount to drinking cyanide. There are no piles of bodies done in prematurely by tobacco. The claim that smoking kills 400,000 Americans before their time has been thoroughly debunked by Marimont and Robert Levy. It's encouraging, perhaps even a miracle, that anti-tobacco is falling on deaf ears.
The 1997 settlement between the cigarette manufacturers and the flight attendants was arguably the most colossal blunder by the tobacco industry. The companies kicked in $300-million to study secondhand smoke while accepting the burden of proving that ETS did not harm the flight attendants in subsequent suits. The companies enriched the two anti-tobacco trial lawyers to the tune of $40-million dollars. Big Tobacco caved on this suit because it was working the legislative arena hoping to obtain a national tobacco settlement to end the states' Medicare suits. The flight attendants, of course, received no compensation and the two anti-tobacco lawyers have reneged on their promise to handle the subsequent suits that could compensate the individual plaintiffs. Now the individual suits are creeping through the Florida court system. The plaintiffs and their lawyers are horrified that the Tobacco Industry is insisting that established law be followed. In other words the companies are, at least now, actually defending themselves. This is dirty pool according to the plaintiffs. If each plaintiff's case is heard and if the legislature doesn't change the rules as it has in the past, 200 years will elapse before the last plaintiff has his day in court.
It was only a matter of time before this totalitarian mentality manifested itself in other arenas of American life. In North Carolina a woman's car was searched because a copy of "High Times", a pro-marijuana publication was visible on the front seat. The officer claims that similar searches have resulted in illegal drug discovery. In this case the search revealed nothing amiss. From expelling high school students to subjecting an innocent motorist to an intensive search, the "anti" mentality is producing a nation of apprehension and guilt. Civil libertarians may cry fowl but when the culture itself is steeped with passive acquiescence there is not much they can do.
It could also be that most smokers do not believe the mountain of exaggerations, frauds and misinformation endlessly pumped with their own money - and with good reasons. It could be that smokers are not as stupid as the propaganda makes them, and it could be they just want to keep enjoying life, and they just don't want to quit. Keep on smoking - and don’t quit on choice.
Steps already have been taken to sell this latest health hysteria to the citizens of the hypochondriac state and this study is part of those steps. Public money for the report was shuffled through the California Department of Health into the coffers of the Public Health Institute, a Berkeley nonprofit that describes itself as "an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting health, well-being and quality of life for people throughout California, across the nation and around the world". Quite a task but PHI has lots of help including the National Cancer Institute, the CDC and, as always, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Based on telephone interviews with 1,200 teenagers who were asked what they had eaten the day prior, PRI confesses to being surprised at the self-reported results. The researchers initially assumed that half the interviewees would be overweight but extrapolations of the tiny sample base revealed that 600,000 of 12 to 17 year olds are fat. Truly PRI has struck gold. Better still the data show that minorities are worse off than whites. Best of all black children, because they watch the most television, are most subjected to pernicious fast food advertisements which obviously results in them being the fattest of them all, 50 percent. PRI has shown the state that there is a crisis. What to do about it? Programs must be enacted to educate these fatsos and their clueless parents on how to eat and exercise. PRI is not yet ready to advocate a tax on fast food but, in another newspaper report, proposes that the food industry assist in the food education campaigns. Before the fat campaigns crank up, before a tax is imposed on fast food, a bit of historical perspective is in order. In 1989 California began the most massive anti-tobacco education campaign in history. Prior to then, the smoking rate for minors had been declining. Since 1989 the underage smoking rate has climbed steadily. Anti-tobacco education equals higher smoking rates for teenagers. Worse, the age by which teenagers start smoking became younger than it was before anti-tobacco took hold of California. The Public Health Institute, as well a multitude of other government grant junkies, are licking their chops in anticipation over the prospect of erecting a anti-fat education campaign identical to anti-tobacco education. If these nonprofits get their way, obesity will skyrocket as did teenage smoking. California will finally slide into the ocean under the sheer weight of millions of fat teenagers.
Second, the researcher attempts to pass off as conventional wisdom, albeit flawed, an assertion that obesity lowers the risk of lung cancer. There are as many people who have heard of and believe this idiotic premise as there are people who have proven secondhand smoke causes lung cancer. Third, and most important, the researcher has released this study just in time to reserve her seat on the trainload of grifters and con artists seeking to make food and it's "abuse" the new frontier of government shakedowns and tort racketeering. The only component missing is the horrendously high cost to society accrued to lung cancer among the obese. Doubtless the researcher is hard at work writing up that grant proposal.
Already there is a reaction against the health obsession exhibited by the governing class. Along with the growing revulsion against the use of the children to swat the tax-paying adults into line, the current cycle of paternalism has about reached the end of its rope. It can't be too soon. A new book, "Clean Living Movements: American Cycles of Health Reform", chronicles the waning and waxing of American Health fascism throughout the country's history. Dr. Ruth Clifford Engs, professor of applied health science at Indiana University foretells the termination of the current clean living, anti-pleasure ethos running rampant throughout society. She gives it another four years.
The outraged response to the plan to ban smoking in every park located within the Southern Florida city of Coral Springs appears to be having an effect. The city council has postponed action until October 17. In the meantime council members will ponder whether to assemble a "focus group" of citizens to review the smoke ban. A referendum seeking voter approval may also be in the works. The park smoking ban was foisted upon the city council by anti-tobacco activists who do not have the support of the citizens of Coral Springs. The lesson the city council should have learned is that allowing themselves to be egged on by goons working for ant-tobacco special interests is fraught with political peril.
Also in Montgomery County, Alfred Muller, mayor of Friendship Heights, has reanimated his odious proposal to criminalize tobacco smoking by banning it from his village's sidewalks and parks. A similar attempt by the mayor in 1996 to ban smoking met with defeat from the County Council. In the intervening years, Muller's hatred of smokers has reached pathological proportions that are truly scary. The County Council must not only kill Muller's smoking ban but should insist he seek psychological and spiritual counseling.
What's a laugh for Europeans is yet another blow against pleasure and good taste for Americans. The Food and Drug Administration's relentless campaign to eliminate every vestige of joie de vivre from the United States now threatens so-called gourmet cheeses. Accounting for around 10 percent of cheese consumed, the cheeses that have raised the ire of the nannies at the FDA are those that are manufactured with raw milk. The FDA, with no facts, flatly states that the unpasteurized cheeses are potentially dangerous. The FDA has even roped the United Nations into considering whether to limit the availability of raw-milk cheeses. Under the direction of anti-tobacco fanatic David Kessler, the FDA moved aggressively to usurp legislative power. Although Kessler is long gone and the Supreme Court halted his expansiveness schemes, the FDA is still out of control and must be brought to heel. If Al Gore becomes President the FDA's activist agenda will move into every American household.
Apparently so. In a case that should infuriate parents, a New York public school's edict that one boy must remain on Ritalin, despite negative side effects, has been upheld by a family court judge. Phyllis Schlafly examines what such a ruling means for parental control and traditional American ideals of liberty. When government bureaucrats begin to raise children as they see fit, plying their charges with dangerous drugs while preaching anti-tobacco, the chains of suffocating paternalism must be sundered.
The Drug Companies had better be worried since the case against Ritalin has been presented clearly and consistently by many members of the medical and psychiatric fields. Scruggs is just jumping on a bandwagon that has been growing rapidly as the consequences of a doped up generation of boys are becoming a national scandal. ``The main complaint is that they (the
defendants) have inappropriately expanded the definition of ADHD to include 'normal'
children so that they can promote and sell more drugs and treat more people,'' Scruggs
told Reuters in a phone interview Thursday. Can't argue with that and Scruggs' assault couldn't happen to more deserving group of people. That said, the main problem facing the United States is out-of-control lawyers and cancerous legislation enacted through law suits. The predatory legal system has made this country the laughing stock of the world..
GORE LINKED TO DOLLARS FOR CLINTON TORT VETO - Added September 15, 2000 - Rarely is such linkage so obvious. In what appears to be a quid pro quo of money for political favors, Al Gore has been tied to a political donation in exchange for a Presidential veto. The Vice-President sought the donation from Walter Umphrey, senior partner at the law firm of Provost & Umphrey. President Clinton's veto ended tort reform legislation that would limit damage awards in product liability cases. After Clinton's veto, Provost & Umphrey have done very well indeed. Every three months a check for $25-MILLION is delivered to the Beaumont offices of Provost & Umphrey. That's $100-million per year for the lawyers who concocted the Texas tobacco settlement. That's $100-million per year flowing from the bank accounts of smokers into the bursting portfolios of a few men whose altruism led them to sue big tobacco. For the little people, of course. It doesn't get more plain than a Democratic National Committee call sheet, scheduling a call to Walter Umphrey with the script included. "Sorry you missed the Vice President. I know [you] will give $100k when the President vetoes tort reform, but we really need it now. Please send ASAP if possible," the sheet says under "reason for call." Since then Walter Umphrey and his firm have donated more than $700,000 to the DNC. Their investment in Clinton-Gore has paid off fabulously. A Gore victory will ensure the supply of loot will not be interrupted. A multitude of trial lawyers have become obscenely rich during the Clinton years and their ill gotten gains flow almost exclusively into the coffers of Democrats in general and Al Gore in particular. Walter Umphrey and his ilk, the trial lawyers, are frantic a George W. Bush presidency will bring this country a dose of long overdue tort reform.
Polls consistently show that the public disapproves of the lawsuits against the tobacco industry and believes that the current tobacco taxes are excessive. The public's revulsion for hateful rhetoric and punitive taxation appear to be having a political effect.
This didn't fly with ADA administrators themselves. Under ADA guidelines restaurants are obliged to set aside 5 percent of restaurant seating for the disabled. Allocating one out of 20 tables to a nonsmoking section pretty much takes care of complying with the ADA.
First, nicotine is once again flagged as the most addictive substance known to man. Anti-tobacco claims its addictive power is more pernicious than heroin or crack cocaine. Before long studies will demonstrate that touching a cigarette or seeing a photo in an advertisement begins the path to hopeless additiction. Second, by focusing on 12 and 13 year-olds, the reasearchers back up the contention that there is an "epidemic" of underage smoking, a crisis that didn't exists until anti-tobacco education hit the American scene 12 years ago. The real purpose for this study, however, is to soften opposition to plying children with pharmaceutical nicotine. Since addiction is so instantaneous and so gripping, according to the anti-tobacco researchers, how else can these minors be weaned from the deadly weed? With trials of Zyban being conducted on school kids in Tucson and pharmaceutical nicotine used to combat smoking in California high schools, the involvement of Big Drugs in anti-tobacco becomes obvious.
FROM THE MOUTHS OF THE CON MEN THEMSELVES: TOBACCO NOT A
CONCERN FOR THE PUBLIC - Despite 10 years of the most extensive campaign ever waged to manipulate and control the American public, the war on tobacco, according to the warriors themselves, is a failure. For a change anti-tobacco is telling the truth. The war on tobacco, which is really a brutal assault upon individuals and civil society, can never be "won". Smoking tobacco, although carrying slight risks, is a pleasure that will be enjoyed for as long as human beings inhabit the planet. That anti-tobacco will ultimately lose is small comfort. The unspeakable plan by Nazi Germany to eliminate "undesirables" from the globe was also a failure from its inception although the horrors inflicted on the world resonate today. Anti-tobacco, like a gibbering hyena, will lash out with increasing levels of viciousness. Sporadic incidents of violence and death are occurring now and its only a matter of time before anti-tobacco explicitly endorses physically brutal methods to control the populace. Take a look at some the television ads for a taste of what is to come. We can take comfort, however, in the knowledge that anti-tobacco will be defeated. Anti-tobacco no longer operates quietly behind the scenes. The money angle is now obvious to all but the obtuse. The rape of smokers has reaped billions for politically connected lawyers. Public money pours into the coffers of greedy anti-tobacco non-profits draining money from programs and charities that actually do perform a public good The exclusive focus on one minor "vice" detracts attention from problems that are actually harming society. As the country wises up to the harm this mad agenda is wreaking, the closer comes the day when anti-tobacco is brought to justice and society exacts its retribution.
When told that the signature drive had failed a local businessman said, "I think people are just tired of being dictated to by special interest groups. Enough is enough." Well said. People are tired of this issue and fed up with anti-tobacco which is the special interest bleating for smoke-free laws. Speaking of special interests, the story notes that the group formed to place the smoke ban law on the ballot received money from the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. These three bloated "charities" not only are tax-exempt they also receive their own funding from the federal and local governments. Because of their tax exempt status and because they accept government money, ALA, AHA and ACS should not be lobbying for, let alone financing, legislation changes.
Gore can tart up his proposal with whatever buzz words available but when a price hike is paid by smokers to fund federal programs we have a tax hike. With the government supposedly awash in enormous surpluses, Gore's tax increase is the same old business-as-usual government boondoggle that make voters very tired of the Washington crowd.
But attorney Matthew Myers, president of the National Center for Tobacco Free Kids, called the suit "a very creative approach" and said it might fly." Of the two opinions the smart money is on Matthew Myers', a well-lubricated anti-tobacco operative, over Boston University law professor Susan Koniak's. Koniak speaks from the rule of law position while Myers speaks from the rule of the goon principal that predominates in legal issues regarding tobacco. Fearful that the goose that lays the golden eggs may be carved up before every each region in country, and local trial lawyers, gets a huge trial like the $145-billion disgrace in Florida, the "creative" thugs are petitioning a federal judge in New York City to create a nationwide class action to consolidate all punitive damages against cigarette companies. Another "creative" aspect is that should such a monster class action be allowed, the punitive damages - which could exceed the $145-billion awarded in the Florida case - would not go to any of the plaintiffs who have been "damaged" by the cigarette industry. The spoils would be placed in a fund to be used for "the greatest possible public benefit". The sharks would get their fees, however which would be billions paid by smokers. The tobacco industry could put a stop to this by turning the tables on the trial lawyers. The RICO statues would be a good place to start but the industry seems to believe that if it bleeds its customers a bit more, while touting its highly publicized good-works, the legal mob will eventually move on to other targets. The mob will move on but not until the tobacco companies are bankrupt, tobacco farmers wiped out and 60 million smokers stuck with shoddy smokes from India and the Philippines. The silence from legislatures, both state and federal, regarding the toxic usurpation of government by a predatory hoard of leaches speaks volumes about the cowardice rampant these past few years.
"Studies evaluating consumer opinions concerning smoke-free ordinances have indicated that smokers are more likely to support the laws than oppose them." A conclusion as preposterous as the one above indicates the contempt anti-tobacco holds for the American public. Roswell Park Cancer Institute, an anti-tobacco group that takes money from the pharmaceutical industry, has just released a study that finds smoking bans not only don't hurt restaurants but actually "may" increase their business. By a strange coincidence this study surfaces as New York City decides whether to embrace a California-type smoking ban. Fronts like the Roswell Park Cancer Institute would like us to believe that restaurants and bars are deluded when they oppose smoking bans. That they are sadly mistaken to assume they, as owners, are the ones responsible for making their business a success. After all, private enterprise is not nearly as qualified to run a business as is a bureaucrat. Even in California five years after smoking was banned in restaurants, the largest restaurant association wants to law to be modified to allow choice. Non-compliance with the bar smoking ban is wide-spread inspite of anti-tobacco's best efforts. Anti-tobacco wants to obscure reality. Restaurants and bars everywhere have always been completely free to ban smoking from their premises. While a few have done so and survived, the vast majority prefer to cater to smokers as well as non-smokers. It boils down to whom do you trust? Business people who pay the bills, make payrolls, work day and night to attract and keep customers or academics who do none of the above and who are paid by Drug Companies pushing nicotine replacement devices?
Because anti-tobacco is a mental illness, rationality is tossed into the toilet and the airport is now under a renewed assault by a grand total of two anti-tobacco activists. They want smoking banned entirely and are willing to waste the judicial system's time to get their way. The anti-tobacco operatives are using the Americans with Disabilities Act to impose their will on the public. After spending a fortune to placate the hysterics, it is to be hoped the airport will not knuckle under the threats of two thugs. Tax-payers, paying customers and public places must not be held hostage by a minute group of professional whiners.
We have to say this for Rosenblatt: he is far from being stupid, and he knows how to take advantage of fools! He knows damn well that passive smoke is a colossal scientific fraud without a shred of scientific proof. He knows better than risking to expose the fraud with individual personal lawsuits! Hey, good for him. When a system rewards the con, silences the truth and encourages pillaging and false victims, no one can argue that Rosenblatt has mastered that system to perfection!
But in this story there is more than just dishonesty: there is a sample of today's twisted moral values, which are what make antismoking possible. Try this: "[Wiant’s wife] turned him in to authorities after he called her in June to tell her he had stolen $6.9 million from the charity by transferring it to a bank in Austria." ... " 'Whatever the outcome of Daniel"s sentencing, I will continue to love and support my husband and eagerly await his return home,' Mrs. Wiant said after the court session. [...] The total maximum sentence possible for all four charges is 65 years in prison and about a $2 million fine." Any further comment is redundant.
"Ritalin, an amphetamine-like drug used to treat ADD, or attention deficit disorder, is prescribed to an estimated 4 million American schoolchildren each year." ... "In fact, a class-action lawsuit against Ritalin manufacturer Novartis, the American Psychiatric Association and the parents’ group Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder alleges the company fraudulently overpromoted the diagnosis of ADD/ADHD in collusion with the two organizations to boost drug sales," reports ABC news, which does not seem to be outraged at all with the fact that the pharmaceutical company openly admits to PAY the APA to promote its drug - for educational purposes, of course! Imagine ABC's reaction if the company name would be Philip Morris, and if the "drug" would be smoking - a known remedy against Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease!
In New York, California and several others, high tobacco taxes have prompted thousands of citizens to buy cigarettes where they can buy them more cheaply. This is human nature at its best; screwing the government that screws them. Economists consistently warn that when any item is excessively taxed black markets and smuggling follow as day follows night. As the anti-tobacco era reaches its climax, the United States finds itself in the same position as scores of countries that have attempted to leach every last nickel from smokers. Today the Internet expands consumer choice, eliminating borders, bringing cheaper cigarettes into the home. The tax junkies are frantic and have enlisted their allies, the mainstream press, into the public relations campaign to terrorize online purchasers. Although there is a myriad of state and local laws vaguely pertinent to online cigarette sales, confusion reigns. Complicating the matter are Indian Reservations that are cashing in on the high-tax insanity. Indian Tribes in many aspects are considered sovereign nations. State taxes are not charged on cigarette sales made on reservations which drives the politicos wild. When buying cigarettes from the web, consumers must determine whether the company or reservation will keep their customer lists confidential. Some states have attempted to bully vendors into disclosing their customer information. Some vendors have complied others have not. Unless a particular state is willing to invest an enormous amount of resources into investigating and enforcing rational tax-dodging, the tax-dodging will accelerate and in time, the ridiculous taxes will be discarded.
The Princeton Health Commission obviously knew that its attempt to ban smoking was illegal but still imposed its will on the citizens. The level of lawlessness of anti-tobacco is clearly becoming a nationwide problem. Although the hospitality industry and civil libertariansmust continue their vigilance, the resistance to smoking bans appears to be growing throughout the country. The smoking ban successes of the mid 1990's in California and Utah have not been repeated. The EPA's secondhand smoke report has been ruled a fraud by a Federal Judge, restaurant and bar associations are not caving in as they did in California and the public is fed up with government interference in personal choices. A hearty thanks to the National Smokers Alliance for pursuing this case through the courts. Read the NSA's press release about the New Jersey victory.
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First, the researcher blithely
lies by stating that secondhand smoke contributes to lung cancer even though there 
Added September 12, 2000