Forty-four years later
Jan 11, 2008 Americana
On this day in 1964,
In a landmark report, U.S. Surgeon General Luther Leonidas Terry issued the warning that smoking may be hazardous for one’s health, concluding that it has a causative role in lung cancer, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and other illnesses.
That’s how long it’s been since there’s been no excuse. (From Wikipedia.)
It’s bad enough that people do this to themselves — smoke cigarettes — despite what everybody has known in those 44 years. What is also remarkable is the hypocrisy of everyone else in the murder-suicide chain — but most of all, the state, which profits massively from tobacco taxes excised from addicts and from corporate and business taxes on the manufacture and sale of cigarettes, which doles out billion-dollar legal fees to politically-connected law firms that represent the “victims,” runs the judicial system that let that dirty deal go down, and pretends in the most preposterously transparent manner to actually care about who smokes.
Our country and our economy are addicted to assisted suicide by tobacco, and almost all of us are, one way or another, in on the game.
January 11th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Well, you DID use the word “addicted” so I’ll give you credit for that.
I think some day people will look back at our time and marvel that we put up AT ALL with state sanctioned sales of an addicting drug regardless of any other extenuating circumstances surrounding personal choice.
P.S. And don’t start with me about “the nanny state.” We’re killing our own kids — and our own future — by allowing tobacco companies to do business at all.
January 11th, 2008 at 11:32 am
And, no, I don’t favor “prohibition.”
January 11th, 2008 at 11:35 am
The first step in clamping down on cigarette use would be to force the cigarette companies to detail what exactly is IN cigarettes. Then, I would favor regulation of cigarettes in the same way the FDA would regulate any OTHER drug delivery device.