Anti-smokers have long tried to restrict smoking on the grounds that it was bad for smokers' health. While this approach has many adherents, this sort of paternalism is not very effective when it comes to getting laws passed. As a result their efforts to convince adults that smoking is dangerous have largely failed ... Sooo, they have changed their tactics.
It's not enough for these purveyors of fear to claim that smokers are increasing their own risk of death and disease, but now they expect us to believe that secondhand smoke and environmental smoke (or passive smoking) is responsible for as many 40,000 deaths each year. And, who are the victims? Children. To win your hearts and minds, they have launched massive deceptive public relations campaigns and are attempting to manipulate public policy in the interest of big government. Several years ago they discovered through focus groups that people react to their message if the focus is more on children.

Perhaps you've seen or heard the ad's saying, "It helps you relax. But it makes me nervous. Because I'm scared it could make us both sick. I want to sit with you and talk and share secrets. But I can't stand to share the room with your smoke. I don't like the way your breath smells or the way our house smells. It hurts when my friends tell me I stink. I want you to quit. You told me you want to quit. And you tried to quit. I know someday you will. Until then, would you smoke outside? Please. I love you, Mom."
Or the one which featuring a photo of a young child looking back sadly and saying, "You tell me to always be safe. But when I'm in the car and you smoke, I don't feel safe. I feel kind of sick. I feel like I can't breathe. Sometimes I try holding my breath when you smoke. But I can't. So, if I asked you, would you wait until I get out before you light a cigarette? Please."

Oh, these folks absolutely love to heap guilt on smokers through the use of emotion appealing advertising campaigns. They claim smoking by parents and others in enclosed environments in the home or the car has been linked to an increased incidence of asthma and acute respiratory infections in children. In other words, YOU are the reason your child doesn't feel safe. Never mind you're dropping your kid off at school where one of their classmates is likely carrying a gun, where the school nurse is handing out condoms to enourage your child to have safe sex, and the school counselor is referring your child to the local abortion provider to have an abortion without your knowledge.

Breaking the Bonds Between Children and Parents
Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes - be they fascist or communist in nature - have always sought to destroy the traditional family unit by severing the bonds between parents and their children, thereby increasing the power of the government.
Columnist Charley Reese notes, “The neo-totalitarians... follow a fixed pattern. They create a straw man, demonize the straw man, then frame the argument as a contest between good and the evil demon.” Children v. smokers, in this case.
Adolph Hitler understood that if he were to control the German people, he had to first control the children. He started by first taking charge of the children and educating them to follow his racist view and teaching them that it was ok to kill and torture Jews, and anyone that shared different ideals. Before it was over, Hitler's youth were even turning in their parents if they shared other values.

Current anti-smoking propaganda is anti-family and is designed to drive a wedge between parents and their children.

World Government Control of Your Children

Tobacco money sends children to college and feeds families, but the federal government believes it (a.k.a. the "Village") should send children to college and feed families. Children are indeed the target of many in the tobacco debate, but it's not childrens health they are concerned with. What they want is to control your children through expanded government intrusion into your home.
In California, for example, a new cigarette tax created the nation's largest pot of money for early childhood programs bringing government social workers right into infants' homes.

Quite simply, Hillary Rodham, Donna Shalala, and other modern statists believe they can raise your children better than you can. That's what they mean by "children's rights" - the rights of children to be liberated from the shackles of their evil parents.
Hillary Clinton argued, "Children should have a right to be permitted to decide their own future if they are competent." "Decisions about motherhood and abortion, schooling, cosmetic surgery, treatment of venereal disease, or employment, and others where the decision or lack of one will significantly affect the child's future should not be made unilatrally by parents."
Hey, Hillary, if you think it's okay for kids to have children out of wedlock, kill babies in their womb, drop out of school, get breast implants, and choose designer drugs for venereal disease, why do you not think they can make their own decisions about smoking? Hillary Clinton and the rest of the current crop of socialists are nothing more than disingenuous "scumbags" talking out both sides of their mouths while they rake in YOUR cash!

Hillary Rodham Clinton was an active radical during the 1960s, when she formed friendships with other student radicals who have now become key Clinton advisers. In the 1970s, the then -Ms. Rodham wrote several articles that suggested children should be free to sue their parents, and implied that parental authority over children was similar to slave masters over slaves, or government over American Indians.
Hillary Clinton, a long-time fierce proponent of the radical Left, chaired the New World Foundation 1987-88, ranked by the Capitol Research Center as "one of the ten most liberal foundations in the United States." While there, she authorized grants to organizations that backed the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Sandinistas. From 1986-92 she chaired the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), which promoted an amoral approach to sex education and other means of destroying the very moral values which most parents want to pass on to their children. The CDF wants to redefine the family and believes government can serve as surrogate parents (the"village"). That means that kids would no longer be primarily accountable to their parents. To whom would they be accountable to?
The answer, of course, is the state. The benevolent state. The "VILLAGE," then, would transcend the Orwellian "Big Brother" role and become surrogate parent. It would grant your children "rights" and be their legal guardian.
Hillary's "village" not only tolerates but encourages crime, drugs, pornography, homosexuality, unrestrained sex, disease, broken familes, violence, disrespect for authority, slothfulness, and a whole host of other destructive but "politically correct" behaviors.

Politics of Division
Today, the primary tactic is to heap guilt on smoking parents making them out to be the villain who doesn't care for their children. In the place of parents, Hillary's "Village", trial lawyers, and big government made its entrance as the savior of the children.
You are told, for example, that cigarette smoking is the most preventable cause of premature death and that smokers have a greater risk of developing various diseases including clogged arteries, cancer, and pulmonary disease. Beyond the loss of life, they are quick to point out the alleged economic consequences of smoking: $50 billion in direct medical costs related to smoking, added strains on already overburdened health-care systems, losses stemming from such factors as absenteeism from work, reduced productivity, fire losses, and lost income because of early death. Indeed, they claim that smoking is responsible for approximately 7 percent of total U.S. health care costs. So, Americans blindly accept higher taxes to pay for more failed government programs, increased government intrusion into American businesses, and higher insurance premiums to line the pockets of insurance industry CEO's.

The liberal propagandists who want your money understand that one of the first milestones they must achieve is to turn public opinion away from the ruthless capitalist tobacco companies and look to big government and socialist programs to protect you. In that effort of turning public opinion, in January, 1998, Congressman Henry Waxman revealed some secret memos of the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company where in 1975 one executive allegedly wrote, 'The Camel Brand must increase its share penetration among the 14 - 24 age group -- which represent tomorrow's cigarette business.' He was clearly presenting evidence here making the tobacco companies out to be the villain. "For decades, the tobacco industry has ruthlessly controlled the public health agenda in this country," said Charles Romaine, Executive Vice President for the American Heart Association, Ohio-West Virginia Affiliate. "Since the release of the first Surgeon General Report on tobacco 33 years ago, the tobacco industry has been responsible for more than ten million tobacco-related deaths. If there is anything we have learned in the last four decades, it is that the tobacco-industry cannot be trusted." Yeah, sure ... and don't forget to send in your contribution!
But, "government studies prove..." you might say? Have you ever looked at these studies objectively, or do you just take their word for it? Take for example the EPA report that mentions carcinogens found in smoke. Why do you suppose they listed them in a chart, without explanation? Why? So the unsophisticated could draw the false conclusion that this somehow answers the question which science cannot.
The American public is expected to trust those who brought us "dancing condoms" to our television screens encouraging teens to engage in "protected sex", have made AIDS the first disease in history to be endowed with civil rights, and have called the wholesale slaughter of millions of babies in their mothers womb "freedom of choice."
Insurance companies surely can't be wrong. They spend all that money on those actuarial studies that prove a connection between smoking and disease. The insurance salesmen tell us we pay higher premiums because smokers have a higher risk of contracting disease and their health care costs are higher than the non-smoker. What they don't tell you is that their insurance plans cover "domestic partners" (that's politically correct jargon for homosexuals) whose risk of contracting AIDS and other sexually transmitted disease is astronomical and their health care costs are out of control. No double standard here!
Imagine the uproar if insurance companies wanted to charge homosexuals more for their insurance. Homosexuals cost the federal and state government enormous dollars in healthcare. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, given today’s life expectancy rates, the years of potential life lost due to AIDS are 24% more than the years lost from lung cancer.

Manipulative Advertising

Anti-smoking zealots hypocritically condemn alledged tobacco industry advertisment targeting youth, claiming their persuasive nature of capturing youngsters by the smoking message.
Cheryl Perry, a University of Minnesota expert on youth smoking, said internal tobacco industry documents show that cigarette makers considered underage smokers critical to their future business. Testifying on behalf of the state and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota in their lawsuit to recover $1.77 billion, she pointed to, in one example, a 1963 ad showed Jed Clampett and his family riding in their jalopy alongside a Winston cigarette truck. The "Beverly Hillbillies" theme ended with the sponsor's slogan, "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should." Perry also cited TV commercials featuring "The Flintstones" and the Marlboro man and print ads for Camel cigarettes featuring the cartoon character Joe Camel. There is also the Kool ad that showed a long-legged, scantily clad woman on a beach gazing into the eyes of a man. Both are smoking Kools.
Almost everyone would object strongly to being manipulated mentally, right? Anti-smoking advertising certainly is not guilt-free in this manipulation. The current wave of anti-smoking ads are clearly designed to play with your mind and turn the focus of the debate to children. Six months after the above pictured campaign began in Kansas, local residents opinions about secondhand smoking showed a change. A survey taken by the Kansas Health Foundation found that the number of smokers who agreed that secondhand smoke is harmful to others had increased from 68 percent to 82 percent. The number of people who agreed that secondhand smoke is dangerous to children had increased from 74 percent to 93 percent.

Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. - Luke 12:1

Out of one side of their mouths politicians like Senator Kennedy and others speak about protecting the health of children by regulating cigarettes. Out of the other side of their mouths they indoctrinate your children with dancing condoms encouraging them to have so-called "safe sex," protect the abortionists right to kill millions of children every year, defend Hollywood's portrayal of homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle, and promote needle exchanges to make shooting heroin safer. What hypocrisy!

What's Next?
Will the socialist Democrats soon be outlawing saturated fat? "No more butter or bacon for you, you greedy overweight sociopath!" Look out, it's not that far away. Already, they're beginning their campaign of turning public opinion against fat people. According to the Roche in Obesity web site, "Obesity is an international health problem. Now recognised as a chronic disease, obesity is a leading cause of illness, including hypertension, hyperlipidemia, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer. Throughout the world, healthcare organisations and government sponsored initiatives are seeking to reverse the alarming rise in obesity and reduce the huge medical, social, and financial toll that it causes." To heighten the urgency of the 'crisis,' U.S. government studies found that 33% of adults and 27% of the children in the U.S. are obese using a new method of calculating who is overweight. It is called Body Mass Index. With the many alleged health problems and costs for obesity related medical problems, the money grabbers aren't far behind.
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals web site has a portion devoted to the health problems associated with eating meat. They make the wild claim that, "America's meat-based diet costs this country billions of dollars in health care costs and billions more in environmental destruction."

If removing from public view Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man is such a positive thing in reducing child smokers, what about the Budweiser frogs that presumably encourage our children to become addicted to alcohol? Will Ronald McDonald be banned because he encourages children to clog their hearts with high cholesterol junk food? Those evil ad men at McDonald's are using those "Happy Meal" promotions to get our kids hooked on high-fat burgers and fries! Our children are being victimized!! They're going to die from heart attacks. Raise taxes on fast food and 60 percent more children will eat their broccoli!
I suppose the anti-coffee (raises blood pressure) fanatics are not too far off.
Maybe vitamins should be banned because studies have shown that taking them, especially Vitamin B1 can cause cancer.
The meat packing industry is already under the scrutiny of the tax-and-spenders.

Targeting cigar smokers, a recent study claims smoking one cigar a day appears to increase the risk of death from coronary heart disease by 30 percent in men aged 75 and younger. The study of 121,738 men aged 30 and older began in 1982 and ended in 1991. Men who had smoked cigarettes or pipes were excluded from the study as were men who had been diagnosed with heart disease or diabetes when the study began. During the study, men who smoked at least one cigar a day were 30-percent more likely to die of heart disease than nonsmoking counterparts, the study found. No increased risk of premature death was found among cigar smokers aged 75 and older or for men who had given up smoking cigars. [The Detroit News, Nov. 24, 1999]

Funded by their windfall profits in state tobacco cases, the same cigarette bustin legal team that challenged the tobacco industry has reunited and is now targeting its next cash cow, five of the nation's largest HMOs, accusing them of unscrupulous business practices. The lawsuits, filed in Mississippi where the first state tobacco case originated, seek class-action status on behalf of the 32 million people who are members of Pacificare Health Systems Inc., Foundation Health Systems Inc., Cigna Healthcare, Prudential Health Care and Humana Inc. "This again appears to be one of many lawsuits that will ultimately drive up health care costs for consumers by forcing HMOs through unwarranted, costly and protracted litigation," Alan Hoops, head of Pacificare, said. [The Arizona Republic, Nov. 25, 1999]

So, Why Do People Choose to Smoke?
Kids smoke because they think it's cool, this is how to impress girls, because of peer pressure, and because of lack of parental supervision. The inducement for underage smoking starts with the home, school and the individual, not marketing techniques. Young people smoke because their parents do, or their friends pressured them to.

Newt Gingrich said the Joe Camel ad campaign had nothing to do with teen smoking. The greater cause was the example of Hollywood stars smoking on screen, he said. The White House responded by accusing Gingrich of defending Big Tobacco's interests. Does that sound a little reminicent of Hillary's charge that all the accusations brought against her husband was orchestrated by a "vast right wing conspiracy"?
If Clinton is so concerned about the effects of media on children's smoking behavior why doesn't he press Hollywood producers to sign a "no smoking on screen" pledge? Why stop there? If Clinton is so convinced that smoking is killing our children, why doesn't he move to ban tobacco altogether? Why not? Because Bill Clinton doesn't care about your children. Here's a man responsible for providing cocaine to 14-year-old girls in exchange for sex ... and you think he's concerned about their health?

If stopping tobacco marketing and promotion is such a pivotal issue in curbing teen smoking, I wonder what advertisments Jess Willard Harris saw when he began smoking in 1924? Or I wonder what role Joe Camel had in the deaths of Jeanne's mother, brother, father, husband, and son who all died of heart attacks. How about Dorothy Ann Oster Wollard, 1920-1987, who began smoking in 1935. I wonder what Marlboro Man billboard she saw? Other victims of tobacco advertising surely include Gilbert Leo Meyer (born in 1927) and Marilyn Jean Kliebhan Meyer( born in 1932), both of whom began smoking as a teenager. These and others were part of INFACT's Face the Faces Photo Project where they attempted to blame the tobacco industry of promoting smoking to youth.
These hypocritical anti-smoking folks really don't care about your children. They are only using your children to heap false guilt on smokers and to further alienate you from the non-smoking folks.

It's politics of division ... and your children are the pawns!

Nationalized Health Care
The Clinton's and other liberals in Congress want to decide who can provide medical care for our children, what the care will be, and when it will be provided. America unequivocally rejected Clinton's Nationalized Health Care Plan when it was first presented but now the Clinton Administration is attempting to get it through piece by piece. In order for them to accomplish this takeover of your children's health, they must first get the authority torn away from parents and into the hands of government.

One of the first things they did was to have the Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) declare Environmental Tobacco Smoke (E.T.S.) an environmental toxin equivalent to asbestos and other hazardous substances. In 1993 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), concluded that ETS caused lung cancer in adult nonsmokers and serious respiratory problems in children and was responsible for more than 3,000 lung-cancer deaths a year. On this false basis the EPA has classified secondhand smoke as a Group A carcinogen (known to cause cancer in humans). This step allowed them to tighten their control and jurisdiction in schools and the work place and its report has been cited widely in decisions by state and local officials to restrict smoking in public places including restaurants, airliners, offices. In 1995 a federal law required all schools and children's facilites that receive federal aid to be smoke-free environments. (Notice the MONEY trail: federal aid.)
In July, 1998, U.S. District Judge William Osteen in North Carolina, ruled the EPA based its 1993 report on inadequate science and failed to demonstrate a statistically significant relationship between secondhand smoke and lung cancer. Osteen wrote: "EPA publicly committed to a conclusion before research had begun; excluded industry by violating the (radon law's) procedural requirements; (and) adjusted established procedure and scientific norms to validate the agency's public conclusions." The judge further criticized the EPA for having "aggressively utilized" the report's findings "to establish a de facto regulatory scheme intended to restrict plaintiff's products and to influence public opinion." ("EPA stands behind link between secondhand smoke, cancer," CNN, July 19, 1998)
As part of the National Tobacco Policy and Youth Smoking Reduction Act before Congress, SEC. 302., "SMOKE-FREE ENVIRONMENT POLICY" gives OSHA the power to prohibit the smoking of cigarettes, cigars, and pipes, and any other combustion of tobacco within nearly all public facilities (visited by 10 or more people) and on facility property within the immediate vicinity of the entrance to the facility. Any aggrieved person, any State or local government agency, or the Administrator (OSHA), may bring suit in any United States district court for the district in which the defendant resides or is doing business to enjoin any violation of this title or to impose a civil penalty for any such violation in the amount of not more than $5,000 per day of violation.

The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, which obligates governments to safeguard the health of infants and children; protect children from drugs and exploitation; and promote health education is being cited as the unifying directive for the global redistribution of wealth.

Section 1926 of the Public Health Service Act requires states to enact legislation restricting the sale and distribution of tobacco products to minors as a condition of receiving federal substance abuse prevention and treatment block grant funds. States are also required to enforce these laws in a manner "that can reasonably be expected to reduce the extent to which tobacco products are available to individuals under the age of 18." (42 USC 300x-26)

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is overstepping its legal mandate by asserting jurisdiction over tobacco in an attempt to curb underage smoking. We ought to keep tobacco out of the hands of our youth, but we should not have the FDA dictating the lifestyles of adults. The FDA claims its plan is aimed at preventing smoking by children, but that's not the issue. No one wants children to smoke -- underage smoking already is illegal in all 50 states. We need to strengthen and enforce those laws, not add another layer of government regulation.

Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), called for an urgent effort by the international community, including the World Trade Organization, to develop a global strategy to treat tobacco products commensurate with the harm they cause, beginning with prohibitions on all direct and indirect tobacco advertising and promotional activities aimed at children and young people. Other measures, the Executive Director said, should include a ban on sales of tobacco products to minors; substantial tax increases on tobacco products; and a stepped-up educational campaign to promote awareness of the addictiveness of nicotine and the dangers of smoking.

Persons that provide children’s services funded by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, or the Department of Agriculture in indoor facilities (e.g. schools, libraries, day care, health care, and early childhood development settings) are required to prohibit smoking in those facilities if they are regularly or routinely used for the delivery of such services to children. In addition, all Federal agencies that provide such services are also required to prohibit smoking in facilities used regularly or routinely for the delivery of children’s services. (20 USC 6081-6084)

These globalists are not content with the implementation and enforcement of FDA regulations within the U.S. borders. They have their sights set on US-based transnationals who are looking beyond our borders for replacement customers. They have their greedy eyes on children around the world. They claim that tobacco-related illness will claim the lives of 10 million people a year by early in the next century. Seven million of them in economically poor countries.
Nearly 1,500 anti-smoking activists attended the 10th World Conference on "Tobacco or Health" in Beijing where one of the big issues was how to get some of the dollars from the massive U.S. settlement distributed worldwide - especially in China, the world's single largest producer of cigarettes. The conference was organised by the Chinese Association on Smoking and Health and the Chinese Medical Association under the auspices of several international bodies, including the World Health Organisation (WHO), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the International Union Against Cancer and the American Cancer Society. The co-organisers and sponsors are Bionax, the Australian and Hong Kong-based healthcare company.
This information from the 10th WCTOH is originally published by UICC GLOBALink

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