QUOTE FROM ARTICLE: In 1992, California Gov. Pete Wilson (R) abruptly suspended an aggressive anti-smoking media campaign. The series of tough ads accused the tobacco industry of lying about the health effects of smoking and of recruiting underage smokers to replace the customers who die from tobacco-related diseases. An actor playing a gravel-voiced tobacco executive in one ad said, "We're not in this for our health."

COMMENT: As for the accusation that the tobacco industry "lied" about the health effects of smoking: Name the disease(s) that they lied about. Also, show that they lied, rather than that they merely expressed their own opinions; and furthermore, that they aggressively sought to promote those opinions, rather than having these reluctantly dragged out of them by zealous anti-smoker interrogators.

We have repeatedly seen only the latter, and this does not constitute "lying" about the health effects of smoking. It constitutes an anti-smoker inquisition into their political correctness. And it is just a ploy, whose sole purpose is for the anti-smokers to deny the truth that smokers made free and informed choices to smoke, and rejected the anti-smokers.

Then, we will show that it is the anti-smokers who lied in their biggest accusation of all against smoking, namely that it causes heart disease; and that they have lied as well that smoking causes perinatal illness, ulcers, stomach cancer, cervical cancer, and other diseases. We can show exactly how they deliberately conduct defective studies to falsely blame smoking and passive smoking, and also conceal data and willfully mislead the public.

Regarding the accusation of "recruiting underage smokers to replace the customers who die from tobacco-related diseases": This is a blatant and outright lie, because the vast majority of smokers do not die from so-called "tobacco-related diseases" in the first place. Not even with the trumped-up anti-smoker health claims can this be pretended. Furthermore, by the age of 65, more smokers have quit than continue smoking.

The tobacco industry should have treated this as a libel, and sued the anti-smokers and their media propaganda machine to oblivion for repeating it over and over again. But those timid, defensive cowards have never had the guts to treat anti-smokers as the lie-spreading vermin that they are.

QUOTE FROM ARTICLE: Prop 99, a voter initiative, raised tobacco taxes by 25 cents and applied 20 percent of the new revenue -- more than $100 million a year -- to anti-tobacco education. The state's health department used some of that money to create the tough ads.

COMMENT: Next, we can talk about how the anti-smokers and their media accomplices deliberately spread the libel that smokers are an economic burden to society, and suppressed the truth, thereby winning public support for their Prop 99 measure by means of conspiracy, fraud, and racketeering. Then they used this stolen money to spew lies in their victims' own faces.

QUOTE FROM ARTICLE: Now, a previously undisclosed internal memo from the Tobacco Institute, a Washington-based trade group, details an industry plan to end funding for the advertising program by encouraging community groups and public health organizations that might otherwise be united against tobacco use, including minority groups and California's doctors.... The 1990 memo does not indicate that the industry tried to buy influence with such groups. Instead, the memo describes how the tobacco companies more subtly may try to take advantage of possible opportunities presented by the goals of respected groups -- even their natural adversaries.... The Tobacco Institute memo, provided to The Washington Post by private attorneys suing the industry in state class-action suits across the country, states: "We developed the following strategies to meet our goal of eliminating Prop 99 media money." Kurt L. Malmgren, the industry group's senior vice president for state activities, wrote to Tobacco Institute President Samuel D. Chilcote on April 18, 1990...

COMMENT: And so on and so on. Those interest groups would be squabbling over that money without the tobacco industry's "encouragement." All this boils down to is wishful fantasizing that the scramble for Prop 99 spoils might be organized in some unspecified way to deny more money to the anti-smokers by getting more to the other interests.

And, WHERE IS THE CRIME? There is none. But the anti-smoker criminals want us to believe that anything the tobacco companies do, other than unconditionally surrender, constitutes wrongdoing. They want us to believe that the tobacco companies have no right to engage even in speculation (they present no evidence of any action, just their own insinuations). The anti-smokers' phony outrage is nothing less than a demand that the tobacco companies be denied any semblance of Constitutional rights, while anti-smokers are privileged to lie, cheat, and steal with absolute impunity.

QUOTE FROM ARTICLE: ...those familiar with the way the Prop 99 drama played out say the memo describes the manner in which events unfolded with uncanny accuracy. "This is the history of Prop 99, written before it happened," said Stanton Glantz, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco and anti-tobacco activist who fought for Prop 99. John Miller, chief of staff for state Sen. Diane Watson and a principal state staff member on tobacco control legislation, said he found the memo "deeply disturbing."

COMMENT: And here are the biggest predators on the planet, trotted out by the media to tell us how "disturbed" they are by elementary facts of political life, namely other groups coming out like jackals and hyenas to steal their prey from them, and to blame the tobacco industry for spoiling their make-believe Garden of Eden where lions lie down with lambs.

QUOTE FROM ARTICLE: The current head of the California Medical Association, Jack Lewin said... that he found the memo troubling because it showed the industry was well aware of how the doctors would react, and used it to their advantage. "People failed to see that the tobacco industry had subtly, behind the scenes, maneuvered everybody" into a position of having to fight over the money, he said -- especially as declining smoking rates led to lower tobacco tax revenue.

COMMENT: So Lewin expects us to believe that, if the tobacco industry hadn't "subtly, behind the scenes, maneuvered everybody" into a position of having to fight over the money, there would be no squabbling whatsoever over a slush fund of "more than $100 million a year." See, it's all the tobacco industry's fault!

And, "especially as declining smoking rates led to lower tobacco tax revenue"! Why, those dastardly tobacco companies! They must have plotted and schemed this too! And the anti-smokers had nothing to do with any of it! They're just poor little injured victims of all these tobacco industry crimes! Obviously the anti-smokers are more than just "disturbed" and "troubled." Anyone deluded enough to believe this garbage is a clinical psychopath, with a limitless capacity for blaming their victims and denying their own guilt.

QUOTE FROM ARTICLE: To Miller, "it's not news that the tobacco industry corrupts political figures, or that they have undue influence over state legislatures. That is pretty much old hat." Having seen African American publishers, many of whom rely on tobacco advertising, "put intense pressure on Senator Watson and any number of African American legislators," he said, along with other groups mentioned in the memo, "it was exactly what we had always thought -- and we were labeled conspiratorial paranoids."

COMMENT: So, "the tobacco industry corrupts political figures"? Only by the bogus definition that "corruption" consists of taking the tobacco industry's money, and then turning around and stabbing smokers in the back. For ten years, Congress has looked the other way, and held their tongues about those fraudulent smoking cost claims that their own Congressional Research Service exposed, because they're really cringing, servile cowards, whose biggest terror is to be assaulted by the smearing, bullying, fascist anti-smoker media hate machine.

Outright corruption is how the anti-smokers got their precious EPA report on ETS. Indoor Air Quality director Robert Axelrad admitted to the EPA Inspector General that the crucial chapters were written via illegal pass-through contracts to his own hand-picked crony, Kenneth G. Brown. The anti-smokers violated federal laws to make sure that they got the finding they wanted, because not just anyone could be "trusted" to be corrupt. After all, the EPA's own scientists were against calling ETS a "human carcinogen." And the media killed the story, so that their anti-smoking accomplices could force their smoking bans on the public by beating everyone over the head with that corrupt report. And there have still been no indictments.

As for "undue influence over state legislatures," the anti-smokers' tax-funded political machine rammed their laws raising the age of access to tobacco down the public's throats as well. This is the reason those laws are massively disobeyed, while the anti-smoker liars cast blame upon the tobacco industry for supposedly "recruiting children."

And, just as Congress takes the tobacco industry's money and screws smokers, those publishers take the tobacco industry's money, and then spew anti-smoker lies and defamations in our faces. And, they defraud the people by allowing only ignorant smokers' letters, to make a sham pretense of open discussion, while they censor informed advocates.

QUOTE FROM ARTICLE: The plan may have worked, since program's hard-hitting anti-tobacco ads were shelved for several years and only began to appear again, in softer form, late last year.... Focus groups showed that the anti-industry approach was the most effective with young people, but the ads were so harsh that some stations called them "inflammatory" and refused to run them.

COMMENT: Thus, the anti-smokers dismiss nausea at their vicious ads as merely the fruit of tobacco industry scheming. Never mind that it takes real principles to turn down the anti-smokers' dirty money.

Furthermore, "Medical association lobbyist Steven Thompson said there `was no question the [tobacco] industry was trying to eliminate the ads, because they had a real impact on cigarette consumption. `I could see their strategy playing out in the Legislature,' said Thompson, who worked for the Assembly Office of Research at the time. `But in my opinion it was a flop, because those award-winning ads have been the most singularly effective piece of the anti-smoking program.'" (Bid to Dilute Anti-Smoking Effort Revealed.

Campaign: Memo from 1990 shows tobacco executives wanted to use legislators, doctors and poverty activists to divert money from TV ads. By Jenifer Warren, Dan Morain, Times Staff Writers. The Los Angeles Times, Wednesday, January 21, 1998).

What this means is that the "most singularly effective piece of the anti-smoking program" is to LIE TO YOUNG PEOPLE ABOUT MATTERS OF FACT. So let's have some nice hard-hitting ads showing sleazy anti-smoking conspirators boasting about how they lie to kids, and bragging about the awards they get for it, while they bash the tobacco companies for mere silly pictures of a camel. And these ads would be 100% true.

Counterpoint by

Carol Thompson
Smokers' Rights Action Group
P.O. Box 259575
Madison, WI 53725-9575
Phone: 608-249-4568