Governor Chiles:

My name is Gian Turci, a Canadian at the head of an independent, non-tobacco-funded smokers' rights organization. Today, however, I write to you as a private citizen, a smoker, a father, and - - especially -- as a human being.

I would like to have an explanation on what kind of moral inversion is happening in your once great country.

Tobacco is a legal product, produced by a legal industry creating much employment and paying much taxes. Tobacco is a major source of revenue for the state. Hundreds of thousands of families depend on it for their existence. Smokers are adults who are (and always have been) aware of the possible risks of their habit. Tobacco is an important part of Western culture.

What kind of state would alter its laws to make possible the extortion of money from the private sector? The only states I know from history are the communist, and the nazi state. What kind of person could possibly smile in front of the press while showing a giant reproduction of the first $750,000,000 cheque, just a small part of such extortion? The only persons I know from recent history are the Communist leaders, for not even the fascists ones dared so much.

And please, do not throw at me the false statistics fabricated by the antismoking industry, where every smoker dies a premature death! Don't give me your lies about smokers' cost to the medical system when in your own country there is ample evidence that smokers more than pay their way. And save me from the lies about secondhand smoke, complete with pathetic concerns for "the children". If you are really concerned about children, address the losing battles on drugs, violence, and education. Address instead the 8,000 children a day wounded or killed by firearms. That is a true epidemic.

Give me the truth, for a change. Give me a reason for the tobacco wars a logical man can understand, for the only reason I see is the desperation of a system that feels pressed to stoop to persecution and extortion to get financial revenue, and to divert public attention from real social disasters such as the ones I mentioned above.

What is going to be next, Governor Chiles, the food or the alcohol industry? Automakers would also be a good target -- deep pockets there, and lots of lung cancer! What is their "cost to society"?

What new lies are you going to use to steal lawfully earned money, and to control citizens' behaviour? Please tell me sir, do you have any shame left in you?

Your nation has entered a very dangerous path of huge moral, ideological, and political corruption of which your state is a splendid specimen. Your justifications for the intrusion in the lives and in the pockets of citizens and industries are based on lies, innuendos, false evidence and political hysteria, not to mention puritanical self-righteousness. A nation basing moral, financial and political revenue on such shaky foundations is inevitably headed for the same bankruptcy and collapse experienced by the Soviet Union.

As most of the world stands bewildered and disgusted, gaping at the American madness that you represent so well, the cancer of this false "ideology" begins to spread to other nations. Unfortunately, my country is among them.

As a Canadian, I always admired your country for its constitution, its respect for individual rights, personal liberties, and private initiative, but today I must be careful to use the past tense.

Now, my biggest sorrow is that my country shares too many miles of border with yours, and I have to fight an uphill battle to keep the "health-scare cancer" from invading the social fabric of my nation.

I sincerely hope that the upcoming generation of U.S citizens will wipe itself clean from this scum, and that one day a retrospective documentary on the end of the twentieth century America will examine with condescension this sad segment of history in the same way that Prohibition (from which your Country obviously learned very little) is now described.

I hope that for the sake of my children.

Gian Turci

cc: Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth.