Smoking


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Sex-changing chemicals found in Potomac River - But For God's Sake! Don't Smoke!

Washington - Chemicals known to change the sexual characteristics of fish and other animals have been found in West Virginia tributaries of the Potomac River, which runs through Washington, D.C. and surrounding areas, the U.S. Geological Survey said on Wednesday.

An investigation into fish that had both male and female characteristics turned up a range of chemicals including pesticides, flame retardants, and personal-care products, the USGS said.

Comment: It's always interesting to read about the thousands of health destroying environmental pollutants being pumped into our bodies, but instead of addressing these issues with restrictions on the big corporations making billions and trillions off of our suffering, instead they go after tobacco - and blame everything on that! Because, of course, stopping smoking is laid on the consumer, while no stopping of anything is laid on the industries.

A bit unequal, don't you think?


Magnify

Sir Richard Doll - blamed lung cancer on cigarettes while on the payroll of chemicals industry!!

Some of Britain's most senior scientists have angrily denounced suggestions that Sir Richard Doll, who proved the link between smoking and lung cancer, had deliberately failed to disclose financial dealings with the chemicals industry.

The scientists said that tens of millions of people owed their lives and health to studies pioneered by Sir Richard. "It is with dismay that we now hear allegations against him that he cannot rebut for himself," the scientists say in an open letter.

Comment: In other words, Doll and other scientists on chemical company payrolls had a vested interest in finding something to blame for lung cancer and many other illnesses caused by industrial chemicals in the air, food and water.


Stop

Doctor: New lips not made for smoking

Tuscon, Arizona -- The world's first face transplant recipient is using her new lips to take up smoking again, which doctors fear could interfere with her healing and raise the risk of tissue rejection.

"It is a problem," Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard, who led the team that performed the pioneering transplant in France on November 27, acknowledged on Wednesday.

Comment: The article's subject identifies it to be about the risks of smoking by the French face-transplant recipient. But is it really?

But note the not-so-subtle message about smokers, achieved by the transition of subjects over these three brief paragraphs:
The woman suffered a tissue-rejection episode last month but is now doing well, her doctors said. However, they said she has resumed smoking, which besides being bad for health is especially a problem after surgery because it impairs circulation to tissues and could raise the risk of rejection.

Some doctors have questioned the woman's psychological fitness for the operation because of reports that she had taken sleeping pills in a possible suicide attempt when the dog attack occurred -- an allegation Dubernard repeatedly has denied.

He said she received extensive psychiatric evaluation and counseling before the operation.
There you have it. Smoking = psychologically unfit.

Why bother with such an article? They warn every patient about this risk of smoking after surgery, don't they?

Last year, my wife was gravely warned not to smoke after removal of her impacted wisdom teeth. After all, the wounds were right inside the mouth! The doctor also warned of the high level of pain she'd likely feel during healing, and he wrote two prescriptions for pain killers (one an addictive narcotic), one of which we filled right away, fearing the worst. She not only ignored the advice not to smoke, but didn't feel any pain whatsoever throughout the healing process. She actually became worried that something was wrong because there was no pain. Obviously, we wasted the prescription, didn't fill the other one, and threw away the free samples of Vioxx that the pharmacy graciously provided us with. There's so much wrong with the whole episode that I wouldn't know where to begin...


Pills

Smoking is down, use of painkillers is up

Washington - Cigarette smoking is at its lowest level in a survey of teenagers, and use of illicit drugs has been declining, but continuing high rates of abuse for prescription painkillers remain a worry, the government reported Monday.

Comment: It's good to know that teenagers are getting hooked on prescription painkillers and ruining their minds instead of smoking, which would have enhanced their ability to think in many cases.


Light Saber

SOTT Focus: Can Smoking be GOOD for SOME People?

John Lennon smoking
© David M Spindle
Many people send or give me their "stories" of [alleged] alien interaction. Very early in the Cassiopaean contact, I attended a party given by the owner of a local Metaphysical Book Store. As I was leaving, she gave to me a little folder of about 35 pages, saying that it had been left under a chair after a recent author seminar she had sponsored and held in her store. It had no identifying marks on it as to who wrote it or to whom it belonged, but it was certainly interesting.

This little booklet purported to be a true account of an abductee/contactee whose information, curiously, paralleled the Cassiopaean account of the alien abduction scenario/reality. At one point in this account, the writer claimed that he was told that the anti-smoking campaign and dietary improvement instructions given to many abductees by the Gray aliens who are then seen as "benevolent," was, in fact, due to the influence of the Reptoid aliens; and NOT because they had human interests at heart, but because they were interested in the diet of their food source! In other words, it was exactly the same as when humans put pigs or cows on a diet of corn for a period of time just prior to slaughtering them! Aliens don't like to eat folks who ingest chemicals, junk food, or who smoke cigarettes!

Well, I read this account to our group one night and, when I got to that part, every person in the room who was a smoker reached for their cigarettes and lit up, puffing vigorously as though to demonstrate their poor quality as "food." We all began to laugh hysterically at this semi-subconscious reaction!

Comment: We wish to emphasize a couple of comments from the above article. As Jeremy Narby noted, "Indeed, by one of those curious coincidences, tobacco, curare, and snake venom all fit into exactly the same locks inside our brains." [Narby, 1998] Consider this in relation to Andrew Lobaczewski's remarks about the effect of a psychopath on a normal human:
When the human mind comes into contact with [the psychopathic] reality, so different from any experiences encountered by a person raised in a society dominated by normal people, it releases psychophysiological shock symptoms in the human brain with a higher tonus of cortex inhibition and a stifling of feelings, which then sometimes gush forth uncontrollably. Human minds work more slowly and less keenly, since the associative mechanisms have become inefficient. Especially when a person has direct contact with [a psychopath] who uses their specific experience so as to traumatize the minds of the ย“othersย” with their own personalities, his mind succumbs to a state of short-term catatonia. Their humiliating and arrogant techniques, brutal paramoralizations, deaden his thought processes and his self-defense capabilities, and their divergent experiential method anchors in his mind. ย…
Laura commented as follows:

Now, it seems strange that these same receptors are stimulated by both nicotine and snake venom, though in opposite modes... hmmm... are we close to a "Reptilian" reason for the enormous campaign to stamp out smoking? And, further, are we close to the chemical condition of the "paralysis" induced in alien abductions? (See Delgado.)

We would like to speculate that we are also close to a "psychopathic" reason for the campaign to stamp out smoking. But then, maybe it's one and the same? As J. Reid Meloy, Ph.D., author of The Psychopathic Mind, writes:
"The other clinical observation that supports the hypothesis of a reptilian state among certain primitive psychopathic characters is the absence of perceived emotion in their eyes. Although this information is only intuitive and anecdotal, it is my experience in forensic treatment and custody settings to hear descriptions of certain patients' or inmates' eyes as cold, staring, harsh, empty, vacant, and absent of feeling. Reactions from staff to this percetion of the psychopath's eyes have included, "I was frightened... he's very eerie; I felt as if he was staring right through me; when he looked at me the hair stood up on my neck." This last comment is particularly telling since it captures the primitive, autonomic, and fearful response to a predator.

"I have rarely heard such comments as these from the same experienced inpatient staff during highly arousing, threatening, and violent outbursts by other angry, combative patients. It is as if they sense the absence of a capacity for emotional relatedness and empathy in the psychopathic individual, despite his lack of actual physical violence at the moment. ...

"I have found little in the research literature, either theoretical or empirical, that attempts to understand this act of visual predation in the psychopathic process. ... The fixated stare of the psychopath is a prelude to instinctual gratification rather than empathic caring. The interaction is socially defined by parameters of power rather than attachment."
As long as you can be shocked and "frozen in the headlights" by them, they can control you. And it very well may be that smoking is a major defense. As the C's remarked recently:
Some people are born to serve, others are born to be served...
[6 August 05]