Impressive salvo of false information in this piece by the Times Herald-Record. “If alcoholics and drug addicts want to kick their habits, they’d better be ready to snuff out their cigarettes. Indoors and outdoors, smoking will be banned at 1,400 recovery centers throughout the state starting next summer. In place of their butts, patients will be offered free treatment for their nicotine addictions.” Yep, promoting Big Pharma once again – and since the “free treatment” for smoking — the disease that does not exist — must be PAID by someone (guess who, the tax payers!), it’s natural to wonder what role the interests of the pharmaceuticals play in the state Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services. When considering the total prostitution of “public health” to the pharmaceutical industry today, this is a more than legitimate and logical question.
Here comes the chain of predicatable lies, this time spoken by Karen Carpenter-Palumbo: ‘We know that 92 percent of those addicted to alcohol or drugs are smokers" … "We know it’s a trigger to alcohol and drug addiction. And we know smoking kills 25,000 New Yorkers each year." ‘
No, we DON’T know that smoking kills 25,000 New Yorkers each year because the death “caused” by smokers cannot be scientifically quantified if not by fraudulent and at any rate totally arbitrary (thus political) assumptions. And no, we don’t know that smoking is a trigger for alcohol and drug addiction. The “gateway theory” was canned even by the antitobacco cons themselves years ago – certainly not because of honesty, but simply because not even the gullible public would buy that. But by bringing the theory up, Carpenter-Palumbo can explain the cause with the effect and turn things upside down, as antismokers so often do – the implication being that smoking that causes alcoholism and drug addiction.
Once again, blind fanaticism driven by emotions such as hatred and hysteria (as well as false information on smoking) endangers what otherwise may be sound social programs against substances that are real causes of death and social disintegration – not false figures spat by imagination and dishonesty and fed into computers. Health first? No: hatred, pharmaceutical interests and political agendas first. Real health can wait.
As to smoking, many of say: no thanks, we will not quit. “Repeat offenders of the smoke-free edict could be booted from state-certified programs under the new regulation”. Well, consider us proud repeat offenders already in the smoke-free clinic that society as a whole seems increasingly to be.
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