Letter to the Editor

Hello;
As balance is required in all public distributions of the news, I would like to present a commentary on the third hand smoke articles published recently.

First, I would like to point out, I am not selling cigarettes, or any notion they are safe or they should be promoted as such. What I am more concerned with, is the fundamental shift from denouncing a product we could easily ban, to denouncing real people. A campaign initiated by an agreement signed by our federal government with the world health organization, which clearly is an obligation to reduce smoker prevalence and the use of cigarettes. This is not in any way a green light to wage war on those affected with bigotry or moral impositions. Nor a permission by over funded lobby groups, to recreate morality in their own image, to serve their own needs or purposes to the peril of their victims.

It has to be understood, the industrial component of this campaign is conflicted and seek as partners, in what is referred to as a Public Health intervention, to profit by the sale of alternative products, such as smoking patches and gum. Tax exempted foundations such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation are directly profiting from their ownership of millions of shares held in their parent founder, which is Johnson and Johnson with the majority of board members current or former directors of Johnson and Johnson. The organized meetings and strategy sessions, which drive the bulk of Public Health campaigns such as this, are sponsored directly including in most cases; hotel, meal expenses, conference hall bookings, gala functions and awards ceremonies. An investment of billions with a reasonable expectation of returned profits.

Getting back to the study. Jacob Sullum, of Reason magazine made a quite reasonable observation of the so called ‘study” in pointing out; this was not a measure of potential harms or risk by process evaluation, this report was simply a phone survey with a quite limited explanation, of what the interviewer refers as “third hand smoke” and asked if a person were exposed to a list of largely petroleum use and production by-products, which are found as the researcher points out, quantitatively in our daily environment regardless of smoking, would the respondent agree those toxins might cause harm. There is no discussion of the levels and known safe levels discussed, there is no comment on how many, if any, would be affected, there is simply a declared conclusion that a risk exists.

The way this was presented in large scale news releases, carried by virtually every news agency in North America placed the focus primarily on the conclusions, we created a rumor and people reacted impulsively by giving this report, a lot more weight and focus than it should be reasonable to assume it is due.

The article we saw published, listed the numerous impositions and community divisions, achieved by the lobbies to date, and simply wrote an entitlement to continue to encroach further into; the personal lives, parental autonomy and homes of others.

People need to take what they read with a little less trust and that is the sad reality in all of this. The damage to our safety and security is inevitable, when the institutions and charities we have learned to trust, reorganize as political organizations, which serve the needs of institutions and profit, in place of the people paying for them.

Smoking might not be the wisest of choices, however many of those who smoke have done so for many years. People smoked in the majority, well before our health care system existed. We have now accepted “sin taxes” to control the lives of others with the claims they reduce the costs of healthcare as their necessity. The Universality of healthcare was fractured the day smoking taxes were implemented, because targeted taxation taken to benefit only the majority destroyed that claim of universality. More recently we have seen the implementation of taxing a nondescript “non healthy foods” with hidden taxes, most are not even aware they are paying, to combat the costs of obesity and what they named “the fat pandemic”. Although communities are divided in the righteous and moral integrity of imposing such laws, which serve some and degrade others, when the campaign focuses on your “protection” without request, things seem to change and the insult comes much more clearly into focus.

If we can allow bigotry and hatred to guide our laws and communities, we only punish ourselves. Smoking bans could be replaced with signs and good judgment, trusting the property owner to decide what is best for his own business. As confident communities have always used consistently in the past. It is only when we seek to punish others, because they do not share our values, that bans and criminalization become popular for the larger group, in spite of the minority and the hatred we demonstrate in our demands.

The notion of a population bubble moving into old age with new protections in place which seek to extend their lives, will somehow reduce the cost of healthcare is amusing to a fault. If you have more elderly people you have increased the largest demographic of the lions share of health care expenses. Does that align well with lowering the costs of healthcare? Through historical observations, the numbers can never accomplish what the self-important lobbies claim they will. We will always have a number one killer to slay, while we divert ourselves with greenhouse campaigns and pandemic pandemonium away from the industry toxins, causing us all the greatest harm. If we candy coat every citizen in this country with protections from the cradle to the grave what will those protections cost? Communism always fails, because it is simply not viable and never meets the advertised and optimistic expectations. Hitler’s favorite campaign slogans, always involved protecting the children and the race, as do China’s “protections” of Tibet. Are either credible?

People need to get back to trusting each other, because we can no longer trust the media to take out the trash. Conglomerate news agencies and ad agencies who sell third hand smoke, are dictating your news. The papers and the network affiliates exist primarily only to rebroadcast the sold products coming off the news wire. It is up to the rest of us now, to consider the source and follow the money, because it is obvious, no one else is doing it.

Many people today who vote for what is advertised as liberal or progressive ideologies, are in fact promoting neo-conservative candidates, regardless of what is advertised on the posters.

People are constantly let down by their candidates after the elections, by their choice of leaders who never get it quite right. Which explains the decades old desire for change.

Most on both sides of the heath scare debate would prefer to avoid partisan or political language. Divided thinking and pessimism as always, we have a problem dealing with the obvious wedge issue which should be defining party politics, as opposed to allowing poll sitters in government to jump on any issue and make it their own.

A point of division for politicians and rejoining of communities, which should be obvious to anyone who rightly believes politicians are all crooks and none deserve our support.

When you abandon traditional "party first" mindsets and really look; the move of all parties to the center leaves them wide open to embarrassment for abandoning party values.

When Liberals support partnership with old money industries and use taxes to sell their products, how can a liberal claim they are liberal.

Alternately can a conservative deny they have gone back to the motivations of failed corporatist policies? Demanding presumptions of guilt, in shoot first ask questions later, among their many mistakes of the past?

When either party promotes protectionist policies such as smoking bans or fat taxes, serving old money bottom lines, large government and the banging of tambourines, they all find themselves in neo-conservative territory.

Promoting only higher crime rates by punishing the innocent, who would prefer to be left alone.

Lyndon Johnson selling cholesterol in eggs all over again...

If we recognize that communities are no longer motivated by confidence, learned traditional values and intelligence.

They now have to be pushed by the constantly adjusted and always inconsistent overbearing moralist values of the state, entitled substantially by an obscenity described as science, promoted fear, divisions, and exclusions.

The problem lies in lost confidence; in ourselves, our systems of government, and the level [or lack] of intelligence guiding them.