November 11, 1998 - Newspapers around the world are reporting an incredible revelation: nicotine may be good for you! (1, 2).

Christopher Columbus has finally rediscovered America -- after bringing back the terrible, mortal, addictive, degrading tobacco leaf to the Old World!

Sometimes I wonder: how many University degrees do you have to have in front of your name to see the obvious? Or, better put, how many titles must you carry for the press and the layman to believe you? Three? Five? None? Perhaps belonging to some pharmaceutical-financed institution is the key to being heard.

I believe that the best way to describe today's hollow public opinion is to compare it to the mysteries of the ocean. In it, huge schools of fish move about in perfect coordination. But when there is the slightest perturbation, the thousands of fishes in the school all change direction at the same time. But, how? Who is the leader? Nobody knows.

Nicotine has been described as the quintessential evil, with no redeeming characteristics. Smokers are accused of being responsible for wasting huge amounts of corporate time in smoking breaks -- because of the "addictiveness " of nicotine. Universities support websites maintained by students who compare nicotine to heroin and cocaine, and complete the description with images of syringes made to look like cigarettes. In Washington DC, pharmaceutical-funded activists organize children in Nazi-style parades to march in front of the White House, and ask the politicians for "protection" from the deadly addiction of smoking and the terrible substance it unleashes. In doing so, they pass right in front of ghettoes ridden by drugs, disease, crime, ignorance and starvation -- right downtown in the capital of the United States. How pathetically touching.

Above and beyond the statistically fabricated "tobacco-related diseases", smokers smoke simply because is pleasurable, and gratifying. And the huge majority of them get to die "prematurely" at a respectable old age -- because of tobacco, of course!

The evidence that certain diseases such as Alzheimer and Parkinson's affect smokers much less than non-smokers is totally lost in the great anti-tobacco clamor. Smokers are usually much more alert and productive than their non-smoking counterparts, and this cannot be reconciled with the "creative" statistics about the loss of productivity fabricated by the anti-tobacco cartel.

Yet smokers are totally excluded from the tobacco debate by the press and the health cartel, except, of course, in the sentimental function of "victims" by the all-of-a-sudden-humane political gangs of various public health entities. Perhaps if smokers were honestly asked why they smoke, they would tell us that it is because they get relaxed, alert, and feel a general sensation of well being.

But why doesn't the puritan health scum "lower" itself to ask us poor addicts? For the same reasons they avoid debating FORCES and other smokers' rights groups as much as possible: they are afraid we may expose them for what they are -- liars --and this is no small danger when medical and political careers, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in grants are at stake!

Interestingly, the "terrible addictiveness" of nicotine magically disappears when it is packaged and sold by the pharmaceutical industry -- as a smoking cessation device. Even the most revoltingly rabid spokespersons of the anti-tobacco cartel promote nicotine-loaded smoking cessation devices -- to save children and adults, of course. I remember seeing a picture of Garfield Mahood of the Canadian grant-funded Non-Smokers' Right Association holding a box of what appeared to be Nicorette Gum during a conference. How come good old Garfield promotes such a terrible substance, when he is so committed to "save lives"?

It seems that the chemical properties of nicotine change curiously according to the political agenda of the promoter. Nicotine is a bad chemical if RJ Reynolds promotes it, but good if pushed by Johnson & Johnson (and the political cartel the company supports at the tune of millions of dollars).

So, now we discover that nicotine is not too bad, after all -- actually, it is good.

The scientific evidence has been with us for the longest time, and we at FORCES have published lots of it (1, 2, 3). Why has it been disregarded? Come on, the answer is simple: who are we at FORCES to know something about it? How can we possibly compare ourselves with the enlightened members of the American Cancer Society in the US, or the Non-Smokers' Rights Association in Canada, for example? Where are our public and private grants to prove that we are disinterested? And finally, how do lay people dare to disagree with the great and in-the-know medical class, anyway?

We, the commoners and the flat-earthers, the unqualified and the politically incorrect, we are supposed to let go of our obsolete values and way of life, and just listen to our benefactors -- not think. We must gape in humility at the awesome revelations of the pharmaceutical industry telling us how to ingest the latest, very profitable designer molecule that makes us happy and healthy (such as the "new nicotine" they are preparing for us). And as good and progressive citizens (sorry -- consumers), we have to quickly and unconditionally modify our behaviour according to the agendas of politicians, doctors, and drug companies -- including the activists they support.

Just like a fine school of fish.