THE FUTILE CRACKDOWN - Formidable article from FORBES on the New Prohibition and its eventual failure. Do not miss this one! "Governments, decreeing zero tolerance of drugs, have 400,000 drug offenders in this country in jail. Mothers Against Drunk Driving persuades legislators to raise the drinking age and now wants to restrict advertising of alcohol. The Justice Department concocts a convoluted theory about how tobacco vendors deplete federal coffers and sends them a bill for $20 billion a year.

"What you are witnessing is the New Prohibition. It is the Volstead Act all over again, in different guises. It aims to enforce clean living by edict. And it is almost certain to fail, as greatly as the last Prohibition failed in the 1920s."

FASCISM AND THE CAMPAIGN TO END SMOKING - "From the vantage point of a late-20th-century observer, the public health policies of the National Socialists who ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945 seem surprisingly modern. Those policies are illuminated in Robert N. Proctor's most recent work, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton University Press, 1999), which documents the war against cancer and other public health campaigns by the Nazis. A historian of science at Pennsylvania State University, Prof. Proctor has written extensively on medicine, public health and their relations with politics, especially with National Socialism."

The National Post publishes this splendid piece by Pierre Lemieux. Visit Pierre Lemieux's "Subversive Liberty" Site.

BEWARE THE CHILD PROTECTORS - If you have any doubt about what the new Socialist US state wants to do with the sacred institution of family nowadays, just read the above essay from The New American.

Over and over we have said that the "tobacco wars" are just the tip of the iceberg of a much greater degeneration of values and institutions threatening every facet of our life. Where the great dictators failed, the New Left seems to be succeeding: the absolute control of behaviour and choices of the individual in the name of the individual's own protection.

The conditioning of the citizen starts in childhood. The anti-tobacco cartel lies to children about smoking, but this is just part of theconditioning process. Gian Turci has recently written an opinion piece on this very issue. His conclusions: " A new American Revolution would be (and IS) required to destroy this machine down to its last bolt and screw -- and even bolts and screws would have to be eventually melted, for they could be recycled to create a new doomsday machine.

[ ... ] And once that is done, a powerful mechanism preventing the reconstruction of the socialist model (whether based on health, legal litigation, security & safety, or any other guise) must be built to reinforce and expand the foundations laid by the Founding Fathers. Those great Revolutionaries could not foresee a social cancer that was two centuries away."

FEDERAL LITIGATION AGAINST THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY: ELEVATING POLITICS OVER LAW - Powerful essay by Todd F. Gaziano from The Heritage Foundation on the abuse of the law by anti-tobacco politics and anti-tobacco gangsters -- from Bill Clinton down.

AN INTERESTING EXPERIMENT - FORCES INTERNATIONAL is glad to present this piece from Lauren Colby (In Defense of Smokers) to its readership.

This article shows once again how manipulated the studies that "prove" that tobacco use "causes" disease really are. The article also shows how devious the statements by "the ones in-the-know", so much trusted by public health authorities. The fact is always one and the same. THERE IS NO PROOF that the use of tobacco causes disease -- only more or less valid speculations. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, NONE of the hundreds of diseases attributed to tobacco use has ever been PROVEN according to scientific rigor. Everything straddles the twilight zone between science, fiction, hysteria, and Puritanism.

MIND IF I SMOKE? - This powerful article by Hadley Arkes, Ney Professor of American Institutions and Jurisprudence at Amherst College in Massachusetts, beautifully describes the putrid moral inversion of corrupted governments such as the one of British Columbia, Canada. The cancer of a mentality that removes personal responsibility from the citizen, and uses lawsuits as a way to loot private enterprise has originated in the US, but it is spreading across the world. If not stopped by the goodwill of the citizens, it will destroy our institutions, invert the poles of our morality, and leave to the next generation a world without references, and truth. We highly recommend this article to friends and foes.

THE AMAZING SMOKE SCREEN - "The anti-tobacco crusade is a reverse Robin Hood arrangement. It robs the poor to pay the rich. ... The attorneys general's agreement now enshrines this. The rich, of course, are the private lawyers who represent the states in their tobacco suits. The agreement allows up to $500 million in annual fees for perhaps a few hundred and at most a few thousand lawyers. For how long? Arbitrators will decide; these payments come atop fees to be paid in four existing state settlements that will almost certainly total billions. The cigarette dispute has evolved into a welfare program that may create some instant billionaires and many multimillionaires."

THE GREAT TOBACCO MONEY GRAB - "The tobacco debate has become a political tightrope similar to abortion. If one doesn't emphatically hate tobacco, one is accused of perpetrating injury on unsuspecting youth. The anti-tobacco faction's propaganda about tobacco's evil ways is nothing short of a gift from the re-election gods for politicians. However, the truth is, anti-tobacco zealots prosper from the tobacco industry."

Cowboys, Camels and Kids - We link to the April issue of Reason Magazine, a review of the arguments about the effect of tobacco advertising on kids, and the problem with banning speech just in case it might be harmful. "Surely a nation that proudly allows racist fulminations, communist propaganda, flag burning, nude dancing, pornography, and sacrilegious art can safely tolerate Marlboro caps and Joe Camel T-shirts, " concludes author Jacob Sullum. Sullum is author of the book For Your Own Good: The Anti-smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health.

Studio BC: Debate Over Anti-Tobacco Legislation - FORCES is glad to present the transcript of a TV debate hosted by the Knowledge Network on the issue of the Canadian anti-tobacco legislation. In this lively conversation we see two defenders of scientific integrity and personal liberties (public policy consultant Dr. John Luik and novelist and journalist Mr. Spider Robinson) against two representatives of the anti-tobacco cartel, Dr. Richard Pollay, from the University of B.C., and Dr. Frederic Bass, part of B.C. Doctors' Stop Smoking Program. Among other anti-smoker activities, Dr. Bass makes a living by selling smoking cessation programs while pushing intolerance against tobacco using faulty information. The standard tune of the cartel is sung by this two, but their arguments are systematically shut down by Dr. Luik and Mr. Robinson. Broadcast of April 3, 1998, 20:00 Hours. Reproduced with permission of The Knowledge Network.

The Anti-Tobacco Crusade - This article by Joseph Kellard, published in The Capital, describes the decay of the American moral and political value system better than anything we have see to date, and it could have been written by us, so much it represent FORCES' position. With relentless logic, Joseph dismantles the twisted arguments of the antitobacco cartel, and he does not spare the tobacco industry, either: "The lesson [the tobacco companies] refuse to learn is that when they compromises fundamental principles, such as individual rights, for a "settlement" and hold this as "practical," they are only appeasing the unjust and setting precedent for future regulations that will cause their ultimate destruction. Like many businessmen, they fail to think long-range, yet it is their long-range survival that they feel will emerge from such compromises. This is their gravest mistake."

Just Say What? - "A recent report on NBC suggests that the mainstream news media are finally recognizing that DARE, the most influential model for drug education in America, has no measurable effect on a teenager's likelihood to use drugs. DARE, however, is worse than useless. By relying on scare tactics that depict a puff of marijuana as the first step on the road to ruin, it encourages teenagers to disregard all warnings about drugs. By insisting on abstinence instead ofresponsibility, it leaves kids ill-prepared to distinguish between use and abuse." Reason Magazine editor Jacob Sullum, author of the recently published book, For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health, tackles the subject of youth drug education, American-style.

EXPOSE` FROM THE WASHINGTON POST: THREE INTERESTING ARTICLES DEPICTING THE TOBACCO WARS - PART I || PART II || PART III

This interesting series of articles describes vividly the grave political mistakes of the tobacco industry, as well as how the price of these mistakes will be paid by the industry's customers -- smokers -- and describes the unsavory maneuvers of the antismoking cartel, like focusing on kids' smoking to acquire money, power, and influence. Best of all - the mastermind was Dick Morris, leading the virtuous battle against tobacco! He was disgraced for patronizing prostitutes, and is the "trusted" Clinton advisor who is so principled that he made a below-the-belt insinuation about Hillary Clinton's sexuality on a radio show just as the Fornigate scandal was breaking. Who says that flowers can grow from manure?

The Great Tobacco Heist - "What we are witnessing is the birth of Prohibition II. We have seen this movie before; it features a bootlegged product, glamorization of its use, increases in crime, and public disgust with government." We link to the archives of Intellectual Capital for an opinion piece by Pete du Pont.

The Costs and Benefits of Smoking "... we all lose something if we allow the government to penalize people for unfashionable habits. Personally, I do not perceive enough benefit in smoking to make it worth the risk. That's why I don't smoke. But I'm sure that a lot of people, including many smokers, would have difficulty understanding why I enjoy bungee-jumping. I do not ask that other people share my tastes and preferences, only that they tolerate them. And toleration is another casualty of the crusade against smoking." We link to the pages of Reason magazine for a speech by Jacob Sullum delivered to the Cato Institute back in 1994.

How Federal "Guesswork" Misleads Consumers This important article, published in Consumers' Research Magazine, Vol 78 No. 1, January 1995, focuses on today's alarmist attitude and wrong assumption at the base of health politics, and the institutions that are continuously fueling hysteria for the purpose of greater financial input and political control. Important balancing voices such as this one are routinely ignored by state and much of the media propaganda because contrary to the pre-established political agenda.