Dear FORCES,

I was shocked to see buried in the back pages of the Daily News a tiny paragraph in the brief section about the serious revelation with the smokestacks from Sydney Steel causing an alarming number of cancer deaths and repiratory and cardiovascular diseases. I would hope the same health officials and politicians and the concerned public who organized the "second hand smoke" smoking bans are addressing this problem immediately with the same intensity and media blitz and shut down all industries who use smokestacks. The safety and concern of the public inhaling this deadly toxic second hand smoke cannot be ignored or denied.

I expect any day the above named groups will call a front page news conference outlining their plan.

Don

Dear Don,

It’s not going to happen, unless somebody has to gain politically from it. “Public Health” has nothing to do with health – but everything to do with the control of the public that pays for it. The passive smoke fraud pays off for activist groups, inept politicians, pharmaceutical industry; and one can state with impunity that cigarettes are voluptuary and useless, while the burden of prohibition is all on the shoulders of smokers - and it is not shared at all by those who demonize them - and all that makes the whole affair very convenient for the tormentors. Moreover, smokers provide an excellent pole for the hatred of a society that needs to loath, but that also needs to make it look as if it has grown beyond that emotional need. Smoke stacks do not bring in that kind of return – not yet. And, by the way, pointing at another issue does not distract “public health” – it only provides an excuse to control and suffocate yet another sector of public life and/or private enterprise.

If you feel that smoking prohibition is unjust because based on junk science, then the issue is to work hard to drastically limit the legal and political powers of these new Nazis – not to complain about smoke stacks or anything else. Don’t get us wrong, we agree on the smoke stacks issue of course, but we want to point out that in today’s perverse scale of values, justice is done by extending prohibition against what is not yet forbidden – NOT through the realization that what is forbidden already is wrong, small, petty and pretentious.

Problems must be addressed at the root – and the root is the unlimited power of “public health”.

Regards,