The Times, of course, can editorialize any position it wishes, but can't it do something about a so-called health reporter editorializing her pet peeves and scientific disinformation under the guise of hard news?  Jane E. Brody's recent screed (A Jubilant Barroom Toast to Smoke-free Air, August 27) was a repository of stale clichés, a pig-headed refusal to face facts and a hatefulness that belies the New York Times' lip-service worship of "inclusiveness."  How such an old sourpuss sustains such hatred without a coronary is a tribute to the restorative benefits of corrosive bile.

Norman Kjono takes each of Brody's points and punctures her conceits and falsity like a lance to a fetid boil.  On his way to a thorough reaming of the bitter Brody, Kjono contrasts her mendacity and bigotry with Edward R. Murrow, an icon of journalism, whose purpose was to dig out the facts and inform people rather than push a special interest's narrow agenda.  Murrow's legendary reputation and his enjoyment of cigarettes is a permanent repudiation to the narrow-minded and agenda-driven journalism that prissy hacks like Brody practice.  While hugging her hatred to her shriveled breast, Brody can take comfort that in her New York, Murrow -- along with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill -- would not be welcome while anti-smoker Adolf Hitler would be the toast of the town.

ABC News did a report on the study May 21, 2001, headlined "Patch May Not Help You Kick The Habit." Jeffrey Schneider at ABC News in New York confirmed that ABC World News Tonight was the network feed for the story. So, according to ABC News, if one gets their nicotine from Glaxo/SmithKline and their satisfaction from Philip Morris, apparently everything is in proper order.

Undoubtedly the Duke University study will open up a vast new "smoking cessation" market for Philip Morris' Next, which will certainly create more sales of Nicorette to folks who continue to smoke, which, in turn will help boost tobacco tax and "settlement" revenues. Which is what anti-tobacco is about at its core, to begin with: Crafting bizarre justifications to provide mercantile advantage to corporations that cow to their party line, and lining their own pockets with consumer dollars by doing so. What should be any different about anti-tobacco's latest scheme, that people should smoke in order to quit smoking?

We invite our readers to printout, read and distribute copies of the 4 page .PDF for Norman Kjono's second work in our series on the Duke University study, "Nicotine Free Smoke." Mr. Kjono also wrote Geoffrey C. Bible, CEO of Philip Morris, and to Washington's Secretary of Health Mary C. Selecky about that study. Readers can read and print out copies of those letters in the 2-page .PDF document "Nicotine Free Correspondence." The previous work "Will The Real Nicotine Addicts Please Stand Up," is available in a 4 page .PDF, as well. For an example of the pressure put on kids to use pharmaceutical nicotine, click here.

Finally, any reader who would appreciate comment from ABC News about their reporting on this story can contact Jeffrey Schneider at ABC News public relations in New York. Mr. Schneider can be reached at (212) 456-4040, E-Mail jeffrey.schneider@abc.com.

WILL THE REAL NICOTINE ADDICTS PLEASE STAND UP? - May 24, 2001 - Follow-up on the non-addictiveness of nicotine story (see Patch Might Not Help You Kick The Habit). Today we publish a well documented article by Norman Kjono. We recommend tthat our readership carefully read, download, and distribute this article, and the ones that will follow.

PUFF, THE MAGIC CAMEL - May 12, 2001 - While there are numerous arguments, well supported by tobacco control's own data, that disprove the theory new taxes materially reduce youth smoking, we believe history speaks clearly to the issue. History says that not only are Mr. Corr and the campaign deceiving parents and legislators, but they are doing so to line the pockets of their pharmaceutical sponsors and to keep their own gravy train delivering the grant bucks.

TAXING TEENS - May 9, 2001 - Make no mistake about it, Professor Gruber supports taxing teens as much as Nicotrol's Campaign for Tobacco-Free (but certainly not "Nicotine Free") Kids. After publishing the above observation on page 17 of his NBER working paper professor Gruber goes on to blithely recommend taxes on cigarettes to allegedly deter teen smoking. The above contrasting statements simply go to the proposition that tobacco control activists will advocate and vociferously demand new taxes on tobacco, regardless of what their own data say. The article is linked with "Joe Camel's Confound Samples," which includes 25 years of University of Michigan youth smoking data.

PLEASE, GEORGE DUBYAH, SAY IT AIN'T SO - April 26, 2001  - On Tuesday April 24 we posted a link to Sidney Zions' April 23, 2001 editorial in the New York Post regarding President Bush retaining Hillary Clinton's smoking ban at the White House. Mr. Zion correctly pointed out that there is no credible evidence independent of the tobacco control enterprise's self serving Junk Science that supports continuing such bans. Mr. Zion also reminded The Post's readers of U.S. District Court Judge William Osteen's scathing Memorandum and Opinion conclusions regarding EPA science that accompanied his order to vacate the December 1992 EPA Report on Environmental Tobacco Smoke. We share with Mr. Zion being somewhat perplexed about the stony silence on tobacco control issues at the Republican White House. After all, isn't it Republicans who are supposed to stand for lower taxes, reduced bureaucracy, and less intrusive government?

PRODUCT LIABILITY? - April 24, 2001 - What is the liability of an organized enterprise that aggressively sells a new belief to consumers that they are permanently addicted to a product that the enterprise describes as "The only product that, when used as directed, kills"? Before the tobacco control enterprise began its aggressive sales pitch in 1988 to convince consumers they are and were addicted to tobacco according to Centers for Disease Control "National Health Interview Surveys" data adult Former Smoker populations steadily increased. Beginning in 1990, immediately after Dr. C. Everett Koop's report that declared nicotine addictive, the adult Former Smoker population group stabilized, fewer people quit each year.

DISMISSED WITH PREJUDICE - April 20, 2001 - What happens when a tobacco control sting goes awry? The expedient course of action for the prosecution is to intimidate most of the store clerks who were cited for selling cigarettes to a minor into copping a plea, and then dismiss with prejudice charges against the one soul who refused to go along. But that scenario then leaves serious and nagging questions about how or why those who pled "Guilty" or "No Contest" to the same charge for the same sting were induced to do so. Norman Kjono presents a compelling report, "Dismissed With Prejudice," about an unsavory sting in Hawaii that may have included using fake ID's to entrap convenience store clerks. Whether or not fake ID's were used, which the facts indicate probably did occur in this case, the January 2001 sting in Maui, Hawaii raises additional and very troubling issues: What is a private special-interest foundation, the American Cancer Society, doing financing criminal prosecution of citizens? Where does the "anti" jihad end, when professional activists openly mandate prosecution of "Target" citizens, to suit their own revenue agenda?

SELLING ADDICTION TO KIDS - I - Few can forget Rep. Waxman's nationwide publicity stunt on prime time television a few years ago where he hauled tobacco executives before the House Commerce Committee, demanding that they concur with his decree that nicotine is is "addictive'.

WHAT PRICE, INTOLERANCE? - "California tavern owners are losing hundreds of millions in revenues per year, not to mention lost tips and wages from cut-backs... Hundreds of millions per year seems to be a paltry estimate... Adding tobacco and hospitality wages together, we are looking at $1 billion or more in lost wages... Oh, I see: this isn't about intolerance. It's for the public good, to eliminate the evils of tobacco from society."

Those RWJF grants are 1,048,507 reasons why tobacco workers in Virginia are fighting for their economic lives. Jobs and livelihoods are on the line in Virginia, to assure appreciation of a New Jersey foundation's $6 billion plus asset base.

"The drug makers' new strategy [long term use of smoking cessation products] has some obvious advantages."

THERE AIN'T NO MORE SECONDHAND SMOKE EXCUSES - Muncie Indiana - The first of many nails to be driven into the coffin of professional anti-tobacco activism went home soundly in Muncie yesterday. May the hundred of remaining second-hand smoke lawsuits go as straight and true.

GLAXO WELLCOME AND SMITHKLINE DRUG MARKETING - "Drug company support of anti-tobacco and anti-smoking activists goes back years: back to when the patches and gums appeared on the market more than a decade ago. It's just that such drug company support of anti-tobacco and anti-smoking activists has become so brazen today that it is no longer quietly hidden or overlooked. Is smoking now regarded by drug companies as a gateway habit, leading to the really good stuff? And the good stuff is FDA approved, with studies from the National Institutes of Health supporting the 'safety' of its use."

AND THEN, THERE WERE NONE... - March 8, 1998, The Daily Telegraph, an article headlined "Passive Smoking Doesn't Cause Cancer - Official", byline Victoria Macdonald, Health Correspondent: "The World's leading health organization has withheld from publication a study which shows that not only might there be no link between passive smoking and lung cancer but that it could even have a protective effect." Considering the nationwide anti-tobacco feeding frenzy here in the USA, as escalated to a $368 billion dollar special interest feast on lower income and ethnic minority pocketbooks by EPA "science" regarding secondhand smoke, disclosing how false the secondhand smoke claims of anti-tobacco are should be very big news.

TIME TO COME UP FOR AIR - Download and read at your leisure. This long piece is worth it, and it will be an eye-opener for anyone who believes that smoking bans are about workplace air quality. Why, for example, would a large business organization lobby against indoor air quality regulation, and aggressively support smoking bans in the place of (as a substitute for) such regulation? Big interests are blowing smoke behind the smokescreen of anti-tobacco....

THE LIGHT BEGINS TO BREAK THROUGH - "...we know, to the decimal, who will pay the new tobacco taxes so fervently advocated by President Bill Clinton and Senator Ted Kennedy: lower income, less educated, blue collar and ethnic minority citizens. We know this is true because the anti-tobacco Trough Skimmers who Bill and Ted so adamantly support defined those folks as a "target group" for new and specifically directed taxes more than eight years ago."

ATTENTION RESTAURANT OWNERS AND MANAGERS - "Cutters Bayhouse, 2001 Western Ave., Seattle (206-448-4884), was the first major restaurant in Seattle to go smoke-free free in 1992. But they paid a price, `We immediately lost 25 percent of our bar business and never recovered it,' said lunch manager Greg Stevens." What made restaurant owners think, in the first place, that they could serve political crap instead of good food to their smoking customers and still build a steady and reliable clientele?

AIR: ORGANIZING THE GOOD STUFF - Lucky John's, Too in Westminster, California sponsored a smoke-in that was broadcast live via a syndicated radio talk show. The owner of the Almond Tree Lounge in Auburn, California will stand trial; facing $1,300 in fines, rather than telling customers in his bar that they cannot smoke on his premises. Bar owners across California are turning off their Keno machines. Business owners in the hospitality industry are showing up in droves to support each other when confronted with the smoking police and their intrusive mandates.

MORE GOOD STUFF: ALMOND TREE LOUNGE - Auburn CA - A seventy-year-old man faces prosecution in California. His crime: permitting customers to consume a legal product on his business premises. According to an Associated Press article, as reported in The Seattle Times on February 14, 1998, Bill Ostrander is scheduled to have a nonjury trial March 13, 1998. He faces up to $1,300 in fines for allowing patrons to smoke in his bar.

INTOLERANCE PAYS: 1998, THE YEAR OF THE LOOTER - "Government funds the studies, doctors sign them off, lawyers pronounce what's bad this week, and media touts the cause."

HANDS OFF OUR KIDS - Anti-tobacco is not, and never has been, primarily about our kids or our public health. Anti-tobacco is about bucks and clout. Using kids to gratify an urge for bucks and clout is the lowest form of economic pedophilia that there is. Put the junk science bums in jail.

OBFUSCATION AND EVASION 101 - It seems that an amazing phenomenon occurs when folks leave the protected life of higher education and begin their ascension in the ranks of the employed. Some folks spend the rest of their lives proving that the tuition they paid was a waste. They engage in a career path of denying that A is still A, or trying to prove that 2 plus 2 now equals something other than 4.

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVIST CAMPAIGN FINANCE - Seattle Times Olympia Bureau, Byline Kery Murakami, "Group wants public money to finance election campaigns". Perhaps by accident, but with this article the press forgot about or overlooked its vested interest in protecting the $500 million per year plus revenue stream for anti-tobacco public advocacy advertising, as is written into the tobacco settlements. Stuff happens.

PROVIDENCE JOB DISCRIMINATION - I think we're supposed to be impressed and grateful. Providence Hospital has announced that it is no longer considering a ban on hiring persons who smoke. Jeez, that makes me feel good. Management at Providence has decided that they will not deprive themselves of the labor assets smokers contribute to help run their hospital. Wow!