Truth was an early victim in the battle against tobacco. The big lie, repeated
ad nauseam in anti-tobacco circles, is that smoking causes more than 400,000 premature deaths each year in the United States. That mantra is the principal justification for all manner of tobacco regulations and legislation, not to mention lawsuits by dozens of states for Medicaid recovery, class actions by seventy-five to eighty union health funds, similar litigation by thirty-five Blue Cross plans, twenty-four class suits by smokers who are not yet ill, sixty class actions by allegedly ill smokers, five hundred suits for damages from secondhand smoke, and health-related litigation by twelve cities and counties - an explosion of adjudication never before experienced in this country or elsewhere.
The war on smoking started with a kernel of truth - that cigarettes are a high risk factor for lung cancer - but has grown into a monster of deceit and greed, eroding the credibility of government and subverting the rule of law. Junk science has replaced honest science and propaganda parades as fact. Our legislators and judges, in need of dispassionate analysis, are instead smothered by an avalanche of statistics - tendentious, inadequately documented, and unchecked by even rudimentary notions of objectivity. Meanwhile, Americans are indoctrinated by health "professionals" bent on imposing their lifestyle choices on the rest of us and brainwashed by politicians eager to tap the deep pockets of a pariah industry.
The aim of this paper is to dissect the granddaddy of all tobacco lies - that smoking causes 400,000 deaths each year. To set the stage, let's look at two of the many exaggerations, misstatements, and outright fabrications that have dominated the tobacco debate from the outset.
Comment: The real cause of death is staring you in the face on your breakfast table every morning and on your TV screens every evening. Gluten, dairy, excessive carbohydrate consumption, nuclear testing, war, artificial famine, manufactured economic crises,
proven killers all of them, not statistical lies... how much more stress can you take until you see that those who would convince you that smoking is killing you are blowing smoke rings around your brain?
Let's All Light Up!
Comment: The real cause of death is staring you in the face on your breakfast table every morning and on your TV screens every evening. Gluten, dairy, excessive carbohydrate consumption, nuclear testing, war, artificial famine, manufactured economic crises, proven killers all of them, not statistical lies... how much more stress can you take until you see that those who would convince you that smoking is killing you are blowing smoke rings around your brain?
Let's All Light Up!