Too often with barely-concealed malice, doctors routinely make the end of life unforgivably hard for lung cancer victims who were or are smokers. Because of their stunning ignorance of pesticide contamination of tobacco products, and their complete ignorance of how this murderous industry operates, lung cancer doctors too often turn into judgmental terrorists who use their invulnerable position and authority to attack helpless, dying smokers and ex-smokers using contempt, rejection and invective. Lung cancer victims of smoking are routinely told that they are guilty, stupid, worthless parasites taking up a hospital bed needed for people who deserve care. There is no vestige of care in this treatment.
A young friend and I were talking about her mother’s recent death from lung cancer. I was showing her the results of pesticide residue tests that we had just run on a sample of tobacco products that happened to include the cigarette brand that her Mother had smoked – Marlboro Red 100’s. She wondered how all those pesticides and fungicides were allowed.
“EPA does not assess intermediate or long-term risks of pesticide residues to smokers because of the severity of health effects linked to use of tobacco products themselves.” EPA report To Congress: Pesticides In Tobacco, 2003
She said that the hardest part of her Mom’s cancer journey was the constant shaming that her mother had to endure. Her Mom was told every day in one way or another that she was dying because of stupid choices she had made and that all these problems she was causing for other people were the result of her own selfishness. There is a deep streak of judgmental meanness that runs through anti-smokers that is wide and deep in the medical profession, and while the industry is simply judged evil and not given another thought, all the doctor’s anti-smoking anger is directed at the dying patient who immolates themselves with shame and guilt. Which suits the tobacco industry just fine. Nobody is really paying them any serious attention. Their role in this has been written off as fully understood.
“Because use of tobacco products, with or without pesticide residues, is so hazardous to health, all of the Oregon Health Authority’s efforts around tobacco are aimed at discouraging use of tobacco products and encouraging cessation of tobacco use in people already using it.” Oregon Health Authority 2018
Imagine how much legal and lobbying effort it took for the tobacco industry to put that attitude and legislation in place.
So because of that kind of work, in every hospital in every town the attitude is – “She brought this on herself and everybody else. How could she be so thoughtless. She could have quit – lots of people do. She should have thought about the consequences before it was too late. All these resources being wasted on someone dying of their own actions. For shame.”
It’s almost like the fear of Satan in early America. Many doctors hate Tobacco with all the fervent belief and as little hard evidence as those ministers in Salem who hated Satan, and since haters can’t actually get their hands on either Tobacco or Satan (because they are a fantasy, an illusion), in the old days the Ministers of God burned the women who were obviously possessed by theEvil One, and today the priests of medicine shame and revile the smokers of the Evil Weed and condemn them to death.
Doctors and nurses are naturally frustrated by what they see as people sickening and dying because of totally avoidable bad decisions. They blame the tobacco industry, but they blame the people dying from lung cancer way more. After all, it says right there on the pack “The Surgeon General yada yada ….”. And besides, everybody knows that tobacco kills.
I always get suspicious when “everybody knows”, don’t you? It’s just like I feel whenever a doctor talks about what “we” know to be true. That “we” raises my hackles – it always has a touch of pretentiousness that is always associated with ignorance. What if I could easily prove beyond any doubt that every medical and scientific study since 1972 that has used University of Kentucky “Reference Cigarettes” is fatally flawed?
Actual Tobacco has never been tested in any scientific or medical research claiming to have tested tobacco since 1972. What would that do to the “we all know that tobacco kills” argument, if there were intellectual honesty on the part of the medical profession?
Yes, people with lung cancer are being killed by smoking, but not by smoking tobacco because they aren’t smoking tobacco these days. They are being killed by manufacturers greed and not their own stupidity, unless you are into blaming victims for being stupid and if you are then the shame is on you. Take a look at the pesticide contaminants in my friend’s Mom’s Marlboro Red 100’s and you tell me – was it most likely the tobacco, or what the manufacturer calls tobacco in those cigarettes that gave her lung cancer, or could it have been all those fungicides and pesticides? You know, the pesticides that “we don’t regulate because smoking tobacco itself is so bad…”
My friend’s Mom undoubtedly thought she was smoking tobacco. She wasn’t.
She probably assumed that any tobacco that actually might be in her cigarettes would be American. It would not.
She probably assumed that she was smoking the cured leaf of a plant rolled in a little paper tube. She wasn’t.
She probably thought the government had her back and regulated the harmful ingredients in tobacco products like they do in all food and beverages. It doesn’t.
She probably assumed that getting lung cancer was a crap shoot and that she could play the odds, not knowing that the game is fixed and she didn’t have a chance. She really didn’t.
Community Tobacco Control Partners Test Results 12/18
