FORCES - Watching the enemy

TOBACCO AS A GATEWAY DRUG!


Among the lies promoted against tobacco and its consumers, one of the most incredible ones is that tobacco is a gateway to the use of heavier drugs.

Firstly, tobacco is not a drug, unless we put tea and coffee officially in the same category.

Second, this is simply not true. It does not take but simple observation to see that addiction to real drugs has nothing to do with smoking tobacco. But the pharmaceutical industry-prostituted mouthpieces keep barking this lie as if it was a fact. It makes as much sense as saying that since most of the prostitutes smoke, tobacco causes prostitution.

We wish to thank Jesse Silverman, member of FORCES, for the great research work on this misleading anti-tobacco topic, as well as for his acute and deep commentaries.


WRITE TO JESSE SILVERMAN

THE GATEWAY MODEL OF THE ANTI-TOBACCO CARTEL

Center for Substance Abuse Prevention

CSAP is an office in the federal government's Department of Health and Human Services. However, CSAP material reads like a direct copy of the literature put out by the neo-Prohibitionists. The explanation may be found within CSAP's very name: with the creation of CSAP in 1986, the "gateway" model was built into the structure of the federal government. While the gateway model may be useful for mapping human development, in the hands of culture warriors it becomes a bludgeon for enforcing the "drug-free" lifestyle (the most pronounced aspect of Psychiatric Correctness).

CSAP exists to close the "gateway" into addiction--youthful experimentation with tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis. Part of the model of drug prevention is that youth experiment with drugs because they are tricked into believing that drug use is okay and it doesn't always lead to addiction and ruin. In order to prevent experimentation, it is necessary to make sure there is a "unified message"--that is one where is no confusing discussion of possible tolerance of drug use. After all if marijuana use is so deadly, how could anyone seriously discuss tolerating it? Thus CSAP publishes material in the name of the United States Department of Health and Human Services explaining that marijuana should not be legalized because of its health effects.

Should this fail to convince you, please follow this link, and search for the following terms (please N.B. that the acronym ATOD stands for Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs, heroin, cocaine, speed and medical marijuana included conveniently enough in the OD characters.)

The Link:

http://www.health.org/pubs/resguide/tobacco.htm

search for "gateway" you will find several references.

FORCES has been reproducing the more outrageous of the anti-smoking banners that they find on the Web. How many had to be obtained by the process these guys are resorting to?? Are they specifically trying to keep us away from them? I am sure if you click enough links you see every one on their website anyway, but it is interesting that they want to know who you are. Of course, they could look up the IP addresses anyway, rather than requiring a CGI-form that could be filled out incorrectly. Or they could do both. I believe our use would violate the agreement if we felt the need to spray the word "Lie" over any of it. If they say anything that we consider to be in the category of proven lie (smoking kills 50 000 non-smokers a year due to heart attacks, etc.) we'd have a problem with it. I didn't fill out the form to check.

The Agreement/ID-required Protected Anti-Smoking Web Banners:

http://www.smokefree.gov/agree.html

Here too, we see a free and easy co-mingling of smoking, alcoholism and drug addiction, witness the following page:

http://www.health.org/pressrel/itn/index.htm

I mined and mined some more, and think I have hit the mother lode, this link is essential to any collection of "Gateway Theory" links, linking smoking and implicitly smokers to the tragedy of drug and alcohol addiction. Please examine this link as well:

http://www.DrugWatch.org/Documents/ATPOS.html

We ignore these links at the peril of letting our young people believe that if they smoke, or their mother or grandmother smokes, they might as well be the town drunk or a drug addicted prostitute. In a less easily quantifiable way, that is just as wrong, in fact and ethically, as blaming smoking for the deaths of countless thousands of non-smokers via ETS.

Here is one more:

http://165.112.78.61/ICAW/origins/originsfindings997.html

Search for "marijuana" on that page to find out that how they may try to raise cigarette taxes (even for elderly widows?!) to prevent teenagers from getting drunk or stoned.

As to whether those who have promised to cure the so-called epidemic or plague of smoking in general are willing to link it (perhaps permanently) to the War on Drugs or not, there is also quite a bit of evidence. What do we do to those addicted to heroin or cocaine? Do they have the least say in the matter? Do we continue to employ somebody who is addicted to alcohol without requiring them to get treatment (especially if they drive to and from work everyday!)?

Skeptical? Are these just a few Lyndon LaRouche followers on the fringe of the anti-smoking movement? Sadly enough, no: witness the American Cancer Society's "Questions about smoking tobacco and health":

Page 1 - Nicotine is a drug which is addicting--just like heroin and cocaine--for three main reasons.

Page 7 - "Suppose I smoke for a while and then quit?" Smoking begins to cause damage right away and is highly addictive. Several studies have found nicotine to be as addictive as heroin, cocaine or alcohol; it is the most common form of drug addiction in the United States. Therefore, it is obviously better never to start smoking cigarettes--and become addicted to nicotine--than it is to smoke with the intention of quitting later. And like alcohol, heroin, and cocaine, nicotine creates a permanent tolerance in the body. When an ex-smoker smokes a cigarette, even years after quitting, the nicotine reaction may be triggered, quickly hooking the person on the old habit.

This site:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/record/record2010.24.html

makes the connection explicit, rather than one drawn by induction by a person who might be too distrusting of the source.

We can see right here what sort of trouble I.V. drug addiction can cause, this very thing they are trying to BLUR with both cigarette and marijuana smoking. What kind of message does THAT send to our children? How about our children who already smoke??! Here is somebody who might never have needed "medical" marijuana if some idiots didn't convince him hard drugs were "the same thing as" smoking or smoking cannabis, which resulted in AIDS--and he now has to fight like hell to get it. Will the first person to be raped in jail while serving time for underage tobacco possession be allowed to have it? Inquiring minds want to know.

http://www.marijuananews.com/canadian_police_march_aids_patie.htm

This link is very illustrative of what I've been talking about so far:

http://www.samhsa.gov/oas/nhsda/pe1997/popes105.htm

What we have here is the same clueless idiots, led by a 4-star general who is an expert on attacking problems by bombing them to death or shooting them down, piling up statistics. They are doing this in order to:

(a) Prevent our children from ever smoking cigarettes, a pathetic failure -- my wife (rather an anti-smoker) completely agrees that smoking was historically headed down the tubes before they decided to declare "War" on teen smoking. At least they made plenty of money, and think of all the cigarette taxes they will reap in the future.

(b) Prevent our children from ever using marijuana (notice, by the way, that the only distinction between "use" and "abuse" is whether or not a "substance" was used in "the past month". Does this tell us how many of the people (children?) risked their life? AIDS? A fatal accident? REAL addiction? Of COURSE NOT!

(c) Prevent our children from becoming IV drug addicts searching desperately for a site to inject what the dealer on the street told them was heroin before they are too sick to fix. Their colossal failure here will not lead to their middle age children crying at the funerals of lost parents, but their middle-aged parents crying at the funeral of their lost children.

(d) Prevent our children from becoming street crack prostitutes, with blistered lips, immune systems compromised by unbelievable exposure to vectors through unprotected sex, lack of sleep, and poor nutrition (who can buy food when trying to support a cocaine habit under Prohibition?)

This is too sick to go on with. The point is, Prohibition doesn't work...Wars against behaviors don't work. The same people who are lying viciously and denigrating cigarette smokers to a disgusting extent in order to increase tobacco use by young people are also doing largely the same thing to increase alcohol and illegal drug use by young people. Some can handle it fine (the vast majority of cannabis users are responsible and do not suffer significant ill effects of it) but many will have their lives destroyed as a result of this.

We have given powers associated with fascist dictatorships, all in order for them to lie, steal people's property, censor and more -- what do we get in return? Higher rates of all kinds of drug ABUSE, more broken lives, more disease, and more crime.

For some time, they managed to keep tobacco "separate". William Bennett explained that he could smoke 3 packs a day while complaining that marijuana was destroying America because "smoking just kills you" while "marijuana destroys your soul".

No more. We now have a full military general leading our "War" on smoking as well. Unfortunately, each and every casualty will be an American, and as we know, the first casualty of war is truth.

TOBACCO PERSECUTION IS NOT NEW, BUT...

Commentary by Jesse Silverman

Yet another link:

http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/drugfact/gateway.html

Final comments

I did hours of "surfing" before I found this bunch of links. I believe they are enough for anyone to get a clear idea of just what is going on.

I shall now return to my normal "Read-Only" mode as a FORCES member for some time. I just felt that this aspect was not being properly addressed--after all, who cares if you are killing yourself or not if you are causing our children to become drug addicts, murderers and prostitutes? Surely, cancer is less than you deserve for such a heinous crime.

I've never felt so hopeful before on any of these issues. As long as we don't let them take the Web away from us, their propaganda machine can NEVER get back to where it was just by controlling TV and newspapers. This, right now, is the key to our staying informed, and therefore, our freedom.


WRITE TO JESSE SILVERMAN
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