April 13, 1999 - The dishonesty of the anti-tobacco cartel is beyond the imaginable. And the naïvete of those who honestly believe the garbage the cartel spews out is equally unimaginable.

Alarmed to discover a large, new generation of smokers gathering in the nation's secondary schools and colleges, public health officials are facing a question they've never seriously confronted before: How do you get an addicted child to stop smoking?

...Notice the resounding title: "The Re-Hooked Generation..." Where is the musical commentary á la "ABC Nightline?"

Though stupid in its essence, this article is also skillfully, almost subliminally, hammering in the head of the reader the equation smoking = addiction. It is important to learn this well-developed techniques of anti-smoking propaganda, for this is how the anti-smoking cartel manages to convince the population that smoking is an addiction, a pandemic, and so on. The ability to read "behind the written lines" is important in order to protect ourselves against the messages hidden under the resounding propaganda.

In this article, the word "addiction" is mentioned 6 times, and the word "smoking," or "smoke," 29 times. That is an average of one in 35 words.

The average smoker starts at age 12, and nine out of 10 American smokers start using tobacco before they are 19. Many regret it right away; by college, half of them say they are trying to quit.

First speculation, and first negative association. "Many regret it... half of them say they are trying to quit". It is clear that the writer states this either out of sheer speculation, or this statement is based on small-sample statistics. The question/answer structure in those statistics is constructed in such a way as to make the only possible outcome of your answer to be a negative association with tobacco.

But most smokers aren't offered effective smoking-cessation counseling, classes or drugs until they are adults. By that time, the addiction is well entrenched.

Association on smoking/addiction/drug restated here, notwithstanding that smoking is not an addiction, but a habit.

Why the lag time? In large part, it's because no one's sure how to get kids to quit.
"Since prevention isn't working, we need to focus on cessation," says Dr. Nancy Rigotti, director of tobacco research and treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital. "But we don't know enough yet about what helps adolescents quit."

Here is the real motivator: MORE MONEY. Notice the low profile given to this aspect of the story.

Other doctors and public health experts agree.

"There is an effort under way, but it's still largely uncoordinated," says Dr. Richard Clayton, director of the Center for Prevention Research at the University of Kentucky. "It takes a while to figure out how to do these things."
Teen-age smoking rates had been stable for years. But, beginning in the early 1990s, rates began to nose upward among middle- and high-school students. About one in three high-school students now smokes regularly, and others use cigars and smokeless tobacco.

The request for money is again stated in this segment. But more importantly, this is where the stupidity and false information really begins. The actual reason for the increase of smoking among the youth is the relentless propaganda against tobacco. We all know that the best way to get the youth to do something is to perform negative advertisement -- or to forbid. This concept is certainly not novel, and it is well tested by human experience.

As FORCES contributor Norman Kjono, among so many others, has pointed this out in several articles ¹ it is impossible to believe that the anti-tobacco cartel criminals are not aware of this reality. The only real, effective way to reduce the number of young smokers is to stop the anti-tobacco propaganda cold, and to put an end to the infringment on the right to smoke. In short, we must return to a pre-1980 situation.

As soon as this would happen, tobacco would lose its appeal to the youth. But depriving tobacco of its aura, of course, is not what the real agenda of the cartel is. By perpetuating smoking, the cartel perpetuates its business -- and the immense financial rewards that come with it. Corrupted doctors, scientists, and "health" organizations want to continue to thrive while pretending to fight tobacco.

What I said above is not to be misconstrued as an implicit admission that the use of tobacco is a bad thing. Smoking is beautiful, rewarding, and it is the only mass-habit for which NONE of the attributed negative effects has yet been proven with scientific rigor. This unique peculiarity should tell us a lot on how false the anti-tobacco propaganda really is.

The most recent study, published this week, shows that the re-hooked generation has now entered college with the addiction well entrenched. On college campuses, the percentage of people defined as "current smokers" rose from 22 percent to 28 percent between 1993 and 1997.

There you go, another 'study' fresh out of the oven! The increase in smoking is the only truthful statement of the whole article. We have already examined the true reasons for this "phenomenon."

"These findings should be a source of concern to those interested in reducing tobacco use among young people," researcher Henry Wechsler of the Harvard School of Public Health and his co-authors wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Very credible organization indeed, the AMA, excelling in the publication and dissemination of junk science, and not just about tobacco.

"The increase in smoking first seen in middle-school and high-school students has reached the college population. … Ultimately, this trend threatens to slow or reverse the decline in adult smoking prevalence that has occurred since 1965 in the United States."
"I'm surprised that it's so strong in college," Wechsler said in an interview. "The remarkable thing is that it's occurring in every single subgroup." No one seems to know why the next generation has returned to tobacco, especially considering all the smoking-prevention efforts directed at them.

"We're seeing an intense amount of smoking, despite everything the anti-tobacco industry has done," says Cincinnati pediatrician Richard Heyman, chairman of the committee on substance abuse of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
"I don't know that anyone knows why it happened," Dr. Clayton says. "These are all the kids who got the biggest dose of information on the negative consequences of tobacco."

Mr. Heyman here makes a subliminal concession. He calls anti-tobacco for what it really is: an industry. Careful, Mr. Heyman: one more "Oops" like that, and you can forget about your next Mercedes!

In the unlikely assumption of honesty in the above statements, how little knowledge of human nature is left in America!

"I don't know that anyone knows why it happened?" The answer is plastered on each and every anti-tobacco ad: they keep TALKING about tobacco!. It is important to notice that these people, paid awesome amounts of money to tell us lies, demonstrate at least an equally awesome amount of incompetence in not admitting that anti-tobacco is the cause of the increase in smoking. It follows that these people, being either incompetent or liars (and often both) should not be allowed to sit in prestigious chairs, and bestow their garbage on the population.

Good old lost honesty and commonsense clearly indicate that these people should be fired, and the funds to anti-tobacco reduced to a big, fat zero. But the corrupted political environment in America protects these crooks who seem competent only in the art of deception, and allows them to keep misleading the population.

Realization that this trend threatens to undo the nation's decades-long decline in adult smoking has focused attention on how kids might be helped to kick the habit. "Their addiction can be every bit as severe as an adult's," says Dr. Heyman. Indeed, the new study found that half of current college smokers had tried to quit in the previous year, and that 18 percent had tried at least five times.

There we go again: "addiction," "severity of addiction," "new study..."

How much taxpayer money has that "study" cost, by the way? $100,000? $300,000? Where is the database? How we, the people, scrutinize the work of "the experts?" We are not supposed to -- how do we dare? And we really can't, because the databases are not accessible to the public.

And quitting will only get tougher.

Who wants to quit?! Smoking is beautiful, and sooo cool -- especially when it pisses the antis off!

"It gets harder to stop the longer they've been smoking," Dr. Clayton says. "More of their experiences are wrapped around smoking." After a few years, "they've never had an adult emotion without nicotine on board," he says.

The "wrapping" statement may be true, Mr. Clayton. As much as your paycheque is wrapped around anti-tobacco. You probably never had a bank experience without nicotine on board, either.

By intervening when they're still teen-agers, "we may be able to break the addiction when it's still a new experience."

That's more easily said than done. Quit-smoking materials created for an adult audience may fall flat among adolescents.
"The same things may not motivate them," Dr. Rigotti says. "Health is not a major motivator, because they don't think they are going to die."

Here we see the Socialist make up at work: intervention. There is nothing to intervene about. And the medical establishment (or the state) does not have the right to "intervene" in a personal behaviour that hurts no one.

And correction, Mr. Rigotti. It is the anti-tobacco cartel, of which you are obviously part, that is implying the illusion that if you quit smoking you are not going to die, or at least you are going to live longer. But the CDC's own figures show that smokers live even longer than non-smokers ¹, ². And huge Australian study could not hide the fact that smokers have less health problems and hospitalization than non-smokers do.

The reality is that everybody dies of something. Even in the folkloristic assumption that smoking actually causes lung cancer (still to be proven), how do you know that a smoker dying of lung cancer would not have died anyway (perhaps even earlier) from another form of cancer -- or maybe even the same lung cancer? You don't know, do you, Mr. Rigotti? Thus you are speculating... unless, of course, you can claim to have figured cancer out! Life cannot be rewound and replayed after changing some of its elements. So, you are pushing your speculations on us, and use your self-perceived authority to try to make your guesses believable. You justify your paycheque by being politically "in tune," though you must be aware of the suffering and the social tensions that the persecution of smokers creates thanks to the criminal endeavor you are supporting. I believe that this makes you and the rest of the cartel a crook, Mr. Rigotti -- a crooks who happens to be on the right side of an even more crooked political environment.

"Often they don't want to quit. They figure they will in a couple of years," says pediatrician Heyman, speaking from experience. The nicotine-replacement patches and gums that have helped many adults quit barely have been studied in adolescents. They're apparently safe, and some pediatricians do prescribe them for addicted adolescents who truly want to quit. But their acceptance and effectiveness among teens remain to be well measured.

This is the gem of the article. So, smoking is addictive because nicotine is addictive. But nicotine patches are "safe," to the point of being pushed on kids by individuals and organizations without any scruple . Why? Is this because they are marketed by the pharmaceutical industry, great moneybag of the cartel for crystal-clear reasons? How does Mr. Ansley, writer of this article, explain this paradox? It makes as much sense as saying that smoking crack cocaine is bad and addictive, but sniffing cocaine is not. Differently than methadone, which is a substitute for heavy drugs, here we are talking about delivering the same substance through different means.

Again, what kind of dishonesty or incompetence are Mr. Ansley and the rest of the cartel capable of? Obviously, the sky is the limit.

Even for college students, the help available may miss the mark if it's built around group counseling sessions. Students often don't have time to attend, says the director of Harvard University's student health service, which is about to introduce one-on-one counseling for students who want to stop smoking.

Obviously, students are much smarter than the cartel thinks. They have better things to do than listen to a bunch of well-paid liars -- like having some good sex, and a good smoke after that!

At least three nationwide efforts are under way to find ways to help kids stop smoking.
The National Cancer Institute has invested in several dozen grants aimed at identifying effective smoking-cessation programs.

Self-exaplanatory and right in our face. No further comment required.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is working on a government mandate to set up national youth smoking cessation programs. A spokesman says the CDC has not yet identified any clearly successful program. Among the efforts it's watching: a program in West Virginia that uses facilitators in schools to conduct eight one-hour group sessions that emphasize stress management and give awards to students who cut down on smoking, and a program in California that offers telephone counseling for students trying to quit.

"Behave as the state wants, and get a medal..." Sinister, familiar sound.... It would be interesting to ask, during these "sessions" where Reykjavik is, what it is, and how to spell it -- and give an award to the student who answers right, admitting that there is still one left!

And the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is providing funding for studies of children's nicotine dependence.

Indeed. Lots of money to the anti-tobacco criminals. It makes good business sense. They are J&J's best salespeople for those patches and inhalers they produce! The J&J people may be twisted, but they are certainly not stupid!

Among the open questions, Dr. Clayton says, is discovering where adolescent behavior is most susceptible to change. "Do you tinker with peer norms, expectations, attitudes or environmental settings?"

What a discovery, this susceptibility to change! Only an anti-tobacco cartel egghead like him could come up with such unique and profound observation...

Meanwhile, experts urge schools, doctors and parents to do all they can with the tools now available.

We urge them too!

Schools, doctors, parents: stop lying to the children about tobacco. Don't induce them to believe that they are going to live long, happy lives without tobacco anymore than with it. This is not true, for no one knows what will happen on everyone's the path of life.

Do not teach them intolerance, hatred, disrespect for their smoking parent(s). Do not try to perpetuate your own hatred and fears and obsessions in them. Your children deserve better than that. Don't fear the truth that tobacco is not a demon, but a pleasure with its costs and its rewards. Do not be afraid to say that you DON'T KNOW what the consequence of tobacco use really are.

Do not influence their choice. Respect your children as human beings capable of their own decisions, often at a very young age. Give them a chance to chose independently.

They will pleasantly surprise you.

Dr. Clayton suggests that schools go beyond the health-oriented messages and apply what he calls "environmental strategies." For instance, he says, principals could pretend the faculty restrooms are broken, and force teachers to share the students' restrooms, which would mean fewer kids sneaking in there to smoke.

Here is the essence of paternalism and anti-tobacco. Yes! Let us teach the children the use of lies and deception. Let us teach them to fear deception -- but to use it well. Let us show them how to sneak on people. Let us give them rewards when they "report" on their peers smoking. This is the essence of a good Communist regime: the reliance on deception and snitching to get recognition.

Mr. Clayton's words describe, more than anything I can write, how traitorous and putrid anti-tobacco really is, and how much faith there is in repression and deception.

When confronted with young patients who smoke, Dr. Heyman tries to get them to discuss what they get out of smoking, acknowledge the pros and cons, and agree to cut their daily smoking by a few cigarettes.
But there's no question that such efforts are the tougher way to keep smoking rates down, Heyman says. "The key is getting them not to start."

Winding down the comments on this pile of garbage, here is 'dialogue' according to the cartel: "...acknowledge the pros and cons, and agree to cut their daily smoking" -- with the foregone implication that this is how things must be done. Thus the 'discussion' is not to establish if smoking is bad, but to use such mockery of dialogue as a TOOL to achieve a predetermined and unmovable goal. Given the circumstances, are we sure that the sick person here is the one who smokes?

It is a fact that the young people are very sensitive to the inconsistencies of the adults. The inconsistencies of anti-tobacco, its hauling philosophical and logical contradictions, its screaming corruption and falsehoods certainly do not go unnoticed by the youth. And this is one important reason why the young take up smoking. They are giving us a strong message that no one wants to hear: "We don't believe you" -- and they are so right.

Soon, a new, strong and massive generation of smokers will get into power, and clean up the scum that has created them. This new generation will remember the awesome failure of its predecessor and hopefully, will restore some fairness and common sense.

Though a pipe smoker, I light a cigarette to that.

Gian Turci
FORCES INTERNATIONAL