by Enoch A. Ludlow

On October 17, 1995 a bunch of the country's elites met in Washington, DC to discuss their plans for the more than 50 million Americans who smoke. The title of the event was Tobacco Prevention: CONNECTING FOR THE FUTURE, and was touted as an 'ASSIST INFORMATION EXCHANGE TRAINING' session. ASSIST (American Stop Smoking Intervention Study for Cancer Prevention) is a federal program which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to eradicate smoking.

Coordinated and paid for by the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society, the attendees and speakers ranged from Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala to representatives from the National Organization for Women. Few, if any, of those present have ever held an elective public office. Certainly the agenda being pushed would be rejected at the ballot box if those attending were ever so foolish as to allow the voters to express their will. What binds the participants together is an almost religious veneration of government control and an inordinate love of the money which flows to the politically connected.

As usual the resulting document is bloated far beyond what could be expected from a two day meeting. It's 300 plus pages demonstrate how serious the organizers are about smoking. We are pleased to offer the public samples of the nonsense which transpired during this extravagant waste of taxes.

Several points are worth noting.

Recently the anti-smokers have altered some of the wording used to advocate brute control. The phrase Tobacco Control has been replaced by Tobacco Prevention. Although Tobacco Prevention is a meaningless phrase -- tobacco can't be prevented since it is a fact of nature -- it obscures the desire for control by removing that word from the literature.

The anti-smokers have reached a level of confidence which is on the verge of become a state of hubris. Item 3 on page 152 of the document states that minors don't believe that advertising has any influence over their behavior. Because this runs counter to the fraudulent campaign against cigarette advertising, the anti-smokers are coaching children to lie when they state that their peers began smoking due to tobacco ads. Rarely does a government document blandly imply that, for the cause, lying is acceptable.

In the section on using young people as 'leaders' in tobacco use prevention on page 167, a bullet states: "All of the current major tobacco issues are directly related to youth". This blatant lie highlights the insidious exploitation of children practiced by the anti-smokers as they fight for tobacco prohibition. Several totalitarian societies in this century have used children to further goals of control. The Soviet Union collapsed under its termite-ridden weight and Nazi Germany ended in flames.

There are some unintended laughs in the document.

The section on preemption on page 105 begins with what could be termed the anti-preemption credo. Imagine a bunch of tassel shoed lawyers and dowdy tobacco control freaks solemnly intoning the words to a Gregorian Chant.

Page 33 contains the results of feminist dogma colliding with the standard anti-smoking dogma of control.

For the most part this document is a sad example of a collection of power mad and money hungry people coming together to screw the country. The people responsible for this training are not merely anti-smoking. In their outlook on life, they are inhumane and profoundly anti-American.

Now see the excerpts for yourself -
The ASSIST 95 document.

FORCES would like to thank Sally Hull for her hard work and diligence in obtaining this document for the public.