dioxins
So-called "smoking-related" illnesses are effects of pesticides, and dioxin

The coordinated, corporate-funded global campaign to ignore, hide, and steal evidence of the harms of industrial chemicals is particularly hypocritical, callous and vicious when it comes to mothers and children. There is an intensified push lately to focus the anti-tobacco crusade on mothers who smoke, and on mothers and kids who may be exposed to second-hand, and even third-hand smoke. ("Third hand" refers to smoke scent left behind on fabrics and so forth.) There are even moves afoot to separate children from their own mothers if the mother happens to smoke. (1) This is serious business.

That tobacco is one of the most pesticide-contaminated agricultural products is a topic too big, too complicated, or too itchy to address in most forums, so far. (2)

There are no moves to separate toxic and carcinogenic and immune-damaging chemicals from what most mothers (and others) believe, and are told, are just tobacco products. And, there are no moves to separate the complicit industries from easily trillions of dollars in penalties and liabilities for what they have done to tobacco and to unwitting, abysmally unprotected, deceived, and Guinea-pigged smokers, mothers included.

The anti-smoking, tobacco prohibition movement is based on "research" that studies effects of using smoking products that are not described or analyzed. "Cigarette" studies do not describe the kind of cigarette (organic or not), or the industrial adulterants. (3) "Smoke" is studied, without description of what exactly is being burned. "Tobacco" is studied, without qualification regarding any non-tobacco adulteration or even if the smoking product contains any tobacco, there being numerous U.S. patents by top manufacturers for making "tobacco substitute material." (4) And "smokers" are studied without a glance at other sources of industrial pollutants at their workplaces, homes or elsewhere in their lives.

To call this research incorrect or incomplete is too kind. It's hard to imagine more fraudulent science. And it's hard to imagine how legitimate law can arise from this.

Researchers study effects of unidentified products that are highly-contaminated with residues of carbamate, organophosphate and chlorine pesticides, dioxin in the smoke from the chlorine pesticides and bleached paper, cancer-causing polonium 210 radiation from certain phosphate fertilizers, any of about 1400 untested and often toxic non-tobacco additives, added burn accelerants, kid-attracting sweets and flavorings etc, carcinogenic filter components, and addiction-enhancing additives. (5) (6) (7) (8)

Researchers then conclude (with no ridicule or outrage from the audience or from legitimate researchers) that "tobacco kills"...a finding that ignores that some brands at the low-value end may contain no tobacco at all, but, instead, "tobacco substitute material" made from camouflaged industrial waste cellulose that itself is likely chlorine contaminated. No law requires labeling such cigarettes as "tobacco free," or "made from industrial waste." Even some otherwise astute and critical progressives accept the deceit that a typical cigarette is automatically tobacco.

This is the kind of "science" that, in old Florence, might have concluded that "drinking" or "wine" caused the death of Medici family enemies murdered by arsenic-laced wine. No one thought then to ban wine and drinking to 'save lives' or to distract from Medici murders. It might have been said that, "everyone knows the dangers of alcohol." Critics, if any dared, would be labeled as supporters of drunkenness and death.

What we now have is that a natural plant, one that is conveniently "sinful" and pagan by having been used for ten thousand years by godless indigenous people in the Americas, is being scapegoated for crimes perpetrated by the industries that made typical smoking products into virtual toxic waste incinerators that are inescapably deadly.

Once again, nature is blamed. Diseases and deaths caused by typical contaminated smoking products are "acts of God", just as are deaths caused by industry-aggravated climate change, or by rain that causes toxic mine reservoirs to overflow and kill those below. Once again victims are blamed, burdened with unjustified laws, and uncompensated. Once again, evidence against harmful industrial substances, especially pesticides, chlorine and dioxin, is being stolen from under our noses. And, once again, the perpetrators are off the hook. Many dare not criticize the quasi-religious corporate "war on tobacco" lest they be labeled as being anti-children, anti-worker, and supporters of dirty air, sinful behavior, disease and death.

Typical cigarettes are not simply products of a relative handful of so-called, self-called, "tobacco companies." They are industrial concoctions that involve the complicity of many pesticide and herbicide manufacturers (some being pharmaceuticals), chlorine producers, logging, pulp and paper, pesticide-intensive agricultural conglomerates, phosphate fertilizer mining, pharmaceuticals again in the additives area, sugar and chocolate, adhesives, spices and so on...plus all their insurers and investors.

One short list, from the U.S. General Accounting Office, of just 35 out of 450 or so tobacco pesticides, includes chemicals produced at one time or another by the likes of Dow, DuPont, Rohm and Haas, FMC Corporation, American Cyanamid, Monsanto, Valent, Miles, Ciba Geigy, BASF, Niklor, Rhone-Poulenc, Zeneca, Drexel, Sanex, Great Lakes, and Bayer. That's our "Big Tobacco" industry, along with the Philip Morrises and RJRs who assemble it all. (9) A typical (very non-organic) cigarette is a "Pesticide Peg" or a "Dioxin Dowel."

Those businesses, the cigarette makers, adulterant suppliers, and the officials in government who presided over and benefited from this mass experimentation and mass poisoning of millions of unwitting people, are working overtime to distract from all that by blaming and putting legal burdens on the victims. This is not a grassroots crusade, as much as the perpetrators try to paint it as such. It's a corporate Anti Smoking Crusade...or, actually, anti-those-doing-the-smoking-of-god-knows-what campaign. Barely a municipality in the land (if not the world) is immune from this epidemic fraud. The questionable anti-smoke-ban forces pathetically defend something called "right to smoke" and, like their oppressors in the ban movement, claim and allow that typical cigarettes are just tobacco. If that isn't a clue to a set-up fraudulent "opposition" then nothing is.

Among the victims of the anti-smoke crusade, and of the broad cigarette cartel, are pregnant mothers, fetuses, and children who are most vulnerable to innumerable harms from the industrial chemical components of typical cigarettes and the smoke. (10) Of course, mothers, fetuses, and children are harmed by other exposures to pesticides and dioxins, but if a mother smokes or has been exposed to "environmental tobacco smoke"...bingo!...the opening is conveniently provided to blame "tobacco", "secondhand smoke" and "smoking".

Who throws the first stones at the mothers? None other than the "tobacco free" and "anti smoking" groups whose own "mothers" are pesticide and chlorine industries. The Tobacco-Free Kids organization is heavily funded by Johnson & Johnson, a manufacturer of nicotine delivery devices, which "is eager to replace the tobacco industry in the distribution of nicotine," according to Forces.org, "an organisation in support of human rights and - in particular, but not limited to - the defence of those who expect from life the freedom to smoke, eat, drink and, in general, to enjoy personal lifestyle choices without restrictions and state interference." (11)

Due to media cooperation in this mass deception, it has become a given, a virtual religious belief, that tobacco and smoking are the sole culprits. No need for actual investigation. Independent science?...forget it. Might as well have Independent Investigators look into 9/11 or Bush wiretapping and torture. Not to happen.

There are no efforts to examine patients for body burdens of industrial substances that are in most cigarettes and are known to cause exactly the diseases and pathologies described colloquially, and unscientifically, as "smoking related".

One study, perhaps the most outrageous, done at the University of Pennsylvania, found that smoking mothers caused their own babies' webbed fingers and toes. (12) These are the same deformities that are notorious effects of Agent Orange spraying in Vietnam. Researchers did not seem to know about Agent Orange or chlorine or dioxin. No news reporter raised that question either. Dioxin, in chlorine-contaminated cigarette smoke or elsewhere, was not even considered as a probable or likely or already-known cause of such problems. Chlorine tobacco pesticides, duly registered by the U.S. government, are not secret, and the chlorine-bleached cigarette paper is not hidden from view. Even people shopping for bathroom tissue know that chlorine-bleached paper is to be avoided for many health and environmental reasons. Not those Penn researchers.

It was as if they studied gunshot victims and failed to look for bullets, guns, or shooters. If the Medici's hire their own investigators, that's what you get.

Barely a week goes by that mainstream media do not report studies that essentially blame mothers for causing yet another health problem for themselves or their fetuses or their children. Mothers from Hell, we are to presume. Tobacco plants, of course, from Mother Nature, are also blamed...though the fact that tobacco is a natural plant is never noted. The word "tobacco" is considered synonymous with "cigarette", even to the point that we read about "tobacco manufacturers." Some day we may hear about "cigarette growers."

A dearth of health effects on mothers and children is claimed in innumerable news reports and in "anti-tobacco" literature or web sites, to be caused by, or, as they say, "linked to", tobacco and smoking by mothers while pregnant or afterward:

* Physical aggression in children
* Miscarriages
* Children of smokers having difficulty becoming pregnant
* Cognitive problems
* Early menopause by women whose mothers smoked during pregnancy
* Learning disabilities
* Attention Deficit Disorder
* Ear and hearing problems
* Hyperactivity and Behavioral Disorders
* Babies' webbed fingers and toes
* SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome
* Respiratory diseases in general
* Decreased lung growth
* Autism
* Low birth weight
* Asthma
* Bronchitis
* Pneumonia
* Childhood Cancer
* Stillbirth
* Premature birth
* Cleft lip or palate
* Mental retardation
* Childhood heart disease
* Childhood diabetes
* Childhood (and later) glaucoma
* Bladder cancer later in life
* Kidney problems

Though not specifically linked to children, we also have so-called "smoking related diseases" (or "tobacco-related" diseases) in general, according to US Govt, "anti smoking", and other "health" sources:

* Acute myeloid leukemia
* Cancer of the cervix
* Bladder cancer
* Kidney cancer
* Pancreatic cancer
* Stomach cancer
* Abdominal aortic aneurysm
* Cataracts
* Periodontitis
* Immune system damage
* Alzheimer's disease
* Heart attacks and virtually all cardo-vascular diseases
* Every imaginable respiratory system cancer
* And PMS.

There are no claims yet that mothers' smoking causes measles, whooping cough, mumps, flu, or the like, but we also are given no information about the immune-suppressing characteristic of dioxin that inescapably aggravates or opens the door to those and all diseases. (13)

Computer searches for any of the diseases in the above list, with either "pesticides" or "dioxin" added to the search term, will turn up hits in every case. Easy for us...impossible for corporate researchers.

The diseases and pathologies turn out to be effects of exposures to pesticides, chlorine and dioxin...except for a few in the "linked to" category. Even smoke from burning poison ivy, as grim as that is, cannot compare.

The thought that pesticides, chlorine, and dioxin parts of typical cigarettes are relevant here is not compatible with the Corporatocracy. The same applies to all sorts of other (non smoking-related) exposures to the same industrial substances. Tobacco has become the number one scapegoat for crimes of the chemical industries, far ahead of others such as "faulty genes", "bad diet", "lack of exercise", "drinking", and "the unknown".

If smoke from the tobacco plant was as deadly as claimed, the U.S. would have dumped typical cigarettes, instead of A-bombs, on Japan...and the U.S.-backed Israeli government would be throwing smokes over the wall at occupation-resistant Palestinians in Gaza.

Bottom line: There may be no more effective opportunity to expose and indict the chlorine/pesticide industry, and industry-compromised government officials, than in this "smoking" and tobacco prohibition arena.

They made it common knowledge about the harms of "smoking." It's our obligation to explain why it's so harmful.

References (among many)

(1) Smokers May Lose Custody of Children as a Result of New Study and see Anti-Smoking Advocate Pushing to Make Smoking Around Kids a Form of Child Abuse.

(2) Pesticides on Tobacco: Federal Activities to Assess Risks and Monitor Residues ("That is, tobacco is the nation's ninth highest valued crop, and in terms of the amount of pesticide applied per acre, tobacco ranks sixth--behind potatoes, tomatoes, citrus, grapes, and apples....") Also see this Cooperative Extension Burley Tobacco Production Guide for a sampling of many chemicals that the Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University advises be used.

(3) Pesticides on Tobacco: Federal Activities to Assess Risks and Monitor Residues (again); and see Po-210 and Pb-210 Inhalation by Cigarette Smoking in Italy for a study on radioactive fertilizers in cigarette smoke.

(4) US Patent Office (fake tobacco) For starters, search Pat. No. 3,978,866 (Peanut Shells); No.3,976,222 (Coffee Bean Hulls); No. 3,100,492 (Corn cobs); 3,638,660 (wood pulp); 3,993,082 (Carbon Filled Paper ?); and 3,964,495 (Popped Corn). (We don't know what the heck "smoke" we're talking, and legislating, about.)

(5) Dioxins in cigarette smoke.

(6) List of 1,110 additives used in cigarettes...if they contain tobacco or not.

(7) Burn accelerants added to cigarette paper.

(8) Addiction enhancement - see Note 6 regarding caffeine, sugar, chocolate, cocoa, etc. Also see Ammonia Added to Cigarettes Can Significantly Boost Availability of Nicotine, Says New Study.

(9) Use GAO list of 37 tobacco pesticides in Note 2, then simply search for manufacturer's name, e.g. Re/ Chlorpyrifos (Dow), AKA Dursban, or Endosulfan (Bayer) ....and so on

(10) Dioxin Update: Children are the Most Vulnerable.

(11) Cancer-Gate (spin doctors hired to sabotage claims that pesticides are linked to cancer); Exposing a "Grass Roots" Organization: Tobacco-Free Kids; Blowing Smoke:Tobacco-Free Kids, Allies Overshoot Campaign; and Splenda: Is It Safe or Not? for a discussion of the harms of artificial sweeteners.

(12) Smoking in pregnancy may deform fingers, toes, researchers find. For other causes of syndactyly and other deformities, see Pesticide Appliers, Biocides, and Birth Defects in Rural Minnesota, Agent Orange Illnesses That Effect Veterans; and excerpts from the book, Veterans and Agent Orange by the US Institute of Medicine, Committee to Review the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides, Division of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention.

(13) Potent Immune System Poison: Dioxin; and see Tobacco Stains: The global footprint of a deadly crop, where it's reported that DDT and dieldrin are being used overseas, though banned in the US.