PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

Smoking Bans: Still Frauds that SERVE the cigarette makers
by Watchdog Saturday, Jun. 09, 2007 at 7:59 PM

Pennsylvania is pushing ahead with a smoke ban...despite truckloads of evidence that justification for such laws is non-existent, incomplete, arbitrary, and fraudulent. Bar owners who oppose ought take care who they ask for help.

Bar and Restaurant proprietors who oppose smoking bans need to be Very Careful NOT to accept help or funding from agents of the Cigarette Industry.

For one thing, such "help" automatically discredits an opponent by the alliance with an industry that has provenly lied, poisoned and deceived. For another, such "help" will NOT address any of the points about fake tobacco or deadly non-tobacco cigarette components...points that can discredit the underlying "science" and undo a "ban" law in fifteen minutes, if presented in court, under oath.

Big Cig will provide "defense" tactics designed to protect itself from enormous PR disaster, enormous liabilities, and enormous penalties.

We need bans on Secret, Toxic, Cancer-Causing Contamination of Smoking Products, and of all Consumer Goods. Such a ban will NOT fracture society into warring camps, and it will not poison anyone, primary OR 2nd hand smokers.

And, we need bans on regulatory officials having economic links to the very industries they are sworn and paid to police.

It is virtually guaranteed that every official pretending to be "concerned" about smoking and health is economically linked to parts of the cigarette industry...not Cigarette Makers, but pesticide suppliers (including many pharmaceuticals), paper/pulp/timber, chlorine, agricultural products, petrochemicals, adhesives, sugar, and/or their insurers and investors.
THOSE are the entities with so much to gain by blaming the victims, by dumpting legal burdens on non-complicit bar owners etc, and scapegoating the virtually unstudied, public-domain, natural, traditionally-used tobacco plant.

NO natural plant, or its smoke, can possibly cause most of the diseases said to be "smoking related" or "tobacco related"...but dioxins are already NOTORIOUS for doing exactly that. No matter. With chlorine still legal in cigarettes, dioxin is still legal as pie in the smoke! If there's a bigger industrial crime, with more victims, involving more money, that even works to corrupt our medical and science systems, it is hard to think of one.

It's not that even the purest tobacco is 100% Risk Free. NOTHING is or can be.
This is about this industry, with full approval of gov't regulators, removing the CHANCE of harm and replacing it with INEVITABLE harm.

A pure water pond presents swimming RISKS...but a pond with secretly added sharks, piranha and nuclear waste is Quite Another Thing. It is an instrument of murder.

See: fauxbacco.blogspot.com for references...or simply Google relevant terms such as "dioxin tobacco" "tobacco pesticides" or "health insurers links to tobacco", etc.

More on this topic is right here at:
http://pittsburgh.indymedia.org/news/2006/09/24641.php