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Tobacco In The Developing World

April 17 - High Tax Equals Dangerous Cigarettes - "Every year, billions of these highly toxic cigarettes - which have no connection with genuine Regal or Silk Cut products - are bought from shady middlemen by British smokers who believe that all they are doing is cheating the taxman of his cut. The reality is that they are smoking cigarettes produced not in hygienic factories in the West, but in scruffy little workshops in China, and what they are smoking is very often the sweepings of a dirty floor."

What will occur in America soon is already occurring in the United Kingdom.  The taxes are so high that, in addition to a growing smuggling problem, the country is now being inundated with shoddy cigarettes made in China.  The United States experienced something similar during alcohol prohibition.  It was called "bathtub gin".  Prohibition doesn't work.  High taxes don't work.  Anti-tobacco making government policy really doesn't work.

April 17 - Things are getting really weird in Manitoba.  Now the good rulers of Winnipeg are demanding that restaurants sell more booze.  When it comes to overindulgence there is no stopping power-mad anti-tobacco.

See INSIDE

April 17 - Mr. President, End The Shakedown - "Of all the oddities surrounding the government's behavior on this issue, the oddest remains the fact that the Bush administration is carrying on a liberal Democrat policy. It is Democrats, not Republicans, who promise to turn America into a padded cell where no one can possibly hurt himself, even if he wants to. To the degree Republicans stand for anything, they stand for less government and more freedom."

The oddity the author refers to is the federal suit against the tobacco industry.  A legacy of the Clinton, administration, the suit was Bill Clinton's final attempt to bankrupt the tobacco industry.  Both George Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft have reversed course and have not offered any good reason to kept this suit going.  With far more important issues to deal with, persecuting cigarette companies and smokers is a waste of time and money.

• People who were or ever had been smokers were more likely than others to have high cholesterol or heart disease, but current smokers were not.
• Smokers also were more likely than nonsmokers to exercise regularly, and were no more likely than others to report poor physical health for a day.

In a story about how heavy drinking Dayton have drastically lower rates of liver disease and accidents, a few tidbits about smoking are uncovered.  The discrepancy between anti-alcohol orthodoxy and the reality of the Dayton area baffle the experts but they do attempt to explain why smokers have lower cholesterol and heart disease and why the slothful smoker exercises more than nonsmokers and is sick no more frequently.  The theories are hilarious and don't even rate a "B" for effort.

April 17 - More bad news for California schools.  The state lags in math and science and has a 30 percent dropout rate.  No money for math and science but plenty of money of anti-tobacco nonsense.

See INSIDE

April 17 - Pharmacies Tell FDA To Butt Out - "...[saying] that making nicotine-spiked products is legal as long as pharmacists abide by the U.S. government's regulations, Pharmacists say they will continue to make nicotine-laced lollipops despite a federal crackdown on the Internet sale of the smoking-cessation aid."

The nerve of those pharmacists!  Don't they know that only Big Drugs must profit from nicotine?  Despite the weight of the Food and Drug Administration and the rants of Big Pharma's very own pocket congressman, Henry Waxman, some of the entrepreneurs vow to continue concocting and selling the ridiculous nicotine-laced lollipops and candy.  

April 17 - Another state blows its tobacco settlement wad and a new generation of entrepreneurs is taking over the retail end of the cigarette business.

See INSIDE

April 16 - Lessons From The Past - Excellent "Point of View" from Duluth Minnesota.  The writer has read history and has drawn the conclusion that today's anti-tobacco movement is the same old intolerance camouflaged under the flag of public health.  Although Hitler's Nazis began the modern anti-tobacco movement, the hatred and religious fervor against those who enjoy tobacco began much earlier.  Mixed in with the startling history lesson is an excellent synopsis of just why the secondhand smoke scam has got to go.

April 16 - Target Market A Waste - As the Target Market scandals continue to amaze and irritate the legislature, the ant-tobacco group keeps trumpeting its so-called accomplishments.  Dan Hass of FORCES-Duluth informs the readers of the Minneapolis Start Tribune just what those accomplishments are worth.

April 16 - How Can This Be?  "Choreographer Paul Taylor has been at the forefront of modern dance for nearly five decades, and at age 71, this veteran figure, who admits to still smoking up to three packs of cigarettes a day, has no plans to retire. Although he stopped touring with his New York-based Paul Taylor Dance Company years ago, he is still the guiding force behind the troupe that has been to more than 450 cities in 60 countries." - (Los Angeles Times, April 14, 2002)

Despite working in a snide comment, the LA Times, one of the more rabid of the anti-tobacco press, gets an A for exposing its readers to a reality that the zealots want to obliterate.  How is it possible that this man is not dead?  How is it possible that, at a fairly venerable age, is still at work creating beauty for the world?  It's possible because smoking, even 3 packs a day, is just one of a myriad of factors that make up one's sate of health.  It's doubtful that Paul Taylor "admitted" to smoking.  With all his accomplishments and love of live he probably regards smoking as irrelevant.

April 16 - A Victim Of Tobacco - Mexico morns the untimely death of Maria Felix.  The actress, who had "the most beautiful face in the history of Mexican cinema", was an icon during the 1940's and the incarnation of the strong, sexual woman who would be tamed, nevertheless, by love before the end of the movie.  Felix' smoldering gaze obscured the smoldering ends of the cigarettes she smoked with a style that was among the best in an era of sensual smoking.  Unfortunately she never quit smoking which, as always, lead to a premature death.  Maria Felix, an active collector of fine art and an avid traveler to end, dead at 88.

April 15 - Libertarians Plan Cigarette Giveaway to Protest Higher Taxes – ‘ Saying the cigarette tax proposals by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg are too high, the Libertarian Party in Manhattan said it will start giving away free premium brand cigarettes to anyone who wants them. "We want to send a message to the politically marginalized in New York that we stand by them, so we're putting our money and our cigarettes where our mouth is," said Jim Lesczynski, a spokesman for the Manhattan Libertarian Party. ’ – Thank you, Libertarian party of America. Yours in Liberty.

Okay, New Yorkers, now is the chance to stand up and be counted.  Join the Libertarian Party of Manhattan this Wednesday.  Show up and receive a tax-free pack of cigarettes purchased from an Indian reservation in western New York.  For address and time, click the Libertarian's link below.

Featured speaker for the event will be Audrey Silk of NY Clash.  Audrey is a veteran of the tobacco wars and has jousted with big-time anti-tobacco operatives on television and radio.  She works tirelessly to run anti-tobacco out of New York City.

New York City C.L.A.S.H.

Libertarian Party of Manhattan

April 15 - Assault on privacy and freedoms - "Government's data sharing plan is a dagger to the heart of liberty", says free market and civil liberties think tank - Press Release - The Labour's government's plans to integrate the personal data held on British citizens by various government departments and agencies is a dagger to the heart of liberty, says the Libertarian Alliance, the radical free market and civil liberties think tank and pressure group.

Libertarian Alliance Director, Dr Chris R. Tame, says: "In the light of the ever-more blatant attack on civil liberties in this country - including the proliferation of camera surveillance systems, the increasing involvement of intelligence agencies in political surveillance and dirty tricks operations, the push for a national ID card and DNA database, the gradual abolition of common law liberties by the removal of jury trials, of the presumption of innocence, of the right of silence and of double jeopardy, and by the adoption of the EU's despotic corpus juris - this proposal is even more ominous. The government's claim that data would be processed only 'where necessary' is laughable - especially when one sees that their list of 'necessary' reasons covers every conceivable excuse for nanny statism, paternalism, censorship, socialism, prudery, Puritanism and prohibitionism.

It is ironic that when the state has demonstrated that it is incapable of providing any 'public service' adequately, when it cannot defend its citizens from predators of every stripe, that is should be attempting to turn us into supplicants and serfs. The common argument that 'if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear' is absurd. In an age when health fascists have declared smoking to be a form of child abuse it is clear that everyone can be subjected to the prejudices of demented paternalists - whether of the fundamentalist religious nutters, the peddlers of PC pieties, the environmentalists, or the feminist anti-sex cranks. Your life style, your tastes, your sexuality, your political and social views, can be subjected to tomorrow's moral panic, propaganda scare campaign and witch-hunt and legislated as 'crimes' or as 'politically incorrect'. The citizens of Britain need to send a message to our would-be masters that we are not numbers, that we will not be pushed, filed, indexed, stamped, briefed, debriefed, or numbered - that our lives are our own. It is now clear that the 'social contract' has been broken by the state. Resistance to the usurpations of the state is both a right and a moral duty. It is the right, the duty, of all to resist and disrupt the state's data gathering and record-keeping ability, by whatever means are necessary".

April 15 - Selling sickness: the pharmaceutical industry and disease mongering - Two pieces published in the British American Journal. While no mention is made of smoking or the low relative risks of passive smoke, the points in this article in the current BMJ support everything that the FORCES group has been saying about the medicalisation of the world and about low relative risks being used to scare the public in order to create more business for the pharmaceutical industry and the medical establishment.

April 15 - Drug firms hype disease as sales ploy, industry chief claims - Again, this is not about smoking per se, but it is very applicable to the contemporary situation of "public health" and its questionable statistics, as illustrated by the statement in the article: "Behind every statistic there is a vested interest."

Much of the current issue of the BMJ is devoted to the theme of the immense power of the pharmaceutical industry and its interference with science, politics, and behaviour control. The theme itself was selected because BMJ readers required it.

Is the public slowly realising the corruption of the white Mafia? The times are certainly more mature, as the excesses and the frauds of antitobacco have metastasized in other fields, such as food and drinks. Most of the health Nazis advocate regulation of every aspect of life, but themselves have very little. As they love to examine the documents of the tobacco industry as a "public service", there is no mention of examining THEIR documents – never mind the frequent impossibility to verify the databases of those very studies that find an infinite amount of diseases, and "cost to society." As they accuse their opposition to be sold out to the tobacco industry (or other industries), they are fronts for Big Pharma. As they accuse Big Tobacco to corrupt governments, they have utterly corrupted ministries and departments of health around the world, and turned them into promotional centers of pharmaceutical products at the expense of the taxpayers. As it is always the case, those who rot accuse others of smelling bad.

April 15 - CDC Pulls Out All The Stops For Its Patrons - ( CDC finds costs of smoking twice previous estimates || High cost of smoking ) - Last week the Centers for Disease Control issued a statement calling for a price tag of $7 per pack of cigarettes.  That price, most of which would be federal, state and the tobacco settlement tax, is necessary to completely pay each smoker's way. In a stunning coincidence, that will be the price for a pack of smokes in New York City if the mayor gets his way.

The CDC has also upped the number of people "killed" from smoking by 40,000 which seems odd since the CDC and other components of the anti-tobacco cartel are constantly claiming that smoking rates are way down. 

It seems only yesterday that the huge price increase on cigarettes to pay the tobacco settlement was supposed to completely "reimburse" society (from "health-related" costs that were not proven in the first place).  What has changed since 1998, the year of the tobacco settlement, and now?  More financial raping: the anti-tobacco enterprise has been unsuccessful in diverting the bulk of the settlement funds to its own pocket.  All new rounds of tax increases are written to benefit financially anti-tobacco special interests.

While exorbitant tax rates are raising to obscene exorbitant tax rates, it is useful to report Wanda Hamilton's comments on the new extortion scheme:

Here are quotes from a few of the studies and experts CDC willfully ignored:

"Smoking has apparently brought financial gain to both the federal and state governments, especially when tobacco taxes are taken into account. In general, smokers do not appear to currently impose net financial costs on the rest of society." Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, "The Proposed Tobacco Settlement: Who Pays for the Health Costs of Smoking?" Jane G. Gravelle, Senior Specialist in Economic Policy, Government and Finance Division, Updated Oct. 12, 1999.

"A National Bureau of Economic Research study by W. Kip Viscusi [an economist and Harvard Law Professor] in the United States showed that when all costs and taxes were taken into account, each pack of cigarettes consumed saved society 83 [cents} == or $20 billion [US] annually." National Post [Canada], 1/22/99, "They didn't inhale?".

"After all, the alternative to death from a smoking-related illness is not immortality and perfect health -- it is later death, and perhaps from a more costly illness... or larger nursing home costs... The message is fairly clear. An increased tax based on the costs smokers impose on nonsmokers has not been justified. The evidence indicates that smokers are already paying, or possibly more than paying, their way." Jane Gravelle and Dennis Zimmerman, economists at the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress, Washington Post, 6/5/94, "The Marlboro Man."

The CDC also ignored other such studies, one conducted by the Rand Institute, one published in the New England Journal of Medicine Oct. 9, 1997, and one published in Canadian Public Policy Sept. 1992. The latter study concluded: "Overall, as Table 5 indicates, smokers make a net overall contribution of $4.3 billion to the benefit of non-smokers [in Canada]."

As for the increased 400,000 SAM figure also included in the "new" CDC report, see Levy and Marimont's rebuttal to CDC's defense of its SAMs even BEFORE the new inflation, exposing the manipulations: http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv22n2/fortherecord.pdf (PDF document. For a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader click here). For more complete information about the CDC "smoking-related" mortality saga, click here. For more information and data on the smokers' cost to society fraud, click here.

April 15 - Paragons of Virtue - On this annual day of tears (Tax Day), let us pay homage to those who spend our money so wisely.  Just think of those virtuous public servants on Capitol Hill as an efficient corporation run by the most honest and efficient people in the land.

• 29 have been accused of spousal abuse
• 7 have been arrested for fraud
• 117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses
• 3 have done time for assault
• 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit
• 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges
• 8 have been arrested for shoplifting
• 21 are currently defendants in lawsuits
• 84 have been arrested for drunk driving in the last year

It's the 535 members of the United States Congress!  The same group that cranks out hundreds of new laws each year designed to keep the rest of us in line.

April 15 - Anti-tobacco Party Fund Fiasco - Attributing his gritty voice to "all the cigarettes I smoke and beer I drink", Matt Skiba, lead vocalist with Alkaline Trio is every teenagers' mother's nightmare.  The popular group's songs celebrate the joys of party-down drunkenness that so appeals to young people.  Alkaline Trio is not reticent about its interests as its own description proclaims:

Whether with their alcohol-fueled love songs or their love-fueled alcohol songs, Alkaline Trio will move you with something you've never seen before.

ALKALINE TRIO

What's never been seen before is anti-tobacco getting royally fooled by people who took the morons' money to the bank, smoking all the way.  Alkaline Trio was the featured act at Minnesota's Kick Ash Bash II thrown by the anti-tobacco goon squad Target Market.  The smoking, cocktail and beer loving musical group is now the focal point in an effort to de-fund Target Market for its unclear concept of keeping kids from smoking and off the booze.

For a report from the front, we link to Anti Target Market .

April 15 - Shhh!  We Don't Want To Offend Anyone - What do you call a corporation that is so cowed by its critics that it hides the product that brings in the most money?  Philip (Kick us again) Morris.  Although the cover of it's annual report portrays a man holding cigarette, the online version has replaced that provocative image with that of a man scarfing down a candy bar.

"We don't want to operate a Web site that would broadcast cigarette brand imagery, or images of adults smoking, to kids. This is in keeping with PM USA and PMI's efforts to reduce the profile of their marketing so that minors' exposure to tobacco imagery is reduced," said a spokesperson.

And just how effective is PM's "good corporate citizenship" effort?  Well, politicians still routinely damn the company for selling cigarettes and continue to raise taxes.  Anti-tobacco pressure groups continue to slander the company, its customers and its products.  The federal government continues its baseless suit and appears to want to drive it out of business.

For a look at what PM's flaccid approach has wrought, take a look at one anti-tobacco groups rhetoric about the "new" Philip Morris.  In fact, pretends to be a left-wing pressure group that exposes transnational corporate evil-doing but is in reality a left-wing pressure group whose only real target is the tobacco industry, especially Philip Morris.  It's views are held by every anti-tobacco organization as well as a significant segment of the general population that pays any attention to the tobacco issue.

The one, sure way to regain any respect from the public and policy makers would be to aggressively counter the bile and slanders in a way that causes immense pain to its enemies.  The company has the resources to eliminate the anti-tobacco enterprise completely.  Instead of cowering before groups and people that are despised by all thinking Americans, take off the gloves and bloody them.

April 12 - Making A Difference - Utah is one of the states that anti-tobacco claims has banned smoking nearly everywhere, including restaurants and bars.  Not true.  Long before anti-tobacco reared its ugly head in the state an extensive system of private clubs had been set up to deal with the Byzantine Utah liquor laws.  Smoking is permitted in the private clubs which include many restaurants as well as night clubs and bars.  In line with anti-tobacco's policy of zero tolerance, operatives have been working full time on the legislature to enact total prohibition.  They finally found one legislator who has written a law to prohibit smoking in the private clubs.

Dan Cracraft, President of President of Freedom of Choice, Inc., a non-profit social organization, didn't let the grass grow under his feet.  He organized the private clubs and whipped up opposition to the crazy scheme to mess with a cultural institution that has served Utah very well.

April 12 - The Drug Companies Call Out The FDA - No one but the Drug Companies must make a buck off nicotine products was the message sent to the Food and Drug Administration after stories about nicotine-laced lollipops hit the news circuit.  Anti-tobacco operatives immediately contacted the FDA to alert them to this unauthorized encroachment on pharmaceutical profits.  For now the FDA has crushed the small businesses that hoped to cash in on anti-smoking hysteria but in the long run Big Drugs' victory may prove transitory.  After all no one owns the patent on nicotine which occurs naturally in a multitude of fruits and vegetables.  Should the FDA forbid all unauthorized nicotine it would have to ban tomatoes.  Americans may throw their liberties away each day but there will always be a passion to make a quick buck.  The nicotine candy will reappear.

April 11 - Nico Teens - It didn't take long for the United Kingdom to import the bizarre American concept of shoveling pharmaceutical nicotine into adolescents.  Even in the land of anti-tobacco mania the public has been slow to embrace hooking teenagers into Big Drug's nicotine delivery devices.  Following Big Drug's script to a "T", Dr. Erlin Jones bleats that young people become "addicted" to cigarettes very quickly.  

Before nicotine became "addicting" the young person who experimented with smoking was very rare yet very few actually became smokers.  When the definition of addiction was broadened to include nicotine at the behest of Big Drugs, the message went out that one cigarette equals "addiction".  All those addicted youngsters (and adults) immediately became candidates for expensive smoking cessation devices.  Each "addicted" smoker bullied into quitting became a dollar sign for Big Drugs.  That cessation devices are 85 percent ineffective makes the scam even more brilliant.  The guilty smoker swings from cigarettes to patches, or gum, or inhaler, or beverage or candy, then back to cigarettes.  In the old days before nicotine was "addicting" people who wanted to quit smoking just quit.  Of course no one got rich from that.

April 11 - Pimping For The Cartel - "Smoking is linked to 120,000 deaths annually" "Passive Smoking is a killer"  Thus proclaims the BBC.  Not in an editorial, but in a "news" story about every alleged evil of smoking, does the BBC assert these two "facts".

The alacrity with which the BBC has taken up the anti-tobacco crusade is astonishing.  Not long ago the BBC had an excellent reputation in the United States.  As the mainstream media there began falling out of favor several years ago, those who had access to the BBC found its reporting far better than anything in the United States.  Those days are long gone and the BBC's transformation into a propaganda arm for the international pharmaceuticals and the anti-tobacco goon squads is disappointing.

On the same day it shills for nicotine patches for children, the BBC writes up anti-tobacco's talking points about secondhand smoke, taxes and health scares and passes it off as health news.  The 24 paragraphs offer no proof for any of the allegations and is laced with quotes from various anti-tobacco operatives.  The one countering opinion from a tobacco company spokesman warrants only one sentence.  People who read this bilge rightly wonder why, if passive smoke is such a "killer", the BBC has never been able to find one real person who was killed by it.