Copyright © 1996 by Bill Drake All Rights Reserved
Last Updated February 27, 2002
Welcome to this site. Limited permission is hereby granted to individuals to print a single hard copy of these materials for personal reading, and to individual teachers and health professionals to make limited copies of these materials for distribution to students or patients. With these limited exceptions, none of these copyrighted materials may be printed or distributed, nor incorporated into any other body of work for distribution of any kind in any medium, without prior written permission from the author, which will be readily provided in most cases. Please contact me directly bdrake@ktc.com
Because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the problem being addressed, existing worldwide efforts to deal effectively with the health hazards clearly presented by cigarette smoking and other so-called tobacco product use continue to have limited success, and the industry is able to quietly stifle most attempts to regulate smoking wherever they arise, whatever strategy they develop.
The strategic problem shared by tobacco and smoking opposition and control groups worldwide is that they assume that the tobacco products they oppose or want to regulate actually contain tobacco. This leads directly to the assumption that smoking-related disease is caused by tobacco smoke. Both of these assumptions are at least partly wrong in the case of most tobacco products, and are completely wrong in many cases. This leads to an unfortunate world in which, I believe, many good people have been deceived into literally tilting at windmills in a fog of smoke and illusion.
The tobacco products industry stopped being the tobacco industry over thirty years ago, and many brands of contemporary American cigarettes actually contain very little tobacco. Some American cigarette, pipe tobacco, cheap cigars, wet snuff, and chewing tobacco brands contain leaf tobacco - but very few. Many contain reconstituted tobacco, made from waste and scrap, not from leaf. Many American cigarette, pipe tobacco, cheap cigars, wet snuff, and chewing tobacco brands are also manufactured partially, and some are made exclusively from a material called alpha-cellulose, which has been chemically stripped out of such natural resources as food processing waste, municipal waste, and forest industry waste.
Alpha cellulose is cellulose in its most basic form, stripped of every identifying natural compound that gave whatever its parent plant was its aroma, flavor, character, and identity. It is pure cellulose, ready to accept whatever chemical treatments the tobacco industry wants to apply.
They have to apply plenty of chemicals, especially solvents, because the cellular structure of alpha-cellulose is very densely packed, and it is very difficult to get flavoring agents, smoker satisfaction chemicals, and other additives and specialty cigarette manufacturing chemicals to penetrate these dense cellulose fibers.
That's why the dyes, flavoring chemicals, aromatics, and a wide range of substances and materials are carried into the cell structure of the alpha-cellulose by powerful solvents like benzene, phosgene, and cyclohexane. Many of these processing chemicals remain in medically significant amounts as residue in the final cigarette product, and are inhaled by the smoker and by passive smoking victims.
As an example, take this quote from U.S.Patent # 4,079,742, dated March 21, 1978 and titled "Process For The Manufacture Of Synthetic Smoking Materials"
"Many attempts have been made to utilize cellulosic materials, such as alpha-cellulose, as smoking materials to be used as tobacco replacements or supplements. However alpha-cellulose and similar materials have, in their untreated form, not been found to be entirely satisfactory materials, either with regard to their burning characteristics or with regard to their smoke properties."
The inventors then go on to describe their invention, which uses acids, solvents, and a range of chemicals to produce special flavorings which, they claim, effectively turns alpha-cellulose into smokable materials.
They give several examples of how well their invention disguises non-tobacco smoking materials, including one in which some "fine grade excelsior cut from Virginia Loblolly pine" was treated with NO2 gas at 25ºC for 12 hours. The material was then heated, extracted, soaked in acids, and washed. This material was then sprayed with 3% glycerine and 3% of the newly invented flavorants, and then dried. This processed Loblolly pine sawdust was then blended with shredded tobacco in a 1:2 ratio and made up into cigarettes.
Finally, the inventors reported that
"Cigarettes containing the smoking material of this invention were adjudged by a panel of 10 experienced smokers to be comparable to control cigarettes consisting entirely of tobacco."
Another U.S.Patent # 4,473,085 dated Sept 25, 1984 and assigned to Philip Morris Inc., NY enthusiastically describes a process which can be used to convert anything, from tobacco stems and stalks to alpha-cellulose, into smoking materials. In defining their invention, the inventors specify that
"The term "non-tobacco substitute" is meant to include smoking filler materials such as are disclosed in U.S. Patents #s 3,529, 602; 3,703,177; 3,796,222; 4,019,521; 4,079, 742. Illustratively, U.S.Patent # 3,529,602 describes a burnable sheet which may be used as a tobacco substitute, which sheet contains ingredients which include (1) a film-forming ingredient comprising a pectinaceous material derived from tobacco plant parts, and (2) a mineral ingredient comprising an alkaline earth metal salt or a clay."
As we said, cigarettes and other so-called tobacco products today are manufactured with dense cellulose materials which have to be processed using solvents such as benzene, cyclohexane, and phosgene, all of which have been known for years to leave carcinogenic residue in significant concentrations. Hundreds of other chemicals and substances are used by multinational cigarette manufacturers completely without regulatory oversight concerning the known or potential health risks posed by their residues to both smokers and nonsmokers alike.
As an example, consider U.S.Patent # 3,920,026 dated November 18, 1975 and assigned to Liggett & Myers Inc., Durham, N.C.
In this patent the inventors discuss the use of solvents to inject flavor into inert synthetic smoking materials, and the industry's inability to remove these solvent residues, at least two of which are known carcinogens appearing regularly in assays of cigarette smokestreams and by implication attributed to tobacco.
"Undesirable taste characteristics of reconstituted tobacco products are often encountered, which are related to the green taste of poor tobaccos, or the papery taste of stem materials. Incorporation of flavorants or flavorant release agents into tobacco has typically been accomplished by dissolving the flavorant or agent into a suitable solvent. The solution of flavorant material is thereupon sprayed on the tobacco or injected into the tobacco matrix - in the case of reconstituted sheet."
" The solvent employed depends upon the particular flavorant material employed. Solvents have included water and various organic materials such as alcohol, acetone, or cyclohexane. Distribution of additives on the tobacco fibers may often be uneven, and more importantly, full penetration of the added substances into the cellular structure may not be achieved. Removal of residual solvent is often a problem."(emphasis added)
Not all cigarettes are manufactured from residue-contaminated synthetic materials; many actually contain a form of reconstituted material called sheet tobacco, which allows the manufacturers to claim that they are using tobacco in their products. However this sheet tobacco is not what we are led to assume by subtle and very expensive industry advertising techniques. Almost without exception I'm sure that Americans believe that cigarette tobacco is little strands of golden leaf, carefully cured in sagging but sturdy barns by southern rustics, all of whom have twelve children and live on their tobacco allotment check from the government.
In reality most of what the cigarette manufacturers call tobacco in their products is hardly what comes out of sturdy southern barns. Demonstrating the irony of cigarettes' continuing exemption from regulation based on the argument that they are tobacco, or even agricultural products consider this passage from U.S.Patent # 4,286,606 entitled Tobacco Flavorants. This patent is dated Sept. 1, 1981 and assigned to Philip Morris Inc., NY. In their introduction describing the state of the art, the inventors give a brief synopsis of materials which tobacco industry manufacturers routinely include in their products.
"The term "smoking material" encompasses all types of tobacco, such as shredded filler, leaf, stem, stalk, homogenized leaf, reconstituted tobacco, and blended mixtures thereof. In addition, "smoking materials" may encompass the various smoking substitutes formulated from non-tobacco materials. These materials may be utilized alone or blended in varying proportions with tobacco components."
It may be startling enough to see that tobacco products are evidently made with tobacco trash and non-tobacco waste, but consider this - a large percentage of the tobacco trash used to make American cigarettes is brought in from processing plants in Third World countries. While the US government makes a pretense of regulating the pesticide residue contaminants of imported foreign tobacco leaf it relies on certification from the importers, who rely on certification from the producers. In addition many categories of imported tobacco materials other than leaf are exempt, and the regulations apply only to pesticide residues banned for use on tobacco in the U.S. Finally, only Virginia and Flue-cured leaf imports fall under any kind of effective scrutiny, even within the narrow parameters of the regulations.
One of the biggest problems with cigarette pesticides is that while a high proportion of the pesticides, contaminants, additives and residues in cigarettes survive the smoking process in one form or another, some are changed by the process of heating and smoking from a dangerous carcinogenic substance such as DDT, into a highly dangerous substance like benzo-a-pyrene. Research reported in 10/96 by US scientists has established benzo-a-pyrene as a positive causal agent in cigarette smoke, leaving unanswered the question of how the benzo-a-pyrene gets there. On the internet see http://www.sciencemag.org:80/science/scripts/display/full/274/5286/430.html
While some benzo-a-pyrene may come from natural tobacco being combusted in the cigarette, and this portion would be unpreventable even if the cigarette were 100% uncontaminated tobacco, some of the benzo-a-pyrene comes from the combustion of DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbon contaminants of cigarettes made from reconstituted foreign waste and scrap.
Some of the pesticides which have been routinely present in American cigarettes beginning in the early 1950s include medically significant concentrations of DDT, Endrin, Dieldrin, Aldrin, BHC, EDB, Chlordane, Heptachlor, Aldicarb, and Carbaryl. Many of these pesticides are detailed elsewhere in this site, and there is extensive literature on their health implications, much of it connected with EPA registration procedures.
While many of the contaminants, additives and residues in cigarettes and cigarette smoke are not carcinogenic, they have other dangerous properties. Some are known to be damaging to rapidly dividing fetal tissues; some attack and mutate or destroy genetic materialsand some interfere with reproduction and produce damaged babies, both insect and human; while others suppress immune system function. Smokers expose themselves and their families to all of the health risks just listed as a direct result of the total lack of product content regulation enjoyed by cigarette manufacturers.
If cigarettes were regulated to standards of content and contaminant levels comparable with any other food, drug or cosmetic product, a major portion of the health risk for smokers and non-smokers alike would simply disappear. The industry cleverly disassociated itself from the Pure Food, Drug & Cosmetic act, arguing successfully ( in a heavily southern democratic congress) that tobacco was neither a food nor a drug and should be exempt from FDA and other such regulation.
The best measure of the impact of contemporary cigarette manufacturing practices is to look at smoking-related death and disease statistics in the US in the 1920-1940 period, and in the period 1940 to present. Although oversimplification is always a danger, so is the tendency to lose sight of simple and true observations.
Cigarettes produced before 1940 were largely tobacco, and until the development of DDT were relatively free of agricultural and manufacturing chemical additives. From 1940-1965 cigarettes were still largely manufactured from tobacco, but were increasingly heavily contaminated with pesticides and other agrichemicals soon discovered to be carcinogenic like Dieldrin, Aldrin, and Endrin.
In fairness, its useful to realize that people were trying to invent smoking additives and substitutes long before the cigarette companies began messing around with industrial wastes. Inventors of tobacco substitutes were at work very early in this country's history. For example, U.S.Patent # 12,417 describes the use of cornstalks boiled to make a syrup which is put on leaves of Indian corn shucks to smoke as a tobacco substitute, and U.S.Patent # 97,962 describes the use of crushed eucalyptus leaves treated with flavors and made up into cigars.
The really dangerous trend, from the standpoint of public health impact, has been that from 1965 to present, cigarette manufacturers have increasingly substituted reconstituted and synthetic smoking materials for leaf tobacco in cigarettes, and these high-tech materials require use of a wide range of hazardous chemicals, none of which comes under any regulatory review due to the exempt status of "tobacco" products.
Much of the slaughter caused by the cigarette industry could be ended with simple Federal legislation. The cigarette industry's exemption from regulation under the federal Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act is based on the assumption that cigarettes are made from tobacco, which is exempt from regulation. However, since cigarettes are no longer manufactured from exempt materials, they should no longer be granted exemption from regulations designed to protect the public.
Once it is clear that cigarette manufacturers can no longer justify an exemption, based on being a "tobacco" product, from the Federal Pure Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act, the gate will open to successful regulation of the worst hazards presented by this renegade industry. I believe that a proper hearing before Congress would reveal the extent of the hazard presented by unregulated use of chemicals and synthetic materials, and uninspected product evidently contaminated by a range of dangerous substances picked up during manufacturing. I believe that product liability lawsuits can be successfully brought by victims of this industry, given appropriate information resources and legal assistance.
For an informative and poignant look at the perspectives of a long-time employee of the tobacco industry who lost his wife to cigarette-related cancer, read "Memoirs In A Country Churchyard- A Tobaccoman's Plea: Clean Up Tobacco Row!", by Howard Nuttall, published by Brunswick Publishing Company, 1-800-336-7154. Recommended by Larry Breed. You can also look over a review of the book on the internet at http://www.gateway-va.com/pages/news/tobac/1223phil.htm
Please contribute comments, information, research or suggestions, which will enhance the effectiveness of this site by contacting bdrake@ktc.com
If the best way to hide an idea is to make it obvious, then the secret that tobacco is a highly psychoactive plant with a long and involved history of Native American magical, spiritual, ritualistic, and purely hedonistic usage has been effectively obscured by the universal assumption that cigarettes are tobacco and that to have smoked cigarettes is to have experienced tobacco.
As an early enthnologist remarked:
"It is a curious fact that while the Whites took the material tobacco from the Indians they took with it no fragment of the world that accompanied it, nor were they at first aware that there was such a world. After all of the generations that have elapsed since its introduction among the Whites, it has woven itself scarcely at all into their psychology and mythology. Lady Nicotine is enshrined among the Whites only as a drug, as a taste, as a habit, along with the seeking after mild and tasty forms, while the Native peoples make tobacco a heritage from the gods, a strange path which juts from there into this world and leads to the very ends of magic."
It's important to keep in mind that all aboriginal and natural people are very familiar with the toxic plants in their environment. Many of these plants have a place in the medicine chest of shamans, but are left alone by regular people, who respect their powers. But tobacco, with deadly nicotine resins shining on its leaves, is eagerly and routinely smoked and snorted by millions of native, natural people who understand plants, toxins, medicines, and gifts from the gods.
Indian peoples of North, Central and South America were uniformly familiar with the plant and prized its use in opening the doors of perception, curing bodily disease and infirmity, reducing the impact of life's twin afflictions, hunger and fatigue, and for its role in deepening and broadening human relationships on both the personal and community level.
And then, as in any society there were those among the Native Americans who disregarded the sacred and simply enjoyed the intoxicating aspects of this great plant - people like Vaskok.
Sometimes when the tobacco is strong the man himself when he smokes does not know when he faints away. Sometimes he falls to the ground and does not know it. Somebody else says "Look, he is fainting". They see his hands shake. He feels good for a long time after he smokes, if he likes to smoke he feels good for a long while. Sometimes he falls on the ground when he feels faint.
He feels good over all his meat when he takes it into his lungs. Sometimes he rolls up his eyes. And sometimes he falls over, backward he falls over backward. He puts his pipe quickly on the ground, then he falls over. Then they laugh at him, they all laugh at him. Nobody takes heed when one faints from smoking, but if he faints because he is sick, then they throw water on him. When it is from tobacco that he faints, they know he does not lie there stiff long.
They say that some old men have to walk with a cane when they have finished smoking, they feel it so good over their whole meat. I used to see them, the old men. It was the strong tobacco, that was what they liked. They fall on the ground. They awaken, and they smoke again. People always laugh at the old men smoking. When they smoke they talk in the sweathouse. All at once one man quits talking. That is the way they used to do in the old times. They used to like the tobacco so well. They used to like the tobacco strong. Whenever they faint from tobacco, they always get ashamed. They used to do that way, get stunned.
Sometimes one fellow will have so strong tobacco that nobody can stand it without fainting, it is so strong. He feels proud of his strong tobacco. Some were fainters when they smoked, others never did faint. Some faint when the tobacco gets strong from them, and others do not.
Vaskok was a fainter when he smoked. Everybody knew that Vaskok was a fainter. Vaskok used to faint, but he liked it. When he first starts to smoke he does not fall. It is when he finishes smoking a pipeful of tobacco that he falls; it is then as it gets strong for him that he falls.
From Travels Among The Aleuts
Alexander Griggs, 1874
What happened? Where did psychoactive tobacco go? What are all these little paper tubes that so many people are sucking on at the rate of 20, 40 and more a day? How come nobody seems to be aware of the magical, spiritual, visionary and euphoric uses of native, herbal tobacco? And where did this idea come from that growing tobacco was a complicated and tricky business, better left to experts, who then sell it to the public in little, expensive packages.
In much of the world today, tobacco is home-grown and used for pleasure, for relief from hunger and fatigue, for minor profit sold to neighbors or at the marketplace, and for use as an herbal remedy. So why don't Americans and Europeans seem to know much of anything about the true nature of this plant - to the extent that the suffering and death of millions of people every year is blamed on their consumption of tobacco?
This site is dedicated to making argument and evidence available to you, and to others who visit, that it is not pure, natural tobacco that is responsible for much, if not most of the death and disease attributed to so-called tobacco products.
First contact between tobacco and the White race took place during the first voyage of Admiral Columbus in 1492. After touching land at San Salvador, Columbus steered south by southwest and, after a few hours, spotted a canoe in the open sea. Pulling alongside the canoe, the Europeans saw a single Carib Indian rower with a cargo of dried leaves. The Europeans were transfixed by what they saw the Indian doing.
On a long sea voyage the rowers of Carib merchant canoes kept a small brazier of coals going amidships. Every 30 minutes or so, a small wad of tobacco leaves was placed on the brazier and, as the smoke began to rise, the rowers would put a forked nosepipe made from the breastbone of a seabird into the fumes and draw them in. After holding the smoke for awhile, a rower would exhale powerfully with a shout like high school players breaking a football huddle and then go back to the awesome task of single-handedly rowing a fully-loaded commercial canoe over the open seas.
We can only imagine the feelings of this Indian, alone in his canoe on the ocean where his ancestors had traveled forever as lords, suddenly being appraised by strange white beings leaning over the rails of the biggest ship he had ever seen.
If there was ever a time for a smoke, that must have been it. Luckily for that Carib none of the Europeans spoke to him to ask what he was doing, so he didn't have to deal with their ignorance of what must have been a commonplace experience to him.
The next landfall of this first European expedition was the island of Hispanola, which today is called Santo Domingo where Columbus, sweeping the south side of the land mass, detected signs of an organized civilization. He anchored and sent ashore two men, one of whom could speak Italian, Spanish, Chaldean, Hebrew and Arabic, insuring that he would be able to communicate with the local deputy of the Grand Khan of Cathay.
Upon landing, this deputy and his guard were met by a party of Carib Indians, who came to the beach with torches, and held out strange objects to the two amazed White people. Lighting one end of these objects in the torch, the New World People sucked the smoke out the other end, explaining by both sign and voice that it relaxed them, intoxicated them, and lessened their weariness. The Indians called the objects "tobacos." To the Carib, "tobaco" was not the herb itself, but the object that was created by rolling the leaves of the herb. Columbus' deputy, however, took tobacco to be the name of the herb rather than the rolled object, and recorded it that way for posterity.
So, we get our word tobacco from the very first encounter between the new World and the Old, perhaps from the first word spoken. Ironic that this first communication creates such a fundamental misunderstanding, the beginning of a long series of wrong conclusions which come down to our own times, about tobacco, about the Native Americans, and about the New World.
There are over 100 varieties of the tobacco plant, all of which contain the psychoactive principle Nicotine in the leaves, though in varying degrees of concentration. Besides true Virginia tobacco, Nicotiana tabacum,for which the genus was composed, here are just a few of the species and varieties that are interesting for their potential as organic, natural homegrown tobacco, or possibly as items for boutique grower/producers.
Tobacco belongs to the elite order of dark knights, the Solanaceae. It's a plant to be respected as potent and toxic. The darkness of the Solanacae is illustrated by the three princes who share the order with tobacco:
People who believe with every good reason that they have been injured by the cigarette companies have certainly not found much relief from the law. Over 200 tobacco product liability cases have been tried in recent years, and not one of them has been won by the person or family who felt that they were the victim.
The cigarette companies are getting so accustomed to winning that they have become even more arrogant than ever, and these days they go into court with an aggressive bullying attitude, having shucked the false humility and "Gee Whiz" attitude which has marked their public relations face in the past.
Every time a major product liability case is won by the companies their stock increases in value, more than paying for any expenses they may have incurred in defending themselves in court, and effectively discouraging many victims around the country from going to court in their own behalf. It is easy to imagine how reluctant most lawyers are to take on clients these days for such a case, given the vast expenses in time and money which must be incurred, and given that in almost every case the lawyers make no money unless the case against the cigarette industry is won. It is remarkable that any tobacco product liability cases are being filed at all, considering how discouraging are the statistics and the prospects of recovering even one penny in damages against the increasingly well-prepared and infinitely wealthy industry.
Lawyers for people injured by cigarettes and other products, such as snuff, have traditionally operated under the assumption that they were fighting for clients injured by tobacco and tobacco products. Consequently they have spent immense amounts of their time and resources trying to prove a case against tobacco and tobacco products, and because of this fundamental flaw, they have lost every time.
In most cases, the lawyers have focussed on nicotine addiction as a primary culprit, usually attempting to show in court that their clients were addicted to nicotine, and therefore were unable to stop using the product in question. After attempting to establish this fact- never very successfully- the lawyers have usually gone on to attempt to prove that the cigarettes, or snuff, or other "tobacco" product in question was dangerous to their client's health, usually by dragging in some variation of conventional scientific and medical evidence which supported their case.
Product liability law requires that the injured party be able to prove two principal points concerning the behavior of the accused manufacturer. First, the injured person must be able to prove that the manufacturer knowingly or unknowingly produced an unreasonably dangerous product, regardless of whether or not the injured party was warned of the unreasonable danger, or had reason to know of the danger otherwise. Second, the injured person must be able to prove that they were deceived, misled, or not informed in such a way that they were deprived of specific knowledge of the unreasonable danger which would have caused them to avoid or cease using the product.
The evidence laid out at this site certainly suggests, if not proves that the cigarette companies provide ample grounds for civil liability and possibly criminal indictment on both grounds - knowingly producing, and deliberately misleading and deceiving.
As one of many examples you'll be shown at this site, consider U.S.Patent # 3,720,214 dated March 13, 1973, titled "Smoking Composition", and assigned to Liggett & Myers Inc., NY. As this patent describes the benefits of a new kind of synthetic smoking material, the inventor notes as an aside that
"Observations of the mechanism of combustion in tobacco compositions such as cigarettes indicate that the smoke components responsible for the biological activity are formed in the pyrolysis zone of the cigarette cone."
The cigarette industry evidently knows that the smoke components formed in the pyrolysis zone of cigarettes have biological activity, and here is seeking a cheaper smoking material that will have less biological activity.
As an example of this literature, U.S.Patent # 3,638,600 describes a tobacco substitute prepared from papermill waste pulp containing at least 90% alpha-cellulose which is heated, whipped and then formed into a sheet. Various ammonium compounds and other materials, such as magnesiuum and potassium salts, are then incorporated into the sheet. Thus prepared, the sheet is fed into giant milling machines and rolled into little tubes of paper to millions of smokers who think that they are risking the health hazards of smoking tobacco.
A wide range of processes involving the use of alpha-cellulose as a synthetic smoking material for cigarette manufacturing have been invented by the cigarette companies, including: U.S.Patents # 3,556,109; #3,556,110; #3,559, 655; #3,575,117; #3,577,994; # 3,608,560; and #3,612,063. This area is a fruitful research focus for people seeking to discover how they have been injured by a specific cigarette manufacturer, once they realize that it may not have been tobacco that injured them.
What remains, of course, is to build a case, and to do this cigarette smoking victims will have to identify the substances which scientific literature associates with their type of affliction, and search for these substances in their cigarette brand. Each victim must decide what kind of smoking-related disease they have. Is it lung cancer? If so, what kind of lung cancer. Different kinds of lung cancer are known to result from exposure to certain specific chemicals, including most of those present in cigarettes as residues, either as the result of manufacturing or production decisions by cigarette company management. Does the medical and scientific literature on this type of lung cancer recognize chronic, sublethal exposure to Benzene or Hexane as a cause? How about exposure to DDT, EDB, or Endrin? What about asbestos? With a list of the contaminants, additives, and other unregulated chemicals in cigarettes a victim of cigarettes will be in excellent position to show how such exposure may have led to their disease or injury.
If a smoking victim examines the literature on their type of smoking-related disease, they will find numerous known originating agents listed which can also be shown to be present in many brands of cigarettes. Tests on the brand of cigarettes they smoked in the process of developing their disease will demonstrate whether or not that brand currently is contaminated with the suspected causative agent.
As long as the victim can show that the Benzene, for instance, was in the cigarette with the knowledge of the manufacturer, and that Benzene is a known causative agent for their type of lung cancer, they will at least be able to force the cigarette industry to prove in court that the Benzene in their product did not cause their cancer. They will have shifted the burden of proof from the victim to the industry- a major first step.
Taking another tack, let's suppose you do your homework and discover that an individual's lung cancer is causally associated to benzo-a-pyrene exposure in the research literature, so the question can then become - could the lung cancer have been caused by exposure to benzo-a-pyrene which was the result of deliberate neglect and misleading representations by the manufacturer of your client's particular brand?.
Let's say that you also know that Company X, which manufactures the brand your client smokes, is a major importer from a country where chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides are in heavy, regular use. Since chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides generate benzo-a-pyrene when burned, it would seem reasonable to require that the cigarette manufacturer in question prove that chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticide contamination of this particular brand of cigarette was not a source of benzo-a-pyrene exposure for the individual with lung cancer.
This approach can be applied to each part of the manufacturing process by tracking available information such as foreign grown tobacco imports, cigarette industry patent literature, and the world research literature which tracks and reports pesticide use on major commercial crops including especially tobacco and cotton. Using this literature in an informed way and tracking as much as possible the specific contaminants, combustion byproducts, manufacturing additives, process contaminants etc used by a particular manufacturer, and then requiring that cigarette company which manufactured the brand in question to prove that they do not allow this contaminant, use this process, or add this chemical, should prove an effective way of creating evidentiary linkage between the manufacturers deliberate actions and the disease and injury suffered by specific cigarette smokers.
Some of the best sources for tracking world tobacco and tobacco parts trade are found at Oregon State University's government information access site at http://govinfo.kerr.orst.edu/ To track tobacco leaf, stem, reconstituted, and trash movements between the US and any other country, look in the Imports & Exports database located on the home page of this site. By the way, if you want to track the export and import of manufactured pesticides, you'll find them obscurely listed under miscellaneous in this same database.
You may also want to look at International Tobacco Growers Association page at http://www.tobaccoleaf.org for an industry-eye view of world tobacco trade in far less detail.
As another example, most cigarette smokers have a brand and are loyal to it, at least in part because there are chemicals in each brand specifically designed to hook the smoker to that brand. If a manufacturer is granted the public trust position of operating without regulation, and uses that regulatory shield to incorporate deliberately addictive chemicals other than naturally-occuring nicotine into its products, isn't that company ethically if not legally required to provide a safe product to hose it is free to addict?
And what is the responsibility of the government agencies who know specifically what is going on, but who are so hog-tied that even the US Surgeon General refers to tobacco and cigarettes as though they were the same thing, when he should know very well they are not. How about the FDA and EPA which know of the situation but claim impotence? Of course the USDA and the dreaded ATF would also have to be a primary focus in any investigation involving federal agency involvement in maintaining the deadly fictions upon which the cigarette industry's existence depends.
The story of chemicalized, synthetic tobacco is only a part of the description of the wholesale slaughter which has been done by the cigarette companies worldwide, with the knowledge and cooperation of many if not most governments and regulatory agencies outside of Europe and even there the government authorities have the power to limit the damage from cigarette chemicals but not to stop the contamination altogether. It is clear that nobody in authority is going to be able to actually stop the killing, and it is also clear that the only way to bring these corporate murderers to justice is to sue them and to win in an American court.
If you are among the millions of victims of this brutal conspiracy, then take what action you can, because if you don't, nobody else in government, the health professions, or any other institution in our society is going to lift a finger to help you. Remember, everyone has been conditioned to think of your death as an inevitable result of your own deliberate behavior and while they may be sorry for you even help you die nobody will help you get justice because everybody - including probably you - think that you basically deserve what's happening to you even though it's a crying shame, etc. In spite of years of so-called public education and research, no government agency or private group has ever raised any of the issues presented here. There has been a curious silence on the subject- considering its magnitude and relevance.
If you have been injured by cigarettes, or snuff, or some other "tobacco" product, then the fact is you have been injured by an unreasonably dangerous product, which the manufacturers had every reason to know was unreasonably dangerous, because they deliberately made it that way. If you are a smoker, you have been deliberately deceived, misled, and kept uninformed in ways intended to prevent you from making an informed decision on whether or not to smoke. If you are not a smoker, but have to breathe air full of cigarette smoke, you have been deliberately deceived, misled, and kept uninformed about the true nature of the dangers involved.
In either case, you have been injured in a way which seems to satisfy the most basic requirements of a successful lawsuit involving product liability. The fact that only one of the recent tobacco products liability lawsuits has been "won" by the victim should not discourage you at all. These poor people have not had the benefit of the necessary knowledge it would have taken to win. They have not known the true facts behind their disease, and their lawyers have been swinging blind.
My hope is that one or more of us, with the information presented here, and with a good deal of additional hard work, will be able to prove in an American court that these companies have truly been engaged in monstrous criminal behavior which renders them liable by all criteria of product liability law. All it will take is for one of the millions of us who have been injured to win such a case in open court, presenting proper evidence and obtaining a full public airing of the real facts, and the game will be begin to be over for some of the most fantastic renegade criminals in history. Let's get on with that job.
The rights of smokers and non-smokers are not fundamentally in conflict, but because the rights of smokers are rarely seen as legitimate by non-smokers, they have little popular constituency. Smokers are in no position to stand up for their rights because deep in their hearts they have been convinced that their nasty habit disenfranchises them.
This apparent conflict is a classic case of people being set against each other by powerful interests who benefit from having victims attacking victims. This ploy is of course a basic tyrant technique, one which has generated and sustained enormous human suffering over the centuries.
With the battle lines drawn between smokers and non-smokers, and with plenty of legal activity and anger on both sides, and with the government playing people's advocate while permitting the atrocity to continue, the cigarette companies are then able to step in smoothly, suggesting that the issue is really just a difference in points of view among reasonable adults, who surely can learn to accommodate each other.
This also allows the cigarette companies to deflect the entire population into debating a non-issue, which is usually expressed in three parts:
The reason that these are all non-issues is that some, perhaps most of the disease and death associated with cigarette smoking are caused by man-made chemical contaminants, additives, and synthetic materials which can be controlled or removed from tobacco products, and not by the tobacco itself. Both nonsmokers and smokers have been grossly deceived into thinking that the debate is, and should be about tobacco. All the while the cigarette industry, and its government cronies, have been using cheap, contaminated foreign tobacco and synthetic smoking materials made from paper mill waste to make cigarettes which have - wonder of wonders - been killing people in droves.
And quite conveniently, since most of the smoking victims and their grieving families blame themselves for the resulting disease, along with society in general, the manufacturer of this lethal product is protected from liability. After all, they smoked, didn't they? Well, what did they expect?
You can almost bet the farm that you'll never hear a deathbed conversation which includes rage that the manufacturer of those damn cigarettes, and the government bureaucrats responsible for health and safety, knew all along that cigarettes are contaminated with chemicals which absolutely cause cancer in even the smallest doses if they're taken in regularly - as in a pack or two a day.
You won't hear people angry about being deceived into thinking that smokers were smoking American tobacco when they were really smoking processed foreign tobacco stems and stalks combined with reprocessed industrial waste, flavored with man-made agents designed to produce chemically-dependent brand loyalty.
What you'll hear is regret, blame, guilt, pain and suffering, and an overwhelming agreement that the victim brought it on themselves and everybody around them.
To the extent that the victim is seen by family and friends as responsible for causing his own disease, the manufacturers are completely protected from investigation and even from blame. Likewise, when the victim is seen as responsible, the crime is not recognized by governmental and legal systems designed to protect and seek redress for victims of corporate crime.
Victims and their protective institutions have been manipulated by powerful commercial, financial, and regulatory government agencies into accepting massive numbers of deaths from smoking as regrettable but inevitable. Most of us see the half million deaths in America and the millions more worldwide each year as due to the inherently dangerous nature of the product, and place responsibility on the dying smoker for knowingly engaging in such behavior.
This blames the victim for the crime, and such skewed reasoning is accepted, largely because even minute traces of the crime have been skillfully and conspiratorially hidden. The evidence of deliberately crafted misdirection and sleight of hand is everywhere, from warning labels on packs which subtly specify cigarettes instead of tobacco when warning the smoker, to phrases like "Pure Tobacco Pleasure" which to reasonable but innocent people seem to promise "tobacco inside".
There are long lists of how smokers and nonsmokers feel about each other. But the most important point is usually missed completely; that in both groups most people basically agree that smokers deserve whatever happens to them, largely because they've been warned - right on the pack. At least, that's what everyone from the victims to the lawyers and judges seem to assume - smokers have been warned. And the fact is that, in the shadowy way of the cigarette industry, they have.
Maybe smokers, nonsmokers, doctors, or somebody should have noticed that the US Surgeon General's warnings
never mention "tobacco" when they talk about disease, genetic damage, suffering, and death. All the warnings mention the cause as either smoking, or cigarettes, but they never mention "tobacco".
Now, maybe they should have noticed this little language switcheroo and said to themselves - "Hold on there, those guys may be leaving out the "tobacco" part of those warnings for a good reason. Maybe I ought to find out what else is in cigarettes besides tobacco, since they don't ever seem to come out and actually mention it by name?"
That would have been a wonderful affirmation of the power of the human mind to penetrate a carefully laid snare of illusion, but it also demands powers of observation along the lines of the child who once observed that the Emperor wore no clothes. So it amounts to this. On the issue of "Is it the tobacco, or is it something else that's killing all these people", what we've got is one naked Emperor walking down the middle of the street and so far nobody in the entire society is seeing skin.
Meaning nobody seriously questions the "legitimacy" of all the massive suffering and dying caused by cigarettes. The presence of the atrocity is accepted because its occurrence is seen as natural. "Of course 4,000,000 people a year are dying worldwide - they smoke don't they?"
Blaming the victim while attracting willing, excited new victims, especially on such massive scale, takes real skill and innovative, persistent brainwashing techniques - which have clearly been successful. People who smoke see themselves as glamorous, independent, freethinking, young, and vigorous, and people who die from smoking are viewed unlucky, obscure, and definitely as someone else.
Institutions with the mission of protecting the health and welfare of the public have been effectively manipulated into treating death from smoking as inevitable, if regrettable. Vast resources are directed toward reducing the number of smokers, and preventing the attraction of young people to the product, but with only moderate effectiveness and little impact on disease and death numbers. In this environment it is only natural that the idea of smokers' rights seems bizarre.
However, the bottom line is that smokers and non-smokers alike have a common interest in eliminating known carcinogens and other hazardous chemicals as contaminants in cigarettes just as the public health would demand their removal from any other item produced for human consumption in the US. It benefits only the so-called tobacco industry for these two constituencies to agree to continue victimizing each other rather than working to make the vice of the smokers a vice only, and not a mortal sin against themselves, their families, and the public at large.
I ask only how each of us will feel if it turns out, upon complete investigation, that smoking a moderate amount of uncontaminated tobacco is no more harmful than living in an urban environment, and that many if not most of the loved ones we have each lost to cigarettes over the past decades could have been with us still, living out their natural lifespans, if not for the pesticides, additives, and experimental chemicals which these manufacturers have fed to an enslaved portion of the world for the last fifty years?
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What exactly are these substitutes for real tobacco leaf in modern cigarettes, and why are they significant cause for alarm?
There is a critical and poorly understood distinction between the health hazards of smoking tobacco, and smoking cigarettes, which comprised in whole or in part of synthetic materials representing a whole different, complex class of health menace. The medical & health community has been conned along with the public into believing in the phoney issues raised and choreographed by the cigarette industry around the hazards of smoking tobacco when the industry knew that many consumers were smoking little or no real, natural tobacco and were instead being exposed to a wide range of known carcinogens, fetus-damaging compounds, neurological toxins, and genetic mutagens.
The story of pesticide contamination is told in detail elsewhere on this site. Here we'll tell you about another connected part of the story of this atrocity - the story of sheet.
Reconstituted tobacco, known as sheet in the cigarette industry, is a major ingredient in modern cigarettes, and is manufactured from waste tobacco. This tobacco has a variety of origins, including:
Many US cigarette brands are made partially or totally from ground up stems, stalks, and tobacco processing waste. This potentially toxic mixture is ground and shredded, then pressed into what the industry calls "sheet tobacco", which closely resembles lumber particle board.
As an example of why stems and stalks are so popular with the cigarette companies, consider U.S.Patent # 4,379,464, titled "Cooked Flavors For Smoking Products".
This patent is dated April 12, 1983 and is assigned to Philip Morris Inc., NY. It's probably fair to assume that the inventors' discussion in this patent reflects the overall state of knowledge in the industry, including such remarks as
"In general tobacco stems and midribs represent an unsatisfactory portion of the cured tobacco leaf, from the standpoint of smoking, in the sense that they produce a stemmy taste on smoking and lack the desirable aroma and taste generally associated with tobacco lamina (leaves). Stems are usually separated from the desirable leaf, or lamina of the tobacco. To throw away the stems and midribs is uneconomical and, for this reason, methods have been devised to make them usable in smoking products."
A large proportion of the stems and stalks used to produce American sheet are of foreign, third world origin, where unregulated pesticides, often concocted on-site by illiterate workers, are routinely applied in heavy concentrations on tobacco crops, which in many countries are the single most valuable export crop, and which therefore receive the bulk of the chemicals. Many of these tobacco-specific chemicals are designed to translocate from leaves, where they might affect taste and thus price, into the stems, stalks, and roots where they are concentrated but nobody pays attention. After the tobacco leaves have been removed for sale to quality markets, the remaining stems and stalks are sent to the US where they become sheet.
Tobacco stems & stalks from around the world are routinely shown to be heavily contaminated with specific types of agrichemical residues, especially soil-applied chemicals and suckering agents, as well as solvent residues. Stems, stalks, and scrap routinely receive heavy fumigation in storage because by their nature they are heavily infested. For example, leaf and scrap tobacco in storage around the world is regularly fumigated with methyl bromide, a highly dangerous wide spectrum insecticide, which is known to leave high concentrations of residue in high protein plant materials like tobacco, as well as with other potent carcinogenic & mutagenic compounds like the tobacco fumigant gas chlorpyrophos.
Davis DL, Blair A, Hoel DG. (1992b). Agricultural exposures and cancer trends in developed countries. Environ Health Perspect 100:39 44.
Reconstituted tobacco is manufactured using tobacco scrap and waste materials which are are first ground to a fine powder. Then using acids and solvents, residual nicotine and natural tobacco materials are chemically stripped from the cellulose tobacco material.
At this point in the process, non-tobacco filler is added. This filler material is manufactured from cellulosic waste materials like recycled municipal paper waste, forest products industry waste, and food processing waste.
Artificial flavoring chemicals & a wide variety of task-specific chemical additives are then incorporated into the slurry, using a range of solvents as carrier solutions. The solvents used in sheet manufacturing include benzene, cyclohexane, and toluene - which are all known carcinogens occurring in medically significant concentrations as residues in cigarettes.
At the beginning of the process, Nicotine is removed from whatever natural materials are used, and the Nicotine is later re-incorporated in precise dosages using nicotine-impregnated polysaccharide fibers and a variety of other ingenious engineering techniques. A wide range of other materials and chemicals are used in production of reconstituted sheet tobacco, including glue, burn rate control agents, filler materials , etc.
This chemical slurry mixture is then rolled out into a thin sheet. Using a variety of chemical and physical processes, this sheet material is then expanded, or "puffed up". The resulting sheet looks like particle board, and it is ready to be fed into giant mills which shave it into the little golden curls you see if you take many modern cigarette brands apart. It looks like tobacco, and by stretching the truth the manufacturer can claim that it offers real tobacco taste, pure tobacco pleasure, and imply in every other way that the cigarette contains tobacco. That little bit of shading of the truth may turn out to be a central clue to why so many cigarette smokers are sick and dead from what they had every reason to believe was their tobacco smoking habit.
It's useful to glance just at a few of the categories which the US Patent Office maintains for reconstituted and synthetic tobacco patents
Just in case you're wondering by now why these cigarette companies need all those patented processes for using tobacco dust, particles, and extracts, at least part of the answer can be found by examining what these companies import for manufacturing into cigarettes and other so-called tobacco products.
Although the cigarette companies no doubt use the sweepings and waste materials from their own US mills to make reconstituted tobacco smoking materials, they also practice the philosophy of "Waste not, want not" regarding their overseas operations. The following tables display only a portion of the import trade in tobacco stems, roots, waste and trash through only one port - Norfolk, Virginia.
By the way, the origins and destinations of this
tobacco trash trade can be easily traced online using the import/export
databases provided by Oregon State University at their Government
Information Sharing site http://govinfo.kerr.orst.edu/.
Simply log onto the site and choose the Imports & Exports
Database, then select tobacco as your search term.
Source:
US Customs, US Imports of Merchandise
| U.S. Imports - Tobacco Stems, not cut, ground, or pulverized | ||||
| General Imports | Imports For Consumption | |||
| Kilograms | Customs Value | Kilograms | Customs Value | |
| 1991 | 18,724,033 | 8,168,226 | 19,697,111 | 8,358,368 |
| 1992 | 74,588,691 | 34,755,278 | 74,833,791 | 34,832,860 |
| 1993 | 79,778,622 | 34,756,148 | 80,175,244 | 34,970,699 |
| U.S. Imports - Tobacco Refuse, not from stems | ||||
| General Imports | Imports For Consumption | |||
| Kilograms | Customs Value | Kilograms | Customs Value | |
| 1991 | 3,686,830 | 2,622,882 | 5,161,935 | 3,059,390 |
| 1992 | 2,143,061 | 2,032,872 | 1,366,109 | 1,954,287 |
| 1993 | 1,248,138 | 1,485,673 | 1,203,060 | 1,896,376 |
| 1994 | 1,346,299 | 1,414,278 | 829,860 | 1,329,417 |
Just as an example of where some of this stuff is coming from, let's take a look at Zimbabwe's tobacco exports to the US.
| Tobacco Stems, not cut, ground or pulverized | ||
| kilograms | Customs Value | |
| 1991 | 260,000 | 36,000 |
| 1992 | 2,700,000 | 832,000 |
| 1993 | 6,800,000 | 2,415,000 |
Also, just in case you're wondering, the US exports huge amounts of stems, stalks, roots, dust, trash and waste. Isn't it interesting that we bring in tobacco stems and trash from third world destinations, and ship our own stems and trash to places like Japan - a heavy user. The US stems and trash are far less contaminated than the foreign stems and trash that we smoke in this country, and it's interesting to note the relatively low customs values of the imported trash vs the relatively high value of the exported trash.
Remember, you can check out country-by-country origins and destinations of this trade in tobacco stems and trash in the imports/exports database at http://govinfo.kerr.orst.edu/.
| U.S. Exports - Tobacco Stems | ||||
| Domestic Exports | Foreign Exports | |||
| Kilograms | Customs Value | Kilograms | Customs Value | |
| 1991 | 25,883,591 | 15,516,547 | 558,762 | 741,117 |
| 1992 | 30,069,251 | 15,744,230 | 499,974 | 213,319 |
| 1993 | 26,158,919 | 17,388,378 | 366,963 | 267,254 |
| 1994 | 18,718,368 | 11,588,953 | 75,593 | 42,064 |
| 1995 | 17,412,604 | 9,104,350 | 100,050 | 47,024 |
| U.S. Exports - Tobacco Refuse | ||||
| Domestic Exports | Foreign Exports | |||
| Kilograms | Customs Value | Kilograms | Customs Value | |
| 1991 | 1,883,799 | 1,392,407 | 12,768 | 5,218 |
| 1992 | 1,390,170 | 960,433 | 486,976 | 488,679 |
| 1993 | 2,312,941 | 2,945,173 | 366,963 | 19,706 |
| 1994 | 1,362,864 | 1,000,869 | 75,593 | 15,840 |
| 1995 | 1,989,786 | 1,605,690 | 0 | 0 |
We also export a lot of tobacco sheet components
for manufacturing cigarettes and other tobacco products in other
countries. This means that to some extent at least we're importing
contaminated scrap and waste, manufacturing it into an even more dangerous
smoking material, and re-exporting it to its countries of origin to be
made into cigarettes for the locals. As an example, here the value of our
exports in just one of several categories that have to do with sheet.
Source: US Customs ( values rounded)
| U.S. Exports -Homogenized/Reconstituted Tobacco | ||||
| Domestic Exports | Foreign Exports | |||
| Kilograms | Customs Value | Kilograms | Customs Value | |
| 1991 | 31,330,951 | 69,500,539 | - | - |
| 1992 | 29,693,417 | 63,504,725 | - | - |
| 1993 | 19,823,263 | 53,053,358 | - | - |
| 1994 | 26,702,108 | 67,851,973 | - | - |
| 1995 | 31,183,793 | 97,893,870 | - | - |
A little challenge: look at the contents of any cigarette under magnification, and see how much of it looks like actual, natural leaf material, and how much looks like granular little strips of brown flavored glued pressed powder. Can you tell? If you don't see leaf material with ribs in it, look a little closer. That reconstituted material in there could have come from stems, or mill trash, from any one of the dozens of countries from which the US imports these materials.
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Tobacco is the most profitable crop available to farmers in Third World countries, yet it actually plays a major role in creating deeper economic deprivation everywhere it is grown.
Tobacco production adds to rural employment, creates cash flow in local economies, and contributes to national gross revenue figures, but tobacco production also takes control of the land away from the peasant farmer and places it in the hands of central authority and multinational corporations.
As tobacco production rises in developing countries, the now-landless peasant farmer goes to work for a wage. The peasant working for wages rather than subsistence falls victim to consumer propaganda and spends at least some of these wages on consumer goods rather than on the basic means of existence, actually creating deeper poverty and a lower standard of living than before wages were introduced.
Since he is now a worker and no longer a farmer, he must pay for the basic means of existence rather than producing them himself. As per-capita income figures rise in Third World countries, so do consumption figures for all types of imported goods- including cigarettes. Not surprisingly, there is a strong statistical correlation between increasing per-capita income and rising smoking-related disease rates.
Coca Cola imperialism is a term describing the corporate equivalent of the simple but shrewd "trinkets & baubles" approach used by early traders and deal makers on the North American Indians. Third World people have all kinds of enticing images dangled before them, and are easy victims for created needs associated with the immensely attractive US life-styles as portrayed in commercials on television and through commercial music, movies. Electronic sounds & images, packaged music, movies, styles, urban consumer, shoes, soft drinks, cigarettes, alcohol, processed foods - all so desirable, all so distant. A connection with the desirable American life-style is so sought after by Third World people that many willingly spend the equivalent of $0.50 on bottled drinks like Coca Cola in countries where an average family may earn $200-$300 a year.
Tobacco production places increasing amounts of wealth in progressively fewer hands, who periodically transfer that wealth into foreign accounts. The wealth is generated largely by the consumer spending on the part of wage-earning peasants, but is controlled almost exclusively by powerful domestic political and economic interests. Income from tobacco production is largely channeled into luxury consumption at home or speculative investments abroad- only in rare instances does it serve to finance the production of basic foodstuffs or capital equipment.
In addition to creating new mechanisms of economic deprivation, tobacco production creates radical new public health problems in developing countries. Tobacco is a pesticide-intensive crop, consuming as much as 50% of the total pesticides used in any given country. The agricultural use of these pesticides is directed almost exclusively at insects causing economic damage to the tobacco crop, but fallout from agricultural spraying enters the total ecosystem, where it operates to select resistant insect disease vectors, particularly the mosquito.
Pesticide use in Tobacco production exposes agricultural workers to a wide range of highly toxic substances in the most unfavorable conditions. Many pesticide formulations utilized in Third World countries are composed of substances totally banned for use in the US and Europe. There is substantial evidence of the existance of "gypsy" chemical plants throughout the Third World, manufacturing substances of unknown hazard. Few if any of the pesticides used in Third World agriculture are properly labelled regarding usage, and even fewer peasant workers are equipped to read and understand the instructions-often written in English or German.
Commercial agriculture such as tobacco production is often located in precisely those regions recently cleared of major insect-borne disease like Malaria. As the danger of illness subsides, landowners are stimulated by the high prices of commodities such as tobacco and Cotton; they reduce their production of basic food crops on existing land and buy up more land to install high value commodity production.
In order to service commodity crop production, workers are imported from other areas of the country, creating a densely packed population which stimulates re-emergence of all types of disease including those with insect vectors. In addition this process serves to augment the number of poor, landless workers, and concentrates agricultural resources in progressively fewer hands.
Madeley, J. The Environmental Impact of Tobacco Production in Developing Countries (in) New York State Journal of Medicine 83 (13):1310-1311, December 1983.
"In the first four months of tobacco production at least sixteen different chemical applications are needed, yet farmers often do not understand the instructions, cannot afford protective clothing, do not have soap or access to medical care, and cannot prevent the pesticides from entering the streams and rivers."
Krieger NK, Wolff MS, Hiatt RA, Rivera M, Vogelman J, Orentreich N. (1994). Breast cancer and serum organochlorines: A prospective study among white, black, and Asian women. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 86:589-99.
Agricultural Production And Malaria Resurgence in Central America and India, Georganne Chapin & Robert Wasserstrom, Nature, Vol 293, 17 Sept, 1981 pp181-185 An excellent discussion of the gross interruption of tropical ecological systems by pesticides related to tobacco and cotton production.
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One of the things that seems to have been lost in the debate over smoking and health is that smokers are people with health-related rights, and they are victims of manipulation of the discussion over their rights. Smokers have been manipulated into defending their right to smoke cigarettes, rather than into demanding their right to have an uncontaminated product which meets ordinary standards for freedom from dangerous man-made chemicals.Of course, they had to have known that their health rights were being violated, and the cigarette companies claim that smokers have received fair notice of the dangers of smoking. The fact is that smokers and nonsmokers alike have been cleverly, persistently and effectively convinced that cigarettes and tobacco are one and the same thing, with the clear implication that most or all of the risks of smoking come from tobacco.
As long as people believe implicitly that what they are smoking, or what other people are smoking is tobacco, and then watch then all the cleverly worded warnings which about the evils of tobacco and the consequences of smoking becoming true as people who smoke drop like flies compared with those who don't, it's hard not to associate tobacco and smoking and death. Which from the cigarette companies' perspective is a lot better than people associating smoking and death with deliberately manufactured man-made chemically contaminated unregulated products containing known lethal chemicals having nothing to do with tobacco. As long as these companies can hide behind the absolute illusion that their products are tobacco then they can continue to be protected by the almost universal belief that tobacco causes all that disease and death because that's just the kind of plant it is - poisonous, dangerous, possibly evil.
Would you like to see an example (contributed by Larry Breed) of how this kind of thinking works?
" In 1981 the Australian Government Analytical Laboratories (AGAL) determined that Australian cigarettes contained 43 times more DDT and 30 times more dieldrin than samples of British or American cigarettes. In its 92nd session in October 1981, the National Health and Medical Research Council made the following observations:
The Council noted that certain pesticide residues in Australian manufactured cigarettes were at levels appreciably higher than in overseas brands. Council directed its Pesticides and Agricultural Chemicals Committee to undertake a scientific investigation into the levels of potentially harmful residues in cigarettes.
Meanwhile, it considered that public health authorities should encourage awareness of the hazards of cigarette smoking, and recommended that to avoid such risks altogether people should not smoke. Although the Department of Primary Industry suggested in 1985 that appropriate upper limits for agricultural chemical content in tobacco be set, this has not occurred.
In press reports, spokespeople for the National Health and Medical Research Council have stated the informal view that as tobacco is already known to contain large numbers of carcinogens and other toxins, and in view of the pronouncements which the NH & MRC has already issued about the dangers of smoking to health, there is no imperative to spend time and resources on measuring pesticide residues."(emphasis added)
One wonders how many tens of thousands of Australians have died since 1981(85) because the national health authorities have concluded that since everybody already knows that tobacco is toxic, why worry about a few chemicals - and by extension, why worry about cigarette smokers?
The late 20th Century is not the only time in history that tobacco and smokers have been social outcasts, and even subjected to the legal sanctions. Smokers have a long history of defending their right to smoke, and American society has a constitution which arguably says that a free adult has the right to smoke, eat, drink, or otherwise use any substance affecting only his own body or mind, so long as this use does not harm others or place an unreasonable burden on them.
If we accept smoking as a proper exercise of individual rights, however personally distasteful it may be, then society must extend every legitimate protection to those rights, as it does with any other proper exercise of individual rights guaranteed by our constitution.
The right to smoke has strong historical precedent. Any behavior which has attracted so many adherents and even fanatics for centuries has established its place as a legitimate personal practice. Tobacco also has a legitimate place in the agricultural and business mix of the world economy, and is particularly important as a source of income for small farmers around the world in spite of the fact that the cigarette companies dominate this area as well. There is clearly something in the act of smoking which appeals to a certain segment of the human race, and as such smoking must be allowed its rightful place.
Non-smokers, on the other hand, have an indisputable right to a smoke free environment, but regulating smokers' behavior is only a small part of the solution. The rights of smokers have been self-servingly defined by the cigarette industry as a matter of individual freedoms in conflict, a matter best left to mature individuals reaching accommodation over what constitutes each others' reasonable rights. In fact a far more important right for both smokers and non-smokers is for smokers to have access to products which are not unreasonably dangerous.
Manufacturers are protected from effective sanctions by the public's almost total misunderstanding of the issues, and by a complete lack of accurate information about the real nature of cigarettes. A carefully erected legal structure protects these companies from liability, with the Surgeon General's warning labels as a central pillar of this structure. These warnings are generally considered "fair notice" to the smoker of the hazards of using the product. Few people notice that these warnings never mention the word tobacco, but refer instead specifically to cigarettes, and to smoking, as the source of cancer, emphysema, birth defects, and death.
There's a very good reason for this. Some brands of cigarettes contain little or no tobacco, but instead are made from synthetic smoking materials, which are reprocessed from industrial waste resources like paper mill pulp. Other brands technically contain tobacco, except the contents are actually tobacco stems, stalks and waste processed into flat compressed composite materials the industry calls sheet, which is then shaved and made into cigarettes. And of course there are many brands of cigarettes which are made from tobacco, but it's more likely to be from Zimbabwe than from Virginia. So it's easy to see why the Surgeon General warns us against cigarettes, not tobacco.
In some ways this is a simple problem. Some people just plain like to smoke, and some people feel that smoking is a dangerous personal assault on others. This basic level of conflict has generated a complex web of social problems, with the rights of non-smokers to breathe smoke free air, as part of their broader rights to a livable environment, set in direct opposition to the rights of smokers to engage in behavior of a kind protected under our American concepts of personal liberty.
All of which suits the cigarette industry just fine, because for every year the final reckoning can be delayed the enormous profits continue. And that's what it's all about.
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Please contribute comments, information, research or suggestions, which will enhance the effectiveness of this site bdrake@ktc.com
According to who is expounding, smoking may be a genetically moderated behavior, an acquired pleasure, an acquired vice, a personality enhancement, a character defect, an irresistible biochemically triggered urge, an adult free-will decision, the work of demons, or a gift from the Gods.
Before Europeans "discovered" the Americas the practice of smoking was unknown in the rest of the world. Nobody smoked opium in Asia- it was eaten, drunk, and used as a suppository, but not smoked. Likewise in early Europe and the Middle East nobody smoked cannabis or hashish; cannabis was used in a mildly medicinal drink, and hashish was dissolved in hot, thickly sugared milk or tea and used as an aphrodisiac, or as an aid to metaphysical and artistic inspiration.
While regular smoking was not practiced by the majority of the Native Americans, almost all Native American people smoked as part of their spiritual and religious life. Even though the classic Native American tobaccos are far stronger in taste, aroma, and impact than anything available commercially today, there is no historical evidence of Native American smokers being addicted in today's sense.
The Native American, much like the Hindus, observed that in many kinds of plants a higher spirit dwells, and distinguishes the personality of the plant type much the same way as animal personality types differ. The Native American understood that tobacco harbors a powerful spirit, and they believed tobacco to be a gift to humans by the Great Spirit. They used tobacco for social events and personal pleasure as well as for spiritual and religious practices, but they always used it with respect for the power of the tobacco spirit.
While it's easy to pass over such historical observations as quaint relics of primitive religious doctrine, they are not only literally true, but they also bear directly on events today, when tobacco is seen by many as a major but somehow "natural" scourge of much of the world, when in fact the scourge, while man-made, can also be seen as evidence that certain of the great Native American Gods did not die with the extinction of their peoples, the great Native American civilizations.
When the Spanish conquerors first set foot on the shores of the "new world", they fulfilled many ancient Indian prophesies, including those of the powerful god Quetzalcoatl. In an event dismissed by conventional historians as coincidence, the ancient writings of the new world told of Quetzalcoatl's periodic returns to earth, and pinpointed the equivalent of Good Friday, 1519 as the precise date for the god's return in his seventh cycle. For this date, with its Christian significance, and its prophetic significance in the new world codices, to be coincidentally the date of Cortez landing at Veracruz (True Cross), would seem at first glance too contrived a story to be true.
Yet there is the evidence of many writings, tablets, temple adornments, and the like, which were seen by many, and recorded by a few of the early Spanish & other Europeans. These writings tell of specific prophecies, many of them hundreds, perhaps thousands of years old, pointing directly to this day as the moment of Quetzalcoatl's reappearance on earth. And the form, in this cycle, of the many-formed god, was to be that of a bearded white-skinned being, arriving from the direction of the rising sun in great winged ships of wood, bearing the sign of the cross.
When we look at tobacco we see clearly the curious relationship between the white man and the new world alkaloids; curious principally because it is the same spiritually and physically destructive relationship as the one between Native Americans and alcohol, their drug endowment from the white man.
Of course, the attraction of the white man to the new world alkaloids, and their powerful indwelling spirits, was not limited to tobacco. Coffee and cocaine are two excellent examples of new world alkaloids which have manifested, in very different ways, aspects of this destructiveness, which can be interpreted in mythic terms as the vengeance of the indwelling spirits of these sophisticated plants, representing the cosmic anger of their extinguished peoples.
Coca was originally a minor spirit vessel, a source of relief from physical fatigue, a mild stimulant. In its highly refined form, developed to appeal to the contemporary love for instant chemical pleasures, the demon assumes a powerful psychic shape, manifest in the world of cocaine with its intense sensation, destruction of values, and the awakening of deeply buried, extremely dangerous psychic shapes.
In the character of the Native American gods, however, this vengeance, while it is total, is also meant to instruct, if the one having his heart torn out is able to take in the lesson at the moment it is given. (Curious that the image of the priest tearing out the heart of a sacrificial boy on the obsidian alter has so much in common with the image of the surgeon taking out the diseased lung of a shrivelled cigarette victim. )
The Quetzalcoatl legends are at least as forceful, from the standpoint of historical evidence, and contemporary force and relevance, as those surrounding the historical Jesus, and the more ancient prophets. In other words, the historical Quetzalcoatl was as real as the historical Jesus, and approximately the same quantity and quality of evidence supports the historical reality of both mythic figures.
References to Quetzalcoatl as the feathered serpent, or fiery serpent, point to an interpretation of the radiant energy which beings such as Quetzalcoatl and Jesus emanate.
When painters in the Christian and Judaic traditions of the old world portray Jesus, and other prophets, saints and mythic figures, the aura of spiritual radiance is portrayed as a disciplined, tight little halo of light over the head, whereas when the exuberant new world Indian cultures saw spiritual light, they saw it as the sinuous aurora of fiery plumage which they immortalized in portrayals of their savior god Quetzalcoatl.
The gods of the new world were a very different breed than those of our own Judeo-Christian world. They ruled a world where terrible deeds called up terrible vengeance, and as the Spanish overthrew the Native American people, and tore down the temples, though many of the gods were destroyed, a few of the strongest survived. Quetzalcoatl in particular survived because the power of tobacco, a primary earthly vessel for the manifestation of his spirit power, entranced the white man.
Europeans were enchanted with tobacco smoking on first encounter. Tobacco became a favorite of wide ranges of people in all classes, from the daring intellectual to the street sweeper, from soldier & sailor, to doctor & minister. Tobacco was the first exposure of the European mind to a powerful, vision-inducing psychoactive drug. The tobacco smoked by early Europeans was the real stuff, straight from the new world, full of strength and spirit.
Much of the early opposition to tobacco as a spiritual evil may in fact have been based on actual, real spiritual perception of the various manifestations of the enraged, vengeful god Quetzalcoatl, although to the European mind these aspects of the "Fiery Serpent" were interpreted as manifestations of the devil from Christian mythology.
Perhaps without knowing exactly what it was they were seeing, for hundreds of years people from kings to popes, from doctors to scientists have warned smokers about the evils of tobacco. Curiously, in spite of generations of such dedicated activity nobody has yet been able to get a handle on tobacco, or on the tobacco interests, or what is more relevant, on the vengeful god Quetzalcoatl, who may be pursuing vengence for his lost peoples even into the 21st century, and using the "evil empire" of the tobacco interests as his instrument of destruction.
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Throughout history the persistence of certain great illusions has presented tyrants with some of their greatest opportunities. Enormous privileges and wealth accrue to those who succeed in institutionalizing any one of the basic human illusions. The making of war, the manipulation of money, the bureaucracy of the church, the unrestrainable corporation, the self-justifying government agency- all such creations rest upon the ability of organized bands of people to exploit specific illusion systems resident in popular psychology.
Huge commercial enterprises rest upon the fact that people willingly pay large sums for a few hours of illusion, whether for the services of an entertainer or a prostitute, for tickets to a concert or show, for a video, a movie, a book, or a limo ride. Business exploits human desires, and often takes unfair advantage, but of course caveat emptor. However, in the history of the exploitation of illusions few success stories rival that of the so-called "tobacco industry".
There's the basic illusion- right up front, in the name. The cigarette industry likes to style itself as an industry based on the glorious weed tobacco, and it does so for many reasons. But modern American cigarettes stopped being real tobacco many years ago. Yet even today you'll hear people like the Surgeon General using the words "tobacco" and "cigarettes" interchangeably, as though there were no difference.
Because we believe in the tobacco illusion, we believe somehow that most of these people died as a result of their own behavior. Even though we blame the "tobacco" companies for providing our smoking dead with their cigarettes, we can't really get mad at them because it was really our loved ones fault. After all, everybody knows that tobacco smokers get lung cancer.
But, what if it turns out that our loved ones haven't been smoking real tobacco for years, but a synthetic chemical blend of materials which include reprocessed tobacco scrap and recycled municipal waste, as well as agribusiness scrap like sawmill tailings. And what if it also turned out that these synthetic cigarettes also contained chemicals to hook the smoker on that particular brand? What if millions of dollars of sophisticated research had been done so that you get a vaporized cloud of these chemicals when you open a pack of your "favorites", and another volatilized dose when you first light up?
What if exposure to even tiny residues of any one of the dozens of banned pesticides in modern cigarettes were known to create more cancer in African-American and Mexican-Americans than in Anglo-Americans, and what if it can be shown that the cigarette companies knew about the problem of pesticide-related cigarette disease as early as the mid-1960's and have done nothing? And finally, what if it turns out that the cigarette industry is totally unregulated regarding contamination of its products with agrichemical residues, toxic solvent residues, asbestos, pesticides, and untested additives as the result of covert understandings struck with a government which has been jailing, ruining, and killing tens of thousands of people because they use or deal in "dangerous drugs"?
What if all these synthetic smoking materials and chemicals and contaminants are the real cause of most of the human damage done by cigarettes, and what if almost all of the horrible damage done so far could have been prevented? Finally, what if the damage was deliberately tolerated and even designed into the product, because there are greater profits that way?
Would that not constitute a crime on the scale of war against humanity? And should those responsible not be arrested and tried as war criminals, by an international tribunal? I believe that the answer would be affirmative, that the evidence points in that direction, and that the public forum of a "Crimes Against Humanity" trial is the proper place to initiate the process.
The counts of the indictment for such a trial should roughly parallel the Tokyo/ Nuremburg models.
The basic rationale of the Nuremburg and Tokyo war crimes trials was that over time there has been a development of the concept of "limitations on the harshness of war". The Crimes Against Humanity trials would be based on the parallel concept of a developing limitation on the social license granted to organized interests to exploit unprotected individuals or groups.
At the core of the concept of indicting high officials in both war crimes models is the concept that they either knew, or by virtue of their position and command authority should have known of the existence of the crimes enumerated, and that they either actively conspired to execute these crimes or tacitly facilitated their commission by failure to use their authority to intervene.
Its not as if any of this is truly hidden - the presence of pesticides and the requirement to comply with varying levels of health regulations worldwide has actually created a niche industry of firms ready and willing to tell the cigarette companies which countries will admit which level of pesticide contamination. For example, the following was taken from a 1996 U.S. company brochure
We can help you set-up a laboratory from scratch, or run an existing tobacco laboratory that meets International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards. Our scientists are experienced in FTC and ISO smoking conditions of cigarettes for the determination of nicotine, water, tar, carbon monoxide, and total particulate matter according to the International Organization for Standardization standards ISO 10315:1991, ISO 10362:1991, ISO 8454, and ISO 4387. We are also very knowledgeable in Pesticide residue testing in tobacco for the worldwide leaf and cigarette trade to support government regulations, metals, carbonyls, phenolics, benzene, hydrogen cyanide, 4-aminobiphenyl, ammonia, vinyl chloride, sonlanesol, protein, silica, and reducing sugars analyses.
We do carefully maintain client and product confidentiality.
There are numerous striking parallels between the behavior of multinational cigarette companies as they have maneuvered to establish themselves securely behind veils of illusion and the behavior of the Nazi and Japanese fascist empires as they set up shop.
There are numerous examples in basic cigarette industry research, patents, processes, and public statements which imply guilty knowledge on the part of the executives and owners of the international cigarette companies, including:
Any true indictment of this industry would enumerate the carnage associated with cigarettes - 60 million killed people since 1950. The global cartel of companies, and layers of the corporate empires of the major multinational cigarette-driven corporations, would have to come under the management of an international tribunal with significant, treaty-based powers to pursue individuals, funds, and real property uninhibited by internal court systems to the extent possible.
Just as the Nuremburg trials incorporated the principle that ill-gotten gains must be stripped from the convicted war criminal, so the cigarette company trials should enforce the same principle. The amounts awarded to any one victim or family should probably be limited to a level of award consistent with compensation for pain, suffering and loss. The remainder of the assets of these criminal interests should be applied through the means of an international foundation to projects for the positive benefit of mankind.
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It has been known for a long time that Black and Brown people who smoke cigarettes get lung and breast cancers at higher rates than Whites, suffer diabetes at higher rates, have genetically damaged children at higher rates, and die earlier and more painful deaths than white smokers. What hasn't ever been fully understood is that the excessive sickness and death haven't been because Black and Brown smokers are more vulnerable to tobacco - it's because they are more vulnerable to certain pesticides, especially when these pesticides are inhaled.
There are several dozen extremely dangerous man-made chemicals present as unregulated contaminants in common, everyday cigarettes which are known to cause much greater harm to Black and Brown people, and especially to young people in their early reproductive years, and to Black and Brown babies, than they do to White people of any age and any gender.
Years of testing of pesticides mainly by EPA but also by the major chemical companies confirm that Black and Brown people are at special, increased risk from ingestion of many of the most common pesticides by inhalation, such as they would experience while working in tobacco fields. EPA and USDA regulations, plus state Health departments, began requiring agricultural producers to get their largely Black and Brown workers out of the fields before spraying. This was costly for the producers, but the health consequences of breathing these pesticides were clearly so dangerous, especially to Black and Brown people, that the regulations were and are enforced.
Krieger NK, Wolff MS, Hiatt RA, Rivera M, Vogelman J, Orentreich N. (1994). Breast cancer and serum organochlorines: A prospective study among white, black, and Asian women. J Natl Cancer Inst 86:589-99.
Montgomery LE, Carter-Pokras O. (1993). Health status by social class and/or minority status: Implications for environmental equity research. Toxicol Ind Health 9(5):729-75.
Moses M, et al. (1993). Environmental equity and pesticide exposure. Toxicol Ind Health 9(5):913-60.
National Research Council (NRC). (1991). Environmental epidemiology Volume 1: Public health and hazardous wastes. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
O'Leary LM, Hicks AM, Peters JM, London S. (1991) Parental occupational exposures and risk of childhood cancer: a review. Am J Ind Med 20:17-35.
Olsen JH, Brown P, Schulgen G, Jensen OM. (1991). Parental employment at time of conception and risk of cancer in offspring. Eur J Cancer 27:958-65.
Rios R, Poje GV, Detels R. (1993). Susceptibility to environmental pollutants among minorities. Toxicol Tnd Health 9(5):797-820.
Occupational Exposure To Pesticides, Federal Working Group on Pesticide Management, January, 1974 especially pp 20-60.
As a direct result, because pesticide use is integral to profits in tobacco production, in the late 1970's as the first of the major pesticide bans began, the tobacco companies began moving production out of America and into the Third World where it churns massively along, totally unregulated, to this day.
However, another result of this agricultural fieldworker research, no doubt unintended by the industry and government, is that
That's genocide in my book. How about yours?
I can hear the response from some folks.
" That's it? That's all there is? Cigarettes!!! Hell, everybody knows they're dangerous and can kill you. What kind of genocide conspiracy is that?"
All I would say to this person is to ask them one question - "Do you think that if there really is a successful conspiracy against Black and Brown people, when and if it is finally revealed, that it will turn out to be something that's been successfully hidden away behind closed doors and kept top secret for forty years or more? With all the people and reporters looking behind every government file all the time for evidence of wrongdoing, conspiracy, UFO's, cover-ups, etc.? How are you going to keep a conspiracy secret that's successfully killing proportionally far more Black and Brown people than Whites in the US?
The real magic trick is to hide something that's killing millions of people in plain view and get them to convince themselves that nothing's there; nothing unnatural is happening. In other words, cigarette smokers just naturally drop dead like sprayed flies.
Then in a racist society, when Black and Brown men and women drop dead faster, and in greater proportions than white smokers, everyone - including Black and Brown people - say " Well, what do you expect? After all, they were smokers." Nobody questions the genocide against Black and Brown smokers because it takes place in the context of a larger crime which is also accepted as an everyday occurrence.
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There's a general presumption that the smoking dead deserve their fate. Not that there isn't a lot of sympathy for the individual dying bravely of lung cancer, or emphysema, but even these folks who are victims usually blame the smoking, accepting what they believe to be their responsibility.
Smoking victims today line up silently at the door to the tomb just as cooperatively as the Indian youth in Aztec times lined up at the base of the sacrificial pyramids. The young people at the base of the bloody pyramid believed that their death would feed the Gods, and that if the Gods were not fed, the world would end. It amazed the earliest of Europeans, the few who saw it; it amazes those few who think about it today. It is difficult to imagine a society in which, many times a year, thousands of young people would line up at the base of a pyramid, waiting patiently and cooperatively for their turn to climb the steps, lie on the alter, and have their hearts cut out.
Those few events documented from the European point of view express amazement at the evident willingness and docility of the waiting youngsters. They speculate on drugs, spells, and other explanations for the inexplicable. These young people grew up in special villages, attended by special priests, had all the pleasures of the mind and body, and there they stood, young hearts waiting to be cut from their living flesh. How to explain that? The smoking dead believe that they have caused their own death, and therefore accept it as quietly as the pain will allow, and as uncomplainingly as the young people in line at the base of the pyramid, waiting to be fed to the hungry, bloody Gods at the top.
They believe that they are responsible for a variety of reasons- they had adequate warning, they always knew smoking would kill them, their doctor warned them, they read plenty of articles about smoking & health, they never thought it would happen to them and that was foolish, and so on.
The smoking dead think that they have been killed by tobacco, and by their own habit of smoking tobacco. They know that tobacco is grown by hundreds of thousands of farmers, and that the tobacco companies make cigarettes and all kinds of other tobacco products, and they know that even though tobacco is bad it has always been grown, sold, and smoked, and probably always will be. The smoking dead agree with those who point out that many people smoke for a long and healthy lifetime, and believe that they are simply those who took their chances and lost.
Five hundred thousand people a year dead of smoking in America alone is pretty savage bookkeeping, but the smoking dead are more numerous than even that. They include not just those dying of smoking-related disease, who number over one million a year worldwide, but also those stillborn or born defective because of smoking by their mother, those developing disease and disability because of environmental smoke, and the many others whose lives will be shortened and made more painful and nasty by smoking and its consequences.
The smoking dead have been done a terrible, systematic, deliberate wrong. They have been abused, exploited, sickened, mocked, fooled, taunted, experimented on, and poisoned by people and organizations driven by immense greed, by a form of corporate insanity, and by an anachronistic freedom from accountability rare in any society at any time, much less in our own highly regulated times.
If I could say only one thing to my fellow human beings the smoking dead, I would say this: You are responsible, but you are not to blame. It was your behavior and your habit that made you sick, that will kill you- but it is not your fault. Wake up, before you die, and realize that you are among the ultimate victims in history! Then, if you can, or if you can mobilize those around you to help, get yourself together and take action!
You have been grievously injured, and you have been deceived from the very fundamentals to the most exotic aspects of your disease and its causes by ignorance, to some degree, but largely by a carefully organized conspiracy, and your death is the direct result of their actions, not your own. You are not guilty of causing your own death by smoking, and you have the right to go after these killers with any resources you have.
You greatest resource is the truth that you did not cause your disease, but that the cigarette companies certainly did, and did so in deliberate pursuit of enhanced profitability. You must realize that they meant to cause you this harm, because doing so meant a more profitable business for them. Also, you must realize that they have been protected and shielded by our government from people like you and me who they have injured, and that government totally sanctions this massive homicidal conspiracy.
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Let's assume for a wild moment that pesticides have become regulated in US tobacco products just like with foods and pharmaceuticals, and that studies are beginning to suggest that smoking pure tobacco, while not as healthy as abstaining from smoking, is far less hazardous than smoking those now-banned pesticide contaminated cigarettes. What will this do to the tobacco industry?
One predictable result is that large-scale tobacco farming, which is heavily dependent upon chemicals principally because of the cost of hand labor, will decline or disappear in the US. At the same time there will a massive demand for pesticide-free tobacco for the basic consumer market, and this demand will have to be supplied by hand-cultivated tobacco. Prices will rise dramatically, drawing a large number of small producers into the market. Uncontaminated land suitable for growing tobacco will be in demand, and there will be a flow of people and investment to small towns in the prime tobacco growing regions.
The government will be forced to deregulate tobacco production to enable the rapid development of a sufficient number of small farms to supply the demand for regular consumer branded cigarettes. Assuming that a series of Nuremburg-like trials have successfully prosecuted the multinational cigarette companies and confiscated their assets, there will be sufficient money available as seed capital to finance the start-up of thousands of 5-20 acre tobacco farms in the US and worldwide, as in-country small-scale production develops to serve the internal markets of each country.
At the same time, there will be a strong revival of interest in tobacco growing among Native Americans, who will realize that there is a strong niche market for pure original Native American tobaccos grown on traditional ground and packaged with medicinal herbs. I believe that a very large share of any confiscated-assets money made available to fund small start-up tobacco production businesses be allocated exclusively to Native Americans, to whom tobacco originally belonged, just like the continent of North America. One predictable result of Native American tobacco production is that there would be an immediate worldwide interest in such products, leading to a significant new export economy for Native American communities.
A market will also probably develop for boutique tobacco producers, much like the emerging markets for local and regional wine, beer and gourmet foods producers. The market for pipe tobaccos is likely to be especially lucrative for small producers, who will no doubt rapidly move in to take over from the contaminated mass-produced poison currently being sold as "traditional" blends and flavors.
While there are many legitimate farmers among those currently holding tobacco allotments, there are also many allotment holders who are simply getting paid off for political reasons. Because of this murky situation I believe that, along with the cigarette industry trials and asset-seizures, the best approach is to cancel and negate all current growing and production allotments and licenses. Some sort of re-application process should be made available to individuals and families who have actually been farming their land, or someone else's, but those who have merely owned and profited from the allotment system without actually doing any growing should not be able to receive any preference under any new system.
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It's a rare person among us who has never been on a diet. Even those who are by some happy quirk of fate always slim and sexy are besieged by daily messages that thinner is always more beautiful. Since the flapper days of the 1920's, cigarette smoking has been consistently associated with glamorous thinness, and today one of the major reasons women smokers dread the prospect of quitting is the weight gain invariably associated with it.
Ironically the role of smoke in quieting hunger pangs has reinforced the preference of dedicated smokers for cigarettes over food, when economics dictate choosing between the two. It's not at all uncommon anywhere to see people begging for money to buy food with one hand, while clutching a burning cigarette in the other, unaware of the cruel exploitation which manifests itself in their choice of smoking over eating.
Just as society shields itself as far as possible from nuclear waste by storing it in remote, secure places, the body shields itself from toxic, carcinogenic pesticides ingested from the environment by storing them in the nuclei of fat cells.
I believe that the evidence is strong that by smoking contaminated cigarettes and newly fashionable cigars people in general and women in particular are chronically exposed to sublethal concentrations of dozens of pesticides which are known to pool in fatty tissues like breasts and cause cancer, along with causing neurological disease and genetic defects elsewhere in the body. When these stored pesticides are released from decaying fat cells during weight loss, they tend to pool on-site rather than being translocated. Breasts are one of the preferred sites for fat-cell storage, and thus become a primary site for released concentrations of pesticides known to cause cancer.
FOR RELATED INFO SEE:Re: DDT and Breast Cancer,
Sternberg, S. S., Journal of the National Cancer Institute: JNCI, July 20 1994 v86 n14 p. 1094
FOR RELATED INFO SEE:Pesticides: How Research Has Succeeded and Failed in Informing Policy: DDT and the Link with Breast Cancer,
Wolff, Mary S., Environmental Health Perspectives: EHP, September 1995 v103 supp: 6 p. 87
FOR RELATED INFO SEE: Aldrin and Dieldrin Residues in Human Fat, Milk and Blood Serum Collected from Delhi
Nair, Arnit, Dureja, P., Pillai, M.K.K., Human & Experimental Toxicology, January 1992 v11 n1 p. 43
The role of pesticide residues in breast cancer seems to be clear to researchers, and the articles cited in this section will demonstrate. Most curiously, what no research institute in the world seems to have investigated is the extent to which pesticide-contaminated cigarettes, cigars, and other so-called tobacco products contribute to the total body-fat pesticide burden of women who smoke, and it's relation to disease - although the relationship between blood serum levels of DDT and cancer seem to be understood.
FOR RELATED INFO SEE:A Prospective Follow up Study of Cancer Mortality in Relation to Serum DDT
Austin, Harland, Keil, Julyian E., Cole, Phillip, American Journal Of Public Health, January 1989 v79 n1 p. 43
By the way, in female bodies breasts are clearly a favorite site for pesticide storage - so guess where one of the fave spots is in guys?
FOR RELATED INFO SEE:DDT And Testicular Cancer
Ekbom, A., The Lancet, February 24, 1996 v 347 p. 553
FOR RELATED INFO SEE: Testicular Cancer In Pesticide Applicators In Swedish Agriculture,
Dich, J., Wiklund, K., Holms, L.E., Scandinavian Journal Of Work, Environment & Healing, February 1996 v22 n1, p. 66
A high Centers for Disease Control official at a 1993 Waste Management conference in 1993 made the following remarks regarding environmental exposure to organochlorine pesticides, evidently completely unaware that they are a preventable factor in the health of women smokers:
"As rates of breast cancer continue to increase for reasons that remain unclear, the topic of a possible link between certain pesticides and this disease in women has generated considerable interest. Environmental factors have recently been implicated in several animal and human studies as important contributors to breast cancer. All known risk factors identified for breast cancer to date relate to reproductive history and personal characteristics, perhaps dietary factors."
"These factors are joined by their common tie to greater lifetime exposure to estrogen. Thus, the earlier in life a women menstruates and the later in life she has menopause, the higher her risk of breast cancer. The longer she nurses her children and the earlier in life she has her first child, the lower her risk of breast cancer. If she has no children, and has, therefore, experienced uninterrupted menstrual cycles, she has a higher risk of breast cancer. The more alcohol she drinks, the higher her risk of breast cancer because alcohol stimulates estrogen production. Animal fat and corn oil may also increase the risk of breast cancer by stimulating estrogen production.
These known risk factors account for, at best, 30% of the disease, but we still cannot explain nearly 70% of all cases. Researchers have long realized that breast cancer is hormonally mediated, that is, influenced by how much hormone a women produces. Lately, scientists have begun asking whether compounds in the environment might also stimulate estrogen production and thereby increase a woman's risk of breast cancer. We call these theoretical materials called xeno estrogens. (Xeno, from the Greek term for foreign, refers to environmental materials that affect the intenal production of hormones.)"
"Much public attention has focused recently on one class of compounds known to include xenoestrogens the class of organochlorine materials. One key epidemiologic study in this area was developed by Wolff et al. (1993). They conducted a large, nested, case control study of women enrolled in a breast clinic. After some of these women developed breast cancer, the blood drawn from them at first enrollment was analyzed for residues of certain suspect xenoestrogens. Researchers found that women in the top 90th percentile for exposure to a metabolite of DDT had a 4 fold excess risk of breast cancer compared with women in the bottom 10th percentile."
"When all human studies already conducted are considered, along with the experimental evidence on several different chemical classes of xenoestrogens, a fairly compelling argument can be made that environmental factors, such as xenoestrogenic plastics, fuels, pesticides, drugs, and other chemicals, may be contributing to some of the increase in breast cancer that is occurring in post menopausal women.
Of course, past patterns of use of diagnostic and therapeutic radiation and possible environmental exposures could also be relevant to current rates of breast cancer, because radiation clearly induces the disease. In any case, because known risk factors do not completely account for recent patterns of breast cancer, other factors must be explored. In light of these unexplained and persisting patterns in breast cancer, a wide range of estrogens remain prime suspects."
FOR RELATED INFO SEE: Davis DL, Bradlow HL, Wolff M, Woodruff T, Hoel DG, Anton-Culver H.,Medical hypothesis: Xenoestrogens as preventable causes of breast cancer,
Environmental Health Perspectives 101, pp. 372-7
FOR RELATED INFO SEE: Krieger NK, Wolff MS, Hiatt RA, Rivera M, Vogelman J, Orentreich N., Breast cancer and serum organochlorines: A prospective study among white, black, and Asian women.
Journal of the National Cancer Institute 1994, v86, pp. 589-99
FOR RELATED INFO SEE: Pesticide Residues And Breast Cancer?,
MacMahon, B., Journal of the National Cancer Institute: JNCI, April 20 1994 v 86 n 8, p. 572
Smokers who do go on diets find themselves smoking more than usual, and smokers who try to quit usually find themselves gaining weight. A lot of quasi-scientific guesswork lays the blame for these twin dilemmas on individual psychological urges, usually expressed as a diagnosis of compelling oral gratification. In spite of the massive attention given to both smoking and dieting, the relationships between cigarette composition, cigarette smoking behavior, and diet failure have rarely if ever been explored.
FOR RELATED INFO SEE: Effect of p,p' DDT and Estrogen on the Presence in the Circulation and Degranulation of Blood Eosinophil Leukocytes,
Bustos, S Soto, J. Tchernitchin, A. N., Bulletin Of Environmental Contamination And Toxicology, August 1995 v55 n2 p. 309
The first clues to what might be going on lies in research data which concerns the role of the body's fat cells in processing and storing toxic and otherwise xenobiotic chemicals introduced by ingestion and other, minor routes of exposure such as skin contact. Next comes the field of study concerning behavioral manifestations of chronic exposure to chemicals which affect the human nervous and organ systems, the blood, and other specialized body fluids and tissues. Finally, we can learn a great deal from examining the disciplines related to nutrition and dieting, especially the cellular-level and biochemical processes which accompany dieting and fasting at various levels.
FOR RELATED INFO SEE: Persistent DDT Metabolite p,p' DDE is a Potent Androgen Receptor Antagonist,
Kelce, William R. Stone, Christy R. Wilson, Elizabeth M., Obstetrical & Gynecological Survey, February 1996 v 51 n 2 p. 111
World Health Organization has conducted numerous studies on the exposure of Third World agricultural workers to pesticides and other potent agrichemicals, and many of these studies have noted the role of fat cells in the body's response to the ingestion of xenobiotic substances.
The principal role of fat cells under such conditions is to act as safe storage vessels for a wide range of substances which would cause great harm if placed in intimate contact with other types of cell such as blood, nerve, or muscle cells.
Fat cells have an interior chemistry and makeup which allows them to store potent chemicals such as the organochlorine and organophosphorous pesticides, which are among the most commonly used insect control agents in the Third World in spite of their near total ban in western countries. The ban on substances such as DDT, Dieldrin, Endrin, Aldrin, and the other Organochlorine pesticides is well founded on knowledge of their invariable carcinogenic effects, yet no control mechanism exists to prevent their use in Third World agriculture, so workers are routinely exposed.
Since most Third World agricultural workers suffer chronically from starvation and intestinal parasites, and with very few fat cells to store these chemicals relatively harmlessly they are at great immediate risk from exposure. In fact, detailed WHO studies have shown that exposure brings about onset of cancer and other degenerative disease in such fat-deficient people far more quickly than an equivalent exposure in someone with a normal or adequate fat cell count. While relatively few of the hundreds of agrichemical compounds in the Third World environment have been studied from the perspective of fat storage mechanisms, those which have been carefully investigated strongly imply that the phenomena are near-universal.
FOR RELATED INFO SEE: Family Pesticide Use and Childhood Brain Cancer
Davis, James R., Brownson, Ross C., Garcia, Richard, Archives Of Environmental Contamination And Toxicology, January 1993 v 24 n 1, p. 87
The processes of fat cell carcinogen storage are not the same for all chemicals; for instance, DDT is stored by the fat cell only after it has been converted into a relatively impotent carcinogen, while Dieldrin is converted before storage into a form which is even more carcinogenic than the original parent compound before it is finally walled off inside the cell. In both cases, when the body draws upon its fat cells for energy during times of voluntary or involuntary dietary deprivation, the stored compounds are released into the bloodstream.
FOR RELATED INFO SEE: The Relevance of Fat Content in Toxicity of Lipophilic Chemicals to Terrestrial Animals with Special Reference to Dieldrin and 2,3,7,8 Tetrachlorodibenzo[p]dioxin (TCDD),
Geyer, Harald J., Scheunert, Irene, Rapp, Karl, Ecotoxicology And Environmental Safety, August 1993 v26 n1 p. 45
The compounds which have been depotentiated for storage are reactivated, resuming their original carcinogenic or toxic potentials, while the compounds which have been converted into enhanced lethal form appear to be unchanged, entering the blood and lymphatic circulation with all knives flashing.
Consider the irony that so many young women smoke, diet, and exercise, keeping their fat cells to a minimum while ingesting chronic sublethal dosages of pesticides, which causes their body to try to make as many fat cells as possible to shield itself from the poisons, while the young woman tries to shed those extra pounds with exercise. And where do those pesticides pool in their attempt to find haven in fat cell nuclei? Anywhere there's fat which, in the thinnest, most fit young women is in the breasts.
FOR RELATED INFO SEE: Estrogenic Activity of p,p' DDT,
Bustos, S. Soto, J. Tchernitchir, A.N., Environmental Toxicology And Water Quality, 1996 v11 n3 p. 265
The current craze for cigars among otherwise healthy, athletic, and fashionable young people holds a special irony for thin, fit young women, many of whom share a common goal of keeping body fat down. These women spend hours every week exercising, dieting, and staying beautiful. They they step out for an evening and have themselves a nice $10 cigar - good quality, nothing cheap.
At that price the cigar is probably 100% tobacco, though you can still find reconstituted wrapper leaf, with skillfully faked leaf ribs and all, in the $10 range. So let's give our young woman a $18 cigar. At that level we can be pretty sure that she's smoking not only quality filler, but real leaf wrapper.
In order to produce that leaf wrapper, the grower had to contend with a huge array of insect and other predators, all hungry for that sweet, high protein cigar wrapper leaf - maybe Black Fat, or Havana tobacco leaf. The grower had to use organochlorines, organophosphorous, and carbamate pesticides, and metallic poisons like arsenic and cadmium. He had to use specialty chemicals to attack molds and fungi in his tropical environment, and he had to cope with illiterate fieldhands who often mis-mixed the chemicals so that they had to be re-applied. All of this because this grower knows that when the time comes to sell his cigar wrapper leaf, if he has been successful at preventing bugs, snails, and other predators from taking a bite, that leaf will be worth significantly more to him. With tens of thousands of leaves in a field, the difference in grade created by just a few bug bite holes in each one is big money - worth every penny a grower has to spend on chemicals.
Unfortunately for our fit young woman having a nice dinner, drinks and cigar with her friends, the high quality leaf from which her expensive cigar is made is heavily contaminated with all those insecticides, fungicides, and other poisons, and she's now taking them into her bloodstream with each savory puff. There's plenty of them in that rich cigar smoke, so her body has to do something with them - fast. It does what bodies do, and stores the worst of the pesticides directly into the nuclei of her fat cells. Unfortunately since there are very few fat cells to work with on our fit young woman, the relatively few fatty locations on her body quickly become the human equivalent of EPA superfund sites.
FOR RELATED INFO SEE:The Pesticides Ensosulfan, Toxophene, and Dieldrin Have Estrogenic Effects on Human Estrogen Sensitive Cells
Soto, Ana M., Chung, Kerrie L., Sonnenschein, Carlos, Environmental Health Perspectives: EHP, April 1994 v102 n4 p. 380
The next day our young friend is back at work on her body, keeping down the fat by exercise. Since she had dinner the night before, and probably even had a dessert since it was a special enough dinner to have an $18 cigar. This means that today she'll exercise at least 30 minutes longer, to burn off that extra fat. As she does so, more of the pooled insecticides and their potentiated stereoisomers will be liberated to do their work on her body while waiting to be excreted or re-absorbed.
Incidentally, we can also be pretty sure that when she smokes cigarettes, as she does several times a day, she smokes a filtered, low lar brand as part of her health-conscious approach to being young and cool, but let's hope she hasn't had the lip injections that are so popular, or that she isn't full-lipped by nature or ethnicity.
Blocking Cigarette Filter Vents With Lips More Than Doubles Carbon Monoxide Intake From Ultra Low Tar Cigarettes
Kozlowski, Lynn T., Sweeney, Christine T., Pillitteri, Janine L., Experimental And Clinical Psychopharmacology, November 1996 v4 n4 p. 404
It's not for nothing that in one of the classic Tarot card decks the card of the Fool is a young man smiling up entranced at the moon as he strides off of a precipice. Perhaps the young have a right to be foolish, but this industry has no right to take cruel advantage of their foolishness.
Does society really need to debate the origins of cancer in smokers before demanding that manufacturers of currently fashionable cigars produce a pesticide-free product and remove all current contaminated product from the market? And how long do you think it would take quality cigar producers to come up with pesticide-free products once the market for contaminated products is removed? Does society really to know more than what can be readily seen from placing the evidence side-by-side before moving to protect women and children from this worldwide chemical assault?
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People have been debating Nicotine for so many years it may seem strange to raise the question of whether Nicotine is what we should be talking about when we are discussing addiction to cigarettes. The assumption that cigarette addiction equals Nicotine addiction is suspiciously similar to the evidently false assumption that cigarettes and tobacco are one and the same thing. So if cigarettes aren't tobacco, or are tobacco plus a lot of man-made stuff, then is addiction to cigarettes simply a "natural" addiction to Nicotine, or is it addiction to something different?
I believe that cigarette addiction is addiction to the non-tobacco additives and contaminants, including known, proven human carcinogens, neurotoxins, hormone deregulators, fetal-damaging compounds, and genetic mutating agents. In other words, cigarette smokers are addicted to what's killing them, and what's killing them has little or nothing to do with tobacco. It's really that simple - but it takes some background to fully grasp, so here's more to consider.
When a person chronically ingests a sublethal dosage of a substance with a highly toxic lethal threshold, they become hooked on the substance and behave in much the same way as an addict to one of the drugs commonly associated with addiction- alcohol, the Opiates, nicotine, etc. Toxic addiction does not manifest itself in an overt craving for the toxic substance, until for some reason the intake is interrupted. At that point the body immediately sets up a biochemical clamor for its routine dose of the poison, and the person responds by nervously seeking out a source for his fix.
In the case of cigarettes, toxic addiction is masked by the commonly perceived addiction to nicotine- in other words, cigarette addiction is far more than nicotine addiction, which itself may well be far less relevant to the smoker's behavior than the man-made poisons.
Since a pack-a-day smoker takes approximately 50,000 puffs a year, the intake of cigarette pesticide residues and their combustion byproducts is definitely chronic, and since the amount of poisons in each puff is minute, there is no approach to the lethal threshold.
Since many of the agricultural and industrial poisons in cigarettes are cumulative, and over time a technically lethal dosage is reached, although this process is considerably modified by phenomena such as increasing tolerance and synergism with other poisons. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of Toxic Addiction is not terribly concerned with the eventual lethality of the accumulated dosage, but with the consequences to a smoker whose intake of these poisons is interrupted. He craves, he sweats, he is irritable and nervous- and, he goes right out and buys another pack, or maybe a carton, just to be sure he wont go through the experience of running out again.
Toxic addiction to cigarettes can be traced to a wide variety of substances, including many of the pesticide residues commonly found in cigarettes, industrial solvents and other contaminants present as a result of unregulated manufacturing processes, and chemical additives deliberately incorporated into cigarettes to promote brand loyalty by inducing subtle forms of physiological dependency. The interaction of these substances with the nicotine commonly associated with cigarette addiction produces a powerful set of biochemical imperatives which, taken together, constitute one of the most powerfully addictive array of substances to which people are commonly exposed, although the public is almost totally unaware of any of these elements but the nicotine.
Small wonder that physicians and scientists are at a loss to explain the strength of the hook in cigarettes.
"Most cigarette smokers, like most drug users, have a remarkable capacity for denial; they appear to believe that the bad effects caused by drugs happen to other people. Many of those who begin to smoke cigarettes believe that they will someday give them up (Lieberman, 1969). Very few cigarette smokers start out to become dependent. We must infer from their behavior that gradually the capacity to choose is eroded and, while the user may want to believe that he/she can stop at any time, the behavior indicates that this is not the case. Hunt, Barnett and Branch (1971) plotted relapse rates for heroin users, cigarette smokers, and alcoholics. The plotted curves of relapse over a one year period were virtually identical."
Dr. Jerome Jaffe, National Institute of Drug Abuse
These observations by Dr. Jaffe, one of the world's leading authorities on drug addiction, point out the strength of the hook in cigarettes. They also demonstrate the bemusement that is common in cigarette addiction literature. Almost all of the studies in this field include some version of the basic statement- "We know that cigarettes are incredibly addictive- we just don't really know why."
Unfortunately, in almost every study of cigarette addiction the scientists have made the assumption that they were studying the effects of tobacco addiction. Not one of the published studies makes any reference to the fact that cigarettes and tobacco are not at all the same thing, nor have any of these studies attempted to explain cigarette addiction on the basis of a clear knowledge of the physical and chemical composition of cigarettes. While the analogy may seem ludicrous, it is as if scientists were still attempting to explain lunar phenomena based on the assumption that the moon is made of green cheese. or to plot global geography on the basis of an assumption that the world is flat.
One encounters expressions of confusion and puzzlement throughout technical literature which attempts to describe and explain the strength of the cigarette hook. A leading cigarette addiction researcher notes:
" Despite the parallels which may be drawn between tobacco (sic) use and the use of other dependence-producing substances, there are some important differences. Perhaps the most important is that tobacco (sic) does not induce the acute behavioral toxicity that is seen with alcohol, opiates, amphetamines, cocaine, and the hallucinogens. The adverse effects from tobacco (sic) are exclusively remote, and stem from chronic use rather than from occasional indulgence. Furthermore, the likelihood that regular users of tobacco (sic) will suffer a medical illness appears to be directly related to total dose of certain tobacco (sic) constituents over time."
Gori, 1976
Another leading researcher says
"In the case of most other drug-using behaviors, we have identified the pharmacological reinforcer. In contrast, we are not at all certain that nicotine is the only reinforcer in tobacco-using (sic) behavior. For a substance that exerts such a hold over so many people, nicotine appears to be less than our most dramatic reinforcer in animals. There is no "mystique" about the nicotine "high" that in any way resembles that associated with the use of alcohol, opiates, cocaine, or marijuana. It is curious that it is easier to find descriptions of the acute effects of the latter substances, which are used by only a small fraction of the population, than comparable descriptions of the subjective effects of tobacco (sic), which is used by millions."
Jaffe, 1979
Other scientists in the field of addiction studies have come a little closer to the role of Xenobiotics in cigarettes addiction. Dr. Jarvik, in a study entitled "Tolerance To The Effects Of Tobacco (sic)" observes that
"Tar is defined as the total particulate matter collected by a Cambridge filter after subtracting moisture and Nicotine. The polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are generally blamed for a substantial portion of the carcinogenic effects of "Tar". They are also powerful enzyme inducers and are undoubtedly responsible for much of the tolerance, produced by smoking, to themselves and to a variety of other compounds. It is now known that hepatic enzyme formation is induced by a number of carcinogens in the tar fraction of cigarette smoke, including Benzpyrene (Oates, et al, 1975). This means that smokers are rendered tolerant to both the therapeutic and toxic effects of a wide variety of drugs."
Once more, one of this country's most talented scientists, a person dealing every day with the serious health effects of smoking, fails to make the simple but profound distinction between tobacco and Cigarettes. The end result of this sort of confusion is that scientists are unable to explain the causes of the powerful addictive hook of cigarettes, because they are looking in the wrong place. How is it that almost without exception, America's most sophisticated scientists and researchers could be so misled? The word is precisely that- misled. How else to explain the uniform ignorance of these brilliant, dedicated people concerning the most basic of facts- the object of their research and the source of their conclusions?
Very strange indeed. These scientists routinely attend international conferences, where they are exposed to colleagues from Europe and elsewhere who are intimately aware of the difference between cigarettes and tobacco. Of course, European health regulations forbid many of the manufacturing practices and outlaw many of the additives and contaminants routinely present in American cigarettes, so it may be argued that European scientists are simply not aware of the confusion which obfuscates the vision of their American counterparts.
But wouldn't you think that somewhere along the line, some European health researcher would have said to an American colleague
"Hey, wait a minute. You keep talking about your inability to find the addictive factors in tobacco, but don't you know that many brands of American cigarettes contain little if any real tobacco, and are full of carefully crafted man-made chemical hooks that we don't allow in our European products? Haven't you ever studied the synthetic smoking materials, contaminants, and additives in your American cigarettes for their addictive potential, regardless of any effects which may be due to a little reprocessed tobacco present in the cigarette?"
This imaginary scenario may, or may not have ever occurred. If it has, then where is the research, and if it has not, then a very significant clue to a major cause of cigarette-related death and suffering has been somehow overlooked. Also, what have all thoser researchers and doctors been discussing at their meetings and conferences, if they never discussed these issues?
In the absence of regulation and testing of the array of pesticides, fungicides, fumigants, recycled wastes, and other established components of modern American synthetic and reconstituted cigarettes, what reasonable smoker or non-smoker can fail to be convinced that there is an immediate serious health hazard here that has nothing at all to do with tobacco? We know that a steady daily diet of dioxins or benzene or asbestos by any other means- eating, drinking, breathing- will very likely cause cancer and death. Why not when inhaled by smoking or breathing cigarette smoke containing these substances - as cigarettes do?
While it is criminal that federal bureaucracies, legislators, and private interests have merely watched over this atrocity for decades, and done nothing effective about the massive dying in spite of the fanfare, there is no point in berating past behavior which cannot be undone.
However the game of protecting the runaway "tobacco" industry must now come to an end, the American government must finally break free of its historic hidden ties to tobacco money and influence and take the side of the People, and act immediately to declare a public health emergency, to remove all contaminated products, to impose regulations effective immediately on any new tobacco products, and move on an international front to determine the extent of civil and criminal liability on the part of the specific members of tobacco industry management, directorship, and ownership communities and those of allied industries and professions including chemicals, forest products, food processing, agricultural sciences, and legal services.
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The story of Pinocchio has charmed millions for generations but its core message remains largely unnoticed. The puppet son created by Gepetto the woodcarver has all the attributes of a real boy, except a heart. He thinks, he speaks, he is motivated, he walks, he talks - he's even puzzled and troubled by certain evidence that he may not be real, though he sees himself as a person, as a real live boy, and asserts that realness with a bravery which all readers of the story recognize as both admirable, and full of pathos.
Unlike Pinocchio, who knows his father, far too many human souls know nothing of the existence of puppet masters. Millions of human souls go through life dangling asleep from unseen strings, with the puppetmasters wiggling their fingers inside puppet heads to make them speak, laugh, cry, and engage artfully and flawlessly in full simulation of real awakened life.
How many of us are simple puppets who bravely and admirably, like Pinocchio, are totally convinced that we are real. That our thoughts and actions aren't controlled by anybody! That we are our own person. That nobody tells us what to do or how to think. That we have a mind of our own. That we're free to think, say and do what we please.
Countless generations of open-eyed sleeping people have believed themselves awake, physically existent, and individual, and in this belief have been easy prey for puppet masters, who are equipped by nature to hunt in the realms of the unawakened where the prey believe that they sleep only during the planetary night.
These open-eyed sleepers are easily hypnotized and manipulated by skilled predatory masters who lure them with powerful dream images, emotions, and logic which dominate and control the unawakened state which sleepers call consciousness.
Successfully indoctrinated sleepers will rush to defend the illusions which ensnare them, swarming over any intruder or deviant who questions their reality, or who otherwise raises whatever dread spectre has been placed at the gates to freedom to turn back sleepers seeking to escape the doctrine.
Could it be that the basic illusion is that we are awake - that we walk and talk, think and act, and are obviously awake, just like a real live boy. What other explanation can there be for our lives, our experiences, our reality? Except .... there's that curious tickle in the back of our minds that something seems to be missing, something not where it should be, something .... unreal about all this.
I think that's the clue. Right there. That sense of the missing ingredient, the thing that ought to be there in ourselves and everybody around us, if all this were real and not simply a puppet's illusion. The little children's story about Pinocchio even tells us straight out- what's missing is love and caring for each other, without which we're all puppets. But we look at the story as trivial childhood entertainment rather than as the most precious of gifts, the liberating jewel.
Still, the hand of god is present in that feeling that something is missing, that there is more to it than this, which the puppet mind comprehends. It is that feeling, if enough of us have it and act on it, which will free us from the puppetmasters and bring us to real life, because pursuit of that feeling leads inevitably to one conclusion, the true point of this wise story, this gem:
Puppets are brought to consciousness and to real life only through love and caring for each other.
Until then the gory arms of the puppetmasters will probe our insides and their fingers will wiggle in our heads, and the show will go on with millions of us talking and crying and praying from an empty stage where nobody's listening because there is no god for puppets, only a small voice beckoning from inside the wooden heart, the message all but drowned out by the roaring and whirring and clicking in the wooden head.
It is especially apt as the millenium turns that we keep in mind how convinced people were for hundreds of generations that this planet earth was at the center of the universe, how clear this fundamental assumption was to every western intellect no matter how restricted or how vast, and how cruelly this article of faith was defended when it was finally questioned by the awakening minds of the European Renaissance.
We should remember that many wise and learned people took their own lives because they could not bear the stretch of the mind and soul required to incorporate this newly awakened knowledge.
Perhaps we are dealing with a similar phenomenon here - with the fundamental mistaken assumptions that we are awake and not captive in a dream world, that we are separate and not one, and that we know the difference between dreams and reality, between me and you, and understand what the difference means.
We should never forget that the people who believed the earth was at the center of the universe lived in what they fully believed was the real world, which we now realize was complete illusion in their collective minds but which was as real to them as ours is to us. They lived and worked and raised families in their world as fully and without question as we live in our world, perhaps with our own core illusions veiling where we are in the universe, where we come from, where we are going, and who we are - who we all are.
We are not yet free of profound illusion - and that small voice from our wooden hearts may be the only clue we have. Many people believe that the last words of the prophet Jesus, which were "Father, forgive them. They know not what they do", refer to those who are killing him, and are an example of his charity and forgiveness. I prefer to think of these words as a mantra sent deliberately down through time, as has been done by many of the great spiritual masters of mankind, in this case as an assurance to those stirring toward consciousness that it is not that evil dominates this world, but that good has not yet fully awakened, and that in time, it will.
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