As of 2011 Federal law (cited below) specifically forbids tobacco manufacturers from using pesticide contaminated tobaccothat exceeds US pesticide residue standards for domestic tobacco whether that tobacco is domestic or imported. Every tobacco company, US and international, is in gross, reckless and conspiratorial violation of this law.
The law has been on the books since 2011 but apparently nobody at FDA is testing, reporting, or investigating anything. I looked hard and saw zero evidence of concern but who knows, maybe I missed something.
Since I couldn’t find any evidence that FDA was doing its job, or get any response from them when I asked, I just paid for the lab tests that FDA should be doing and am publishing data below showing that every brand we tested violates 907(a)(1)(B) of Section 907 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. These products we tested and reported to FDA in January 2019 (“Potential Tobacco Violation Report ID 19C00160“) should be re-tested on a national scale and if they are in violation they should be withdrawn and the manufacturers subjected at least to fines. I am of course holding my breath.
Here’s the core language of the Federal statute which along with the accompanying language gives any health authority at any level powers to act immediately in protection of public health and safety.
907(a)(1)(B) of Section 907 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act: (B) ADDITIONAL SPECIAL RULE. “Beginning 2 years after the date of enactment of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, a tobacco product manufacturer shall not use tobacco, including foreign grown tobacco, that contains a pesticide chemical residue that is at a level greater than is specified by any tolerance applicable under Federal law to domestically grown tobacco.”
Here is violation of the law.
Community Tobacco Control Partners Test Results 12/18
The law says and means “any tolerance” which means no DDT (zero tolerance under US law), no Carbendazim (zero tolerance under US law), and none of about 13 others just in the little sample of tobacco products we sampled in December 2018. The tobacco material in at least one of the products – Swisher Sweets – violates this law multiple times with contaminants that are a clear and present danger to public health.
The Feds know what the industry is doing, because they wrote this law forbidding it. But they have never published one single test or as far as I can tell conducted one inspection of pesticide residue contaminants in cigarettes or any other tobacco product, which means that since 2011 they haven’t prevented one single pregnant teen from inhaling DDT from a Swisher Sweet their older friends bought at the bodega.
There are quite literally thousands of pregnant teens inhaling DDT today in the Us. The reason this is critically important is that DDT is a severe hazard to human fetal development. By imposing reasonable pesticide regulations based on existing, effective Cannabis pesticide limits in Oregon and other states, millions of smokers could be protected from exposure to pesticide residues in tobacco products (shown below) that are strongly associated with or in some cases proven to cause breast cancer, testicular cancer, obesity, diabetes, prostate cancer, liver cancer, childhood leukemia (ALL), atrophied testicles, compromised immunity and ruined HIV/AIDS treatments. And there’s more, but I hope this awful list of preventable slaughter is enough to demand that 907(a)(1)(B) of Section 907 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act: (B) ADDITIONAL SPECIAL RULE. be enforced. Here is the full data
Tobacco Product Pesticide ResidueTest Sample #1: 12/15/2018Community Tobacco Control Partnersbilldrake4470@gmail.com
In order to make the case for why organic tobacco is not only safer than pesticide-contaminated tobacco, but is very likely to be perfectly safe to smoke or vape, especially in moderation, I want to share both hard data and published science with you, as well as a new way of understanding the criminal conspiracy that the Tobacco Cartel and US government agencies created together in the 1970s and have sustained without accountability for over 50 years since, at the cost of hundreds of millions of lives worldwide.
The data on pesticide contaminants in tobacco products that I’ll share with you in this post are unique, because no research at all has been published on fungicides and insecticides in tobacco products since the complete end to research like this, a study published in the early 1970s after which all such research worldwide literally disappeared. Here’s a table from that study, referring back to previous studies as far back as 1959.
Now after looking at the 1970s data, please check out this new data below showing what smokers are inhaling today. Not one published research study, out of the tens of thousands of “studies” funded with hundreds of millions of dollars, has ever compared organic tobacco cigarettes with commercial tobacco cigarettes, and not one study has ever looked at pesticides in those commercial cigarettes as a possible and even likely but unrecognized cause of “smoking-related deaths”, yet this 2019 data from research for my book “Smoke No Evil” held up against that 1970s data shows clearly that smokers have been inhaling cancer, diabetes, birth defect and obesity-causing pesticides along with their tobacco smoke continuously for over 70 years since the early 1950s with complete US government knowledge, consent, protection and support. Notice by the way that the organic cigarette we tested actually was organic – no detectable residues – where that ‘natural tobacco’ cigarette was contaminated with pesticides, although fewer than all other commercial brands tested.
I hope this data on even a few brands shows the hypocrisy of the too-clever bullshit from self-serving agencies like FDA and from anti-smoking hustlers like Truth Initiativeclaiming that organic cigarettes aren’t safer than regular commercial cigarettes because all tobacco is equally hazardous. Besides being obvious bullshit that’s either a deliberate lie or gross ignorance. They either actually know nothing about the tobacco industry, although they claim to be unimpeachable experts, or else they do know about the true nature of the health consequences of even the lowest levels of exposure to these highly bioactive xenobiotic chemicals and they are true co-conspirators in this global atrocity. This post and much of my life’s work is about documenting and showing readers the evidence that the latter is tragically true: US regulatory agencies have been corrupted to the core by the Tobacco Cartel.
If around now you’re thinking “Well, some of those pesticides look pretty bad but those concentrations look awfully low to do any damage to smokers” please understand that science now knows that many of these designer chemicals are highly bioactive in human nerves, tissues and organs even at molecular levels, and especially when exposure is to “cocktails’ of these unregulated bioactive chemicals.
“Toxic effects of pesticide mixtures at a molecular level: their relevance to human health”
In other posts I’ve tracked this remarkable disappearance of research on cigarette pesticide contaminants to a global effort by the Cartel to erase the topic of pesticide residues in tobacco products from public awareness. From the early 1950s through the early 1970s there was extensive research on the topic of pesticides in tobacco products in multiple scientific/agricultural/chemical journals, every study revealing concentrations of organochlorine and then organophosphorous pesticides in every tobacco product studied. However, as medical science on these xenobiotic chemicals advanced, the industry understood that these heavily contaminated products, already coming under a lot of negative anti-smoking pressure, would very likely attract horrified attention and be banned if they were brought under proposed environmental and agricultural pesticide regulations unless they took control of any research that could lead to such regulation, and so they did. They managed to shut it all down, worldwide.
You can browse more examples of the surviving tobacco/cigarette pesticide research on DDT and other organochlorine pesticides in cigarettes that virtually ended in the 1970s here and here andhere and here and here. You can see from the reference sections of these journal articles that from 1950-1975 there were entire journals devoted to researching pesticide residues in cigarettes and tobacco products. Then it stopped.
During these same years the Tobacco Cartel successfully maneuvered and manipulated Congress and the agencies to get tobacco products exempted from pesticide inspection, regulation or even tracking by any government agency. To this day in 2021 no agency inspects or regulates tobacco products for pesticides, and in the regulations of every agency dealing in any way with hazardous or toxic substances, from EPA to CPSC to FDA, tobacco products are specifically exempted. It took a lot of satanic lawyering and political corruption to get every single piece of regulatory exemption in place but that’s how the Cartel rolls.
Please use your own research skills to confirm this absolutely remarkable absence of attention to what in any other product consumed by millions of people would be completely horrifying. I would love to hear of anything you find on pesticide residues in tobacco products – cigarettes, cigars, bidis – anything, anywhere.
While you’re thinking about that, if you or someone you love enjoys smoking but wants to get rid of that nasty cigarette addiction, take a look at this little handbook sharing the experiences of hundreds of other people who have switched to organic tobacco as an easy transition away from cigarette addiction that doesn’t require you to stop enjoying tobacco. Oh yeah – it’s priced at $0.99. Cheers!
If you or someone you care about is hooked on cigarettes, this new approach may be the answer. You’ll never hear anyone recommend that you change WHAT you smoke first if you want to QUIT smoking, but as you’ll see in this little book that’s exactly how thousands of people have already done it. And of course, what you also may find is that once you unhook from cigarettes and switch to organic tobacco, maybe blended with a little nice Cannabis flower, all those reasons you want to quit smoking may just disappear.
So, back to the story of WHY switching to organic tobacco to eliminate pesticides in your smoke is an imperative.
We know that regulators are already on the case of pesticide contamination with Cannabis, right? There’s plenty of pesticide residue research on Cannabis, and plenty of careful regulations, strictly enforced. Can’t have pesticide residues contaminating Cannabis you know, and we have to regulate everything very tightly in order to protect Cannabis users. But on (what you would think would be) a natural hot regulatory topic, toxic pesticide residues on those nasty old tobacco cigarettes that we’ve all been well-trained to hate, there’s not a peep since the mid-70s. You’ll find some limited published research, and plenty of regulations on pesticides used on field tobacco, but zero data of any kind on pesticides that remain in manufactured tobacco products, and nothing on banned pesticides coming into the US on cheap tobacco waste used in manufacturing US cigarettes and little cigars imported from places like India and Brazil. Pretty strange, you’ll have to admit. If you do find something please let me know!
It seems to me that a coordinated policy decision must have been made at a level of power and influence wielded out of public view by generational and corporate wealth shielded by the best legal minds, ensuring that there would be no more of this kind of information readily available to the public. If there is any industry research on tobacco products it is kept tight and private in the Tobacco Cartel’s so-called scientific organization CORESTA.
All funding for research on pesticides in tobacco products was simply cut off by government agencies in the 1970s, and all those government scientists were re-purposed and paid so well they didn’t complain, and this must have all been operating under coordinated control. It didn’t just happen that one day an entire area of published research with thousands of scientific publications suddenly just stopped. I haven’t been able to find a single study, funded by anyone, including the so-called non-profits that raise hundreds of millions for so-called tobacco research, and their own salaries of course, that has looked at the health impact of inhaling the supertoxic cocktail of pesticide residues in tobacco products that every Federal agency, every ‘anti-tobacco’ organization, and the entire Tobacco Cartel all know are concealed in these products.
We know that the agencies involved have played major CYA on this subject over the years, because they’ve left a clear trail of both deliberate omissions and deceptions. They’ve even occasionally had to dodge legislators like they did with Congressman Henry Waxman in 2003 with the massively deceptive GAO Report to Congress “Pesticides On Tobacco: Federal Activities To Assess Risks & Monitor Residues“. That piece of work deserves its own blog post, but the bottom line is that pesticides are no problem and the government is totally on the case – no need to worry. But interestingly enough, when it comes right down to it, here’s how EPA deals with the reality of pesticide residues in tobacco products:
“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 2018
There’s a lot of that kind of deliberately misleading bullshit in the Federal records, but the clarity of this statement is what makes it such a great example. Hey there EPA, couldn’t the “severity of health effects linked to use of tobacco products themselves” maybe be because of the pesticides you don’t care about? This is a truly classic “la la – we don’t give a shit” and says everything that needs to be said about how carefully the Tobacco Cartel’s crimes are being shielded by EPA – and every other Federal and State agency, top to bottom.
And let’s keep in mind that FDA and a vigilante posse of clueless Attorneys General just spent tens of millions a few years ago (2015/16) to force the manufacturers of American Spirit to tell smokers prominently on the package that organic tobacco is NOT safer for them to smoke. The FDA was and is in a total (fake) tizzy because some smokers have the nerve to continue to believe that organic tobacco is safer for them to smoke! That has to stop! Others are being deceived by the word “Natural” – they actually think it means safer too – but even FDA realizes that they can’t control the escape of that meaning from their word control game. And the BAT/RJ Reynolds/Cartel manufacturers who long ago bought and control American Spirit had to go along and comply – they couldn’t afford for smokers to see this kind of data regarding all their other non-organic and highly contaminated brands, including all the non-organic American Spirit brands.
They would like to kill organic tobacco. Besides exposing their crimes against humanity for anyone who knows what to look, American Spirit smokers are perfectly satisfied with an average of 10 a day while the average across all other brands is almost 16 a day, and up to 60 a day for seriously addicted smokers. Not addicted to Nicotine, by the way. American Spirit organic has plenty of that highly desirable alkaloid. So why would the Tobacco Cartel be anything but horrified at the idea of smokers worldwide suddenly going to 10 cigarettes a day? The Cartel wants more, always more, and they have hundreds of millions of biochemically trained and conditioned smokers to give them just that. More and more until they die, to be replaced by another generation lured into accepting biochemical conditioning to always want more. That’s the game plan, and that’s the game plan that organic tobacco can totally disrupt.
They couldn’t defend organic tobacco as a safer smoke even in the face of blatant FDA and Attorneys General lies. What are they going to say – American Spirit organic tobacco is safer because all our other brands are loaded with lethal man-made poisons that are there so we can make more money and that we’ve been paying off government agencies and politicians to keep totally concealed since the 1970s?
Everywhere you look in the Federal regulatory establishment it officially all comes down to saying “It’s the Tobacco, bitches, and just the tobacco, and we’re not going to look any further”. This from a government and anti-tobacco elite that knows perfectly well that there has never been a single study of the health impact of smoking organic tobacco cigarettes compared with smoking any of the commercial cigarettes that it knows are universally and often heavily contaminated. Not one study, not ever. They really do not want to hear about organic tobacco, or that tobacco may not be anywhere near the problem they have staked their entire careers on “fighting”. Maybe there’s nothing to fight, and maybe these evil greedy bastards know it, and are determined that people are never going to find out. Why else would here be absolutely zero research on something this obviously important in 50 years?
If you press them you’ll also hear that the government actually does test tobacco and it regulates the pesticides that can be used on tobacco too. Well, those statements are both “true” very misleading in a carefully crafted lawyerly kind of way. There are so many deliberately-crafted, subtle misdirections in government agency claims around pesticides and tobacco that it is, also deliberately, hard to decipher them, but the bottom line is that there is zero regulation of pesticides in US tobacco products and there is zero interest in what these xenobiotic substances are doing to smokers and their children, no matter what kind of language these agencies use to try to make it seem like they are on the case. Read carefully and you’ll see the weasel language everywhere, trying to obscure the single compelling fact that no US agency or regulatory organization inspects, tests or regulates pesticides in tobacco products. At all. Period. They are all quite simply complicit with the Tobacco Cartel in concealing this public health atrocity.The standard of guilt at the Nuremburg trials is that the top Nazis “by virtue of their command authority, either knew or ought to have known of the crimes committed under their jurisdiction.” Ditto.
So that’s probably why finding all that published journal research from the 50’s-70s isn’t easy. Even in Land Grant University libraries where these old ag science journals are supposed to reside, and many actually do, it’s very difficult to get access to the print copies of these old agricultural journals and the digital archives appear to have been scrubbed – although digging around pays off.
Oddly enough, considering the suppression of public tobacco product research, the Tobacco Cartel itself kept very detailed internal review and research processes going throughout the 20th Century aimed at determining the impact of each of the pesticides they were using on consumer taste. They were nominally concerned that these biologically hyperactive chemicals might make smokers think the cigarettes tasted funny, and they spent hundreds of millions on this research – in plain sight of government agencies. But because all of this research was private, and because they were able to totally suppress any publicly-funded research on pesticides, what the Cartel scientists knew by the 1980s about what these chemicals were doing to smokers was totally concealed behind corporate walls.
There was an explosion of science and medicine in the 1980s and 90s around environmental exposure to pesticides, which everybody agreed was terrible and dangerous and had to be controlled, and which ‘nobody knew’ smokers were being exposed to daily, but there is zero published evidence that the Cartel ever tested their own products for pesticide residues – although I’ll bet that subpoenas of Cartel manufacturing records would turn up decades of detailed batch testing. There looks to be a conspiracy of silence around this whole domain of science and public health and criminality that can only be due to impeccably concealed political and economic influence and the deepest possible public agency corruption by private, concealed power and wealth.
The tests that yielded the data I showed you above were the first of their kind since the 1970’s, and were run by a uniquely qualified pesticide testing lab, a US subsidiary of a major EU company that has been doing testing on tobacco product substrate for years. Some EU governments do regulate pesticides in tobacco products but they have a deal with the Cartel to keep it quiet and so nobody even realizes that it takes place. For example, German cigarettes are simply somehow very, very light on pesticide contamination, but you never hear about it, or see any public discussions of why the German government inspects and regulates tobacco products for pesticides. It simply happens quietly, behind the scenes. That’s undoubtedly the agreement. But any American smoker who has ever gone to Germany and bought their same brand there, or any German smoker who has ever done the same in the US, will know exactly what I’m talking about even though nobody has the true facts that would so easily explain the differences.
But back to the lab tests I ran that opened all this up for me. I’m lucky to be living in Oregon, where because of Cannabis there are a number of highly qualified pesticide testing labs. I found one with impeccable credentials in testing both Cannabis in the US and Tobacco products in – guess where – Germany, their home base. Testing cigarette tobacco for pesticide residues is far more complicated than testing Cannabis, which is this lab’s main business in the US, so being able to have this lab’s scientists collect and test random samples of tobacco products against their massive tobacco substrate database with their experience in doing so was real plus.
Here’s that data again. You tell me – is smoking organic tobacco safer than inhaling any of the factory smokes you see here? The FDA wants you to think that organic tobacco is not safer. The Attorneys General of 33 states, led by California, want you to believe that organic tobacco is not safer. But neither the FDA nor any of the ‘anti-tobacco’ forces can show you actual data to support their claim, which they nevertheless enforce with the full power of their Federal authority. What do you think? Take a look. No safer?
Here’s another way to look at the range of contamination smokers are exposed to with non-organic tobacco products. Just absorb the image and notice the differences left to right – premium brand to cheap little cigar. It’s pretty obvious when you see the data displayed this way that as you go lower in price you go up in exposure to a huge range of bioactive chemicals any one of which has potential health & life-threatening properties if inhaled often enough regardless of how tiny the amount.
But please reflect a moment longer on this data and ask yourself – who are the markets for American Spirit Blues, Marlboro Reds, and Swisher Sweets? Who are the people smoking these brands? What are the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the smokers in these different markets? What are the poor folks inhaling vs the better-off smokers? And why are there such big differences in the amounts and kinds of pesticides and insecticides affecting these different groups of people? Those questions all have hard evidence answers, which I try to cover in my blog posts and books, but you can probably answer them yourself just by looking at these three brands. Let this slightly different display of the same data you’ve seen above speak to you. It reveals the dynamics of a hard truth behind millions of deaths. Not just these three brands – the landscape of chemical madness they reveal. Who is smoking the premium brand and who is smoking the cheap brand? What does that tell you?
After all, government at all levels and “non-profit” parasites like Truth Initiative are full partners in the revenues generated by tobacco products, and they have every reason to conceal the fact that they know that pesticides are a major, even primary and 100% preventable cause of smoking-related disease and death. The only reason pesticide residues are in tobacco products at all is because it is much more profitable and far more convenient for Tobacco Cartel companies to produce them that way than to make them cleaner and safer and organic, and the only reason that nobody has called them on this atrocity is because they have spread so much money around in so many places for so many years. If you want to identify tobacco industry co-conspirators, or maybe just pathetic dupes, just look for the ones claiming that all tobacco products are equally hazardous, organic American Spirit and Swisher Sweets alike.
If around now you’re thinking “Well, some of those pesticides look pretty bad but those concentrations look awfully low to do any damage to smokers” please understand that science now knows that many of these designer chemicals are highly bioactive in human nerves, tissues and organs even at molecular levels.
“Toxic effects of pesticide mixtures at a molecular level: their relevance to human health”
The damage even goes well beyond the smoker. If your mother smoked a brand contaminated with DDT, which as you saw earlier was almost a certainty any time from 1950 – 1972, and you are a woman, then your odds of developing breast cancer are much, much higher as a result of what DDT in those cigarettes did to your mother’s DNA. That genetic damage is passed on to both female and male children across generations.
For peer-reviewed journal research on maternal DDT and Breast Cancer see also here and here andhere. Oh, and how about Obesity? If your mother was exposed to DDT while she was carrying you, your odds of uncontrollable obesity rise dramatically. Remember, smokers from 1950-1972 were probably universally exposed to DDT, and even if they quit during pregnancy there was more than enough DDT circulating in their bodies to damage you before you were even you. Every brand in those days was contaminated not just with DDT but with Endrin, Aldrin, Lindane, Dieldrin and literally dozens of other OC and OP pesticides. Remember those links to the 1950-72 research here and here andhere and here and here?
So please tell me – are there any differences worth mentioning between those non-organic American Spirit, Marlboro and Swisher Sweets? Would tobacco cigarettes without these specific contaminants be safer than contaminated cigarettes. Prove it for yourself. Search for any one of these fungicides or insecticides listed above along with keywords like “neurological”, “fetal”, “diabetes”, “obesity”, “birth defect” or “cancer” and see what you get. As you’re looking at the results, ask yourself:
Is the least contaminated tobacco product safer than the most contaminated one, or not?
Even if you assume that the tobacco in all three brands is the same, which it isn’t, would you say there are differences in safety levels, or not?
If someone you love is smoking and you can’t get them to stop, which of the three brands above would you want them to smoke, and why?
If your kid is sneaking off and smoking, which of these brands would you least want them to be smoking, and why?
Looking at that hard data, only blind arrogance or a hidden agenda could continue to claim that the DDT, Carbendazim and Penconazole residues in the little cigars that kids are smoking right now, today, by the tens of thousands in every city in the US, doesn’t matter because tobacco itself is so bad anyway. Yet that is exactly what EPA, FDA, all the anti-smoking groups, and all the state health departments pretend to believe. That’s their excuse for doing nothing, and it’s pathetic. Here’s why.
First as I said before, there is simply zero research on the health effects of smoking uncontaminated tobacco products. No such study has ever been done. In addition, virtually all smoking and health research that used tobacco smoke obtained that smoke from “Research Standard” cigarettes supplied by the Tobacco Cartel itself, and with zero data on what pesticide residues were present in any of these “research” cigarettes. Please tell me any other area of research where the materials to be examined for their health impact are not completely characterized? No research study I have found, and I’ve looked pretty carefully, has ever acknowledged the presence of pesticide residues in the “tobacco” they were using to test the health effects of smoking tobacco.
So all statements about tobacco products begin with the unstated, unproven assumption, which is super-convenient for the Cartel, the government ‘regulators’, and the non-profit parasites, that tobacco is causing so much of the obvious harm that any damage being done by those insecticides and fungicides, that are absolutely necessary for the Tobacco Cartel to maximize profits, can safely be ignored. Not just ignored, but actively placed outside consideration or even public knowledge. In other words, concealed by conspiracy.
This level of self-serving deceitfulness while enormous numbers of people die from pesticide contaminated tobacco products every year, and while children around the world are sealing their future fates by being lured into smoking these cheap contaminated tobacco products, all of which is 100% preventable, is beyond disgusting.
The question that must be asked – if it were possible, wouldn’t the kids smoking this trash, idiots that they certainly are, be safer smoking these products if they were made from exactly the same crap as they are now, from trash and waste tobacco and cheap chemical flavorings but weren’t contaminated with those extremely hazardous pesticides we can all see in the hard data for the first time now?
We know that 1 in 13 of all the children under 17 alive today will die prematurely, painfully and expensively of “smoking-related” disease. That is a whole lot of children and future suffering. Do you think any of it could be prevented just by requiring tobacco manufacturers to remove pesticide residues from their tobacco?
They could do that, almost in a flash. Why don’t they? Because they don’t have to, and because it’s much more profitable to use chemicals than to use labor, even in the remote areas of the Third World where they grow their tobacco out of sight of regulators and inspectors.
Every tobacco product on the market could theoretically be made with responsibly grown and even organic tobacco – no problem. Give the industry 3-5 years and a drop-dead set of conditions and they will do whatever they have to do. It would take longer to actually become widely organic, but in 3-5 years the world tobacco supply could be 75% cleared of extreme and severely hazardous pesticide residues and the lives of millions of people conserved for a future with their families.
However as long as “players” like FDA and Truth Initiative and others like them play the “All Tobacco Is Equally Bad” game nothing will change. Of the total number of smokers dying each year, a significant number die because of the arrogant conceit of those who believe (or at least pretend to believe) they know all the truth there is to know about Tobacco when they have never once set foot in any tobacco field anywhere, much less a field that has just been sprayed with DDT inIndia, Nicaragua or Brazil. These countries supply hundreds of tons of contaminated tobacco waste to US manufacturers that they make into fruity little sweet smokes for our kids. US companies are also totally permitted to import tobacco products like fruity little cigars from these countries with zero inspection for DDT or any other pesticides. As long as they pay their import taxes they skate, and all that toxic load goes straight into the lungs of the young black and brown smokers in poor communities.
And then in 2015 the moralists and parasites had the nerve to go after organic tobacco. The problem is that they apparently don’t know what Tobacco is, or really that much about it, because if they did they wouldn’t have gotten themselves into the really stupid trap of insisting for the record that there’s no difference between organic tobacco and severely contaminated tobacco. They may claim when finally confronted that they don’t know about all those pesticides, but they are on the record as fully informed.
Notice that in the data tables above even the regular American Spirit Blue non-organic brand is lower in pesticides than the Marlboro or another RJR brand, Camel. That’s a big difference in safety levels even among non-organic brands, much less between organic and non-organic. However, if RJR had defended American Spirit organic tobacco on that simple evidence-based premise then they would have had to admit how contaminated all their other products are, and why. Oops! That’s a non-starter. Think of the lawsuits!
So it was a much, much better deal for RJR to let FDA pretend they scored a big win, just like years before the Surgeon General’s warnings were a godsend to tobacco manufacturers. It let them say – hey, you were warned. The so-called “Tobacco Settlement” was an even bigger fraud – look at what is actually being done with all that money. Lots of “Tobacco is really really bad” advertising, lots of huge salaries and nice perks, everybody congratulating themselves on what a great job they’re doing, and no change in the numbers of people suffering and dying, or in the number of kids heading down that dead-end road.
Until my little non-profit finally got funding and was able to begin testing tobacco products in late 2018, not one dime has ever been spent by the “anti-tobacco” forces to test for these contaminants that by themselves make these products illegal, period. But then the “Tobacco is really really bad” game would be over, wouldn’t it. Imagine the public reaction if it became clear that people in positions of responsibility and authority had known about pesticide contamination of tobacco products for many smokers’ lifetimes and had never once spoken out.
FDA knows what it has to do in return for being allowed to look like a winner in the organic tobacco derby. Their part of the deal is not to make too much noise about all those “crop protection agents”. That’s what the industry calls pesticides. After all, crops need protection, right? so much better than a nasty word ending in “cide”.
FDA and the anti-tobacco PR and advertising shills are allowed to beat the drums and make up endless variations of the “Tobacco Is So Bad” meme because that doesn’t hurt the tobacco industry one bit, but it does allow thousands of people to keep doing extremely dubious work to justify their lucrative titles and careers “fighting tobacco”.
Ever wonder why FDA is being so helpful in the industry’s pivot away from tobacco and toward e-cigarettes? Are they are all hoping that their complicity in 75 years of slaughter for profit will just slide on out of sight? Yes, complicity. FDA has had institutional knowledge of the presence of heavy concentrations of hazardous pesticides in tobacco products for over 50 years and has not once, ever brought it up in any hearings or testimony or research. That’s complicity.
I call the tobacco industry’s reckless, negligent, criminal behavior “slaughter for profit” simply because the tobacco industry doesn’t have to use pesticides at all. Traditional tobacco growers used hand labor for hundreds of years and did just fine. The tobacco companies use chemicals in place of labor strictly for increased profits and they have rigged the regulatory systems of the world so that they are protected from the consequences of their greed-driven decisions.
Should people who smoke be protected from these contaminants, or do they deserve whatever happens to them?
If these chemicals were in wine or beer, would that be OK just because alcohol is known to be so hazardous to health anyway.
Does it not matter that the most hazardous of these brands, the one with 375 times the highest background level of DDT, is the one that most kids 11-16 love?
“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
“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 2018
“Organic,” “natural” or “additive-free” product labels may imply a healthier or safer choice, but that couldn’t be further from the truth when it comes to tobacco products. A cigarette with organic tobacco or tobacco with no additives does not make it healthier or safer than other cigarettes.” Truth Initiative 2018
That’s what every regulatory agency in the country, and in most of the world, wants you to believe – if you ever ask the question at all. So, these people are fully on record – no differences at all? Pesticide contamination of tobacco products doesn’t make smoking them more dangerous than if they were USDA Certified organic tobacco. Really? Now, hold on a minute …..
We laugh at the silly idea of Cannabis as a “killer weed” now, but millions believed it and happily allowed the government to send generations of people to prison because they believed it. It seems absurd that anyone would be fooled by that ham-handed government propaganda, but millions were and many still are.
Keeping mind that what has happened in the past could happen again, and could be happening right now, let me ask you to consider this:
What if there is a much more subtle and sophisticated generations-long campaign of disinformation about Tobacco just like there was about Cannabis? What if it’s run by a powerful industry with endless money and not by a bunch of clueless bureaucrats thinking up stupid slogans. What if the motive is a combination of profit and fear – immense profit from what they’re secretly doing, and deep fear of the liability if what they’re doing is revealed? What if the Tobacco industry has known for a long time that it has a severe, possibly fatal problem that it has managed to keep completely out of public view by spending vast sums of money on a combination of public persuasion and widespread, carefully targeted (but increasingly visible) official, scientific and medical corruption?
What if some or even most of the damage being caused in the modern world by commercial Tobacco products is not being caused by the Tobacco in those products but by previously unidentified hazardous toxic substances IN the tobacco products, and what if that means that these hazardous toxic substances in tobacco products can be controlled at the local level using existing local and state ordinances and laws? The hazardous substances in question are pesticides that are highly regulated and even banned in every other kind of product that people consume but – unbelievably – they are not regulated or inspected for in tobacco products. They are allowed by default by EPA, FDA, USDA, CDC, FTC, CPSC, and every other Federal agency. The Tobacco Cartel has controlled them all since the 1970s when all government research on pesticides in tobacco products ceased forever. You have never heard a word about pesticides in tobacco products, for all the Billions spent on “smoking and health” and “anti-smoking” and “anti-tobacco” programs and campaigns. That’s because there actually is a conspiracy, and its in plain sight – the very best place to totally conceal something.
I know that’s it’s a heresy to talk about controlling toxic substances in the tobacco products instead of the tobacco products themselves, but fair-minded people will consider the actual evidence and not rest on an unquestioned assumption: maybe it’s not the tobacco in the tobacco products that’s killing most of the people. It’s really no different that realizing that it’s better for addicts to inject drugs with clean needles and then make them available. You may not like the fact that people are smoking tobacco, but at least you can ensure that the manufacturers aren’t allowed to harm and exploit them with negligence and greed.
A Quick Review Of Some Hard Evidence
Here are a few of my posts with hard data on cigarette pesticides revealed by lab tests I commissioned in 2018 and with links to peer-reviewed research demonstrating the depth of the health hazards presented by these hidden contaminants.
After you have a chance to check out this set of links I would like to return to the topic of this post – what communities can do without “help’ from Federal bureaucrats to protect themselves from this public health threat.
This post links hard data on DDT in Swisher Sweets brand of little cigars, smokers by millions of young women, with peer-reviewed publushed research on pre-natal genetic damage to the baby
This post links hard data on hidden fungicides in tobacco brands popular in marginalized communities with peer-reviewed published research that demonstrates that exposure to these same fungicides is strongly associated with testicular cancer
This post offers hard evidence and historic documentation of the conspiratorial role of Federal agencies in concealing the health threat to smokers created by unregulated pesticide exposure
Any exposure to several of the pesticides shown to contaminate tobacco products are proven to have greater impact on babies with Latinx, African American, American Indian and Pacific Island genetics.
Could the unexplained link between smoking and suicide could be explained by the known link between pesticide exposure and suicide, once you become aware of the heavy concealed pesticide contamination in cigarettes?
A radical “quit smoking” plan that will probably offend a lot of non-smokers but that could help a lot of Diabetic smokers quit hurting themselves without having to quit.
This post examines the evidence of the link between mother’s exposure to DDT (like in Swisher Sweets) and their daughter’s lifetime risk of breast cancer. It’s huge.
The very foundation of the anti-tobacco, anti-smoking faith is that “Tobacco Is Bad Shit”. That’s the firm, unquestioning belief, and every tobacco prevention and control effort in the world is pinned to that article of faith. Tobacco causes illness and death. End of discussion. No questions. Full stop. We already know that Tobacco is bad shit, and we don’t want to hear any more about it. So let’s just move on and figure out how we can keep people from smoking and now vaping the goddamned stuff!
OK, but what if everybody is wrong? Really – what if everyone thinks things are one way, when they are actually another? Is that possible? What if people are all looking in one direction while the answer lies in another? Has there ever been that kind of mass delusion in history? Of course there has been – that’s a central theme in the history of science. People believe something fundamental for generations. It’s obviously wrong, but nobody can see it. The first one who points this out is attacked. Others speak up and say wait a minute, we should check this out and see if it’s true. They do, and it is. And then everybody says “Whocoulddaknowed?”
The oldest example of “everybody knows” is the flat earth delusion that ruled western minds for centuries. Maps showed the edges of the earth. Then one day – Oops! It’s round. Whocoulddaknowed? Then next the all-powerful church decided to burn heretics who pointed out simple, hard evidence that the world rotated rather than the heavens turning. Everyone knew that the earth was the center of the universe and that everything in God’s heavens rotated around God’s earth. Then one day – Oops! Whocoulddaknowed? It took the church centuries to apologize to Galileo. I doubt he cared. Then everyone laughed at the idea of invisible bugs causing disease because everyone knows it’s the vapors. Mal Aria. Oops! Again. Really? Whocoulddaknowed? Little invisible bugs. Well I’ll be damned.
Most of us scoff at that kind of profound ignorance as if we were invulnerable to the same folly. But I’m telling anyone who will listen – it’s not the tobacco that is sickening and killing millions. It turns.
I realize that tying those profound historical delusions to a delusion about Tobacco, even if it could be demonstrated, may seem trivial in comparison, but if anything the effect of the delusion about Tobacco has had greater impact on human life than any of those mass delusions just cited. That’s because of our profound collective delusions about tobacco, carefully cultivated by the tobacco industry to shield itself from accountability, have allowed millions of completely preventable deaths in the past and the dying will continue long into the future because of our willful collective ignorance.
The last words attributed to Jesus were “Father forgive them. They know not what they do.” I have always believed that Jesus was using those last words not to comment for all eternity on those who were killing him, and the evil Romans in general, but on the one thing most responsible for the suffering and death of mankind.
So, I’ll ask again, what if most of the damage being caused by Tobacco products is actually being caused by pesticide residues that contaminate the Tobacco products? The tobacco products, the manufactured crap, not tobacco itself. What if smoking tobacco, just tobacco, no contaminants, is OK? Gasp.
Here’s the thing. We know for sure that pesticide chemicals do exactly what they’re designed to do. They interrupt nerve transmissions, they destroy DNA, they poison internal organs, they mutate little bug babies – these chemical industry scientists, working dead-center in the traditions of the Nazi nerve gas experiments, are endlessly creative. So in the end, it really doesn’t matter whether tobacco is bad or not – we know that pesticides are “bad” for sure. They are “xenobiotics” – substances “hostile to life”. But so many people are so tied up arguing the evils of Tobacco so passionately and hatefully that they don’t see themselves as precise parallels with the Middle Ages “angels on the head of a pin” debate that consumed generations of “wise men”, while the Tobacco companies, like the wealthy classes that actually ran the Medieval Church for their own benefit, are snickering all the way to the bank.
All this may sound depressingly true and impossible to overcome, but not so. There are laws in place in every community to deal with pesticides as toxic substances, although those laws have been rigged by the pesticide manufacturers to cover what they thought was every contingency. Nothing in the Tobacco Master Settlement, or in any other shields the Cartel has erected, can protect them from liability for concealing their longstanding material knowledge of a clear, present danger to smokers and their children.
That’s the beauty of understanding that there are xenobiotic substances ON the tobacco products. It doesn’t matter what you think about tobacco itself, or even what laws and ordinances and regulations say about “tobacco” itself. Hate it or love it – doesn’t matter. These are products, and they are contaminated with known toxic and dangerous substances, and they violate all kinds of laws on that basis. If you love Tobacco, you should care. If you hate Tobacco, you should care. Pesticide-free tobacco products would be a major improvement in the life of a community regardless.
So there really doesn’t have to be any argument at all about whether or not tobacco is bad and should be controlled – some of the pesticides on the tobacco products being sold in your community are flat illegal and there are available legal remedies that the law says MUST be applied. Take that to the bank – and to your health department. and don’t let them stonewall you about “lack of authority to regulate tobacco products” – they have the authority and the duty to protect the public from pesticide exposure. They have never used it before this way, and they probably haven’t ever thought about it, but if a barrel of Cypermethrin suddenly falls from the sky into the WalMart parking lot you can bet they won’t be sitting around wondering who is going to handle it. If somebody lets loose a can of DDT in a schoolyard you can bet that the local authorities aren’t going to just call the poison hotline and then wait around. Communities can act when they are in immediate peril, and high concentrations of banned pesticide residues in tobacco products being smoked by children in the community meets that definition in spades.
Pesticides fall into a class of chemicals defined as “toxic substances” in a wide range of environmental and consumer protection regulations and statutes. In every state, there are statutes that empower local, county-level health officials to act when toxic substances threaten local public health. Yes there are pre-emption laws that forbid local communities from imposing greater restrictions on pesticides than state laws do, but in this case we’re talking about local communities using existing state laws on toxic substances in consumer products that, if detected at the any level, can trigger local action by public health authorities without waiting for permission from the state. This strategy may need tweaking in many communities, but because state and federal lawmakers have been incredibly (and perhaps in some cases deliberately) sloppy in writing tobacco product regulations I believe that tobacco product pesticide contamination opens a big wide door for local control.
In Oregon where I live, the credible allegation of the presence of banned “toxic substances” on any property located in the community is supposed to trigger mandatory regulatory responses if the allegation is properly made and supported by evidence. “Property” includes tobacco products sitting on the shelf down at the mini-mart. I’m currently working on educating our local public health administrator on her authority to act in this area.
In most jurisdictions I’ve looked at in California, Colorado, and other Cannabis-legal states, a broad range of “Property” is subject to “toxic substance” regulatory oversight by County public health authorities.
I can hear the screams from the faithful now – but, but Tobacco is so bad that it doesn’t matter if there’s poison on the leaves! I would only ask the faithful – can you point to one scientific research study that compares the smoke or vapor of 100% pure, organic Tobacco with any Tobacco product on the market? There are none. Zero. And, that’s not one of those famous “distinctions without a difference”. Please think about that – if actual, real Tobacco smoke or vapor has never been tested, and if every report of toxic substances in “tobacco” smoke has been based on rigged “reference cigarettes” supplied by the industry itself, where does that leave the idea that, without any question, Tobacco is horrible, awful, dangerous stuff? It may be true, but there are no studies that prove it one way or another.
Since 1970 virtually every “scientific” study of tobacco products has used industry-supplied “reference cigarettes” that don’t give results relevant to either what is really on the commercial market or to organic or even simply leaf tobacco. At least 25% of those “reference cigarettes” are “reconstituted tobacco”, a synthetic product made from a highly variable mix of tobacco stems, stalks and factory-floor waste called “tobacco dust”. There is no way that the results of smoke stream or vapor stream analysis using “reference cigarettes” has anything to do with tobacco in pure form. I know that anti-tobacco advocates would fear that the results of such testing might clear Tobacco’s name and give people who like to smoke and vape a license to do so. But so what?
I would say to them, if it turns out that it isn’t the Tobacco but the pesticides, since the pesticides are a very controllable harm while people smoking and vaping are not controllable, then forget about your dislike of Tobacco and deal with the problem. Or , I would also ask them, do you secretly agree with that renegade government bureaucrat in the 1920’s who arranged to have bootleg whiskey poisoned with methanol in order to scare people into not drinking? Do you think, I would ask, that this was actually a pretty good idea and those drinkers deserved what they got? Or maybe you aren’t that cold-hearted and simply think that alcohol is so bad anyway, and those drinkers were poisoning themselves anyway, so what’s the big deal?
I would ask them these questions because any person who felt so strongly about alcohol that they would ignore the deliberate poisoning of drinkers by the government wouldn’t be worried about a few pesticides in Tobacco products. By the same reasoning, Tobacco is so bad anyway – who cares about pesticides?
Think that an example from the 1920’s, a hundred years ago, is a bit irrelevant to today’s enlightened government? Well, remember Paraquat on Marijuana? The DEA came right out and said that regardless of what it did to Marijuana smokers, they were engaged in illegal activity and so it didn’t matter. Besides, from the government’s point of view, a few dead hippies weren’t worth getting worked up over. The idea that was sold to the public is clearly that Marijuana is so bad anyway who cares if the government poisons it – after all, they’re just trying to keep precious little American children from being lured into a life of degradation and crime.
Workers apply fungicide “Ditio carbamato” to cigar tobacco in Nicaragua every 4 days
So what I’m saying is that the only fair and reasonable way to determine the truth, the relative degree of actual risk, would be to compare (1) commercial tobacco products with (2) organic tobacco smoke and vapor. Otherwise all that science on smoking, and all those horrible components of “tobacco” smoke and vapor, aren’t actually testing “tobacco” smoke or vapor at all. They are testing “Tobacco product” vapor and smoke, and most Tobacco products in America have no relationship to real Tobacco leaf. Again, a distinction with a big difference.
One more heretical question, if you’re with me so far. What if those toxic substances are in Tobacco products for one reason only – because it is more profitable for Tobacco product manufacturers to use these chemicals in Tobacco production than to produce Tobacco without them? Almost as an aside, premium cigars are among the most severely contaminated Tobacco products in the world, because the growers spare no expense in applying pesticides, fungicides and every other kind of chemical to keep bugs and worms
from eating holes in those incredibly valuable cigar wrapper leaves. And why do they do that? Simple, again. It’s the money. A Tobacco leaf with bug holes can’t be used for making premium cigars, so once a bug takes a bite that leaf turns from gold into plain old shit.
Tobacco products aren’t contaminated with pesticide residues because the growers and manufacturers want to poison their customers; they’re contaminated because everybody makes more money by using these chemicals and they aren’t being forced to clean up their products, so millions of people are dying just like the bugs and worms in the Tobacco fields. It’s really that simple.
The Tobacco industry has produced organic Tobacco products, with no pesticide residue contamination. It knows how. It simply chooses not to. That cost/benefit decision alone impoverishes and drives the loss of millions of lives every year with immeasurable suffering and grief.
Pretty damned grim, right? Well, maybe not.
All it took to bring down Al Capone was one little charge of income tax evasion, and he wasn’t nearly the magnitude of monster these Tobacco companies are. Al thought he was riding pretty high too. Fancy suits. Expensive wine. Hookers. Blow. The best of everything. But he overlooked that one little crime, and that was enough.
Who in your County public health structure has the regulatory authority to order inspection of commercial products that are credibly suspected of being contaminated with the residues of banned pesticides?
Insist that they forget you are talking about Tobacco products.
Ask them what their action would be if you were coming to them with evidence that imported scented candles, or air fresheners, or incense being sold in your community were contaminated with these same pesticides at these same levels?
Geiss, O., Kotzias, D. – Determination of Ammonium, Urea and Pesticide Residues in Cigarette Tobacco. Fresenius Environmental Bulletin (FEB), No. 12 (2003), 1562– 1565
What would they do if they knew that children in the community were going to be inhaling vapors of Endosulfan, 4,4-DDE and Heptachlor over 100 times a day in homes where adults burned these candles?
How about if the issue was air fresheners contaminated with those same nerve toxins? Or maybe incense from China or India full of Chlordane?
What would they do if Tobacco products at the local mini-mart had the same contaminants as the cigarettes on the list you see here.
Oh, and about this cigarette pesticide data being from 2003? See my recent blog post with the Tobacco industry’s own data that shows these same pesticides – and about 100 more – still present on Tobacco worldwide in 2018. Show that data to your county public health department too.
If these two little bits of “income tax evasion” evidence aren’t enough to give your County public health officer “reasonable cause” to order inspection of commercial Tobacco products being sold in your County, let me know.
I’m doing some Tobacco product testing right now (12/18) in three of Oregon’s premier testing labs, and I plan to make the results available as part of a community-level Tobacco product control program.
Local communities have deferred too long to State and federal bureaucrats to protect them from Tobacco products. Simple residue testing of commercial tobacco products being sold in your community will give you ample evidence to insist that your local public health officials use their existing authority to enforce toxic substances regulations against contaminated Tobacco products for sale in your community.
If your community doesn’t have existing qualified pesticide residue testing labs, and most don’t, get in touch and ask for no-cost assistance from the Oregon Community Tobacco Control Partnership.
Here is a story is about an Australian oncologist who, dismayed at the damage that she saw “Tobacco” doing to her patients, was horrified to find out that her medical institution held “Tobacco” company stock as part of its investment portfolio.
Well, she set to work, she did, and although the gruff, cynical world of big money managers was skeptical at first, this plucky, photogenic Australian Oncologist has managed to create a very successful “Tobacco-free Portfolio” movement worldwide.
The article is chock full of feel-good quotes from financial wizards who were absolutely bowled over by the moral and ethical intensity of the Aussie doc’s arguments, and her ghastly photos of diseased lungs, and now they are 100% on board with her in shunning the “Tobacco” industry’s stocks in their portfolios.
The problem here is emblematic of the failure of anti-“tobacco” movements to even begin to identify who and what they need to be attacking. The core of the problem is that the industry has so completely propagandized people and institutions at all levels that most people actually believe that it is Tobacco killing all those people who die from smoking cigarettes.
While these movements and lawsuits and non-profit (sic) campaigns are all aimed at “Tobacco”, that plague-like carrier of the dreaded addictive nicotine toxin that destroys lives and stalks children, the industry slides right by because its products have almost nothing at all to do with Tobacco anymore. 100% of the attacks against the industry based on the assumption that its products are “Tobacco” are virtually meaningless and a complete waste of hope, energy, and money.
Almost all US cigarette brands are up to 100% recycled waste with nicotine added in precise dosages. Does anyone who reflects for even a few seconds believe that it would be possible to manufacture billions of cigarettes from natural plant material and be able to print the precise amount of tar and nicotine on every pack? The amount of nicotine varies so much from field to field, from plant to plant, and from leaf to leaf that even if they were using actual Tobacco leaf they couldn’t control the amount of “Nicotine & Tar” without doing some major processing.
The only way the industry can achieve uniformity is to produce a synthetic product, and in fact the industry does just that, by the millions of tons each year. The industry calls it “synthetic smoking materials” or, in a more colorful (and unconsciously accurate) industry term, “sheet tobacco”. That’s what it is – recycled waste processed into sheet of material that are then shaved, infused with precise amounts of hundreds of chemicals including nicotine, and then shaved into little curls and made into cigarettes. Anyone who knows the industry is laughing at the “Ammonia” lawsuit. Sure Ammonia is used in manufacturing “tobacco sheet” – huge amounts of it. But it isn’t “added” to the material, it’s used in a super-cooled process to puff it up after its been shaved into little curls so that it will look and smoke more like real leaf. The Ammonia is long-gone by the time those little ciggys are all packaged up and ready to be inhaled by some poor idiot who really is being deceived, manipulated, injured and murdered as a result of deliberate, profit-driven decisions of this industry.
If the 2016 US “Tobacco” industry were to be a startup industry with no history, and it came to even the highly-manipulated US regulators with the products it currently makes and proposed to make those products, they would not only be denied they would probably be arrested as terrorists.
But after many decades of very expensive and well-crafted propaganda, this industry now has even those who see it clearly as committing crimes against humanity led unknowingly to be aggrieved at “Tobacco” and to spend all their energy and resources attacking the “Tobacco industry”.
I’m afraid that for the most part anti-“Tobacco” people are useful idiots. They aren’t stupid, or foolish, or wrong in what they are trying to do. Bless them. However, they are being so effectively manipulated that they are the “Tobacco” industry’s most ardent defenders when it comes to anyone trying to point out the error of their “anti-Tobacco” ways.
In the 1980s I had written a four-part expose of the “Tobacco industry” at the request of a senior editor with the Nader organization, and just before that series was to begin publication, a senior member of Nader’s Board, a well-known “anti-Tobacco” physician, said (as my editor told me) that they had spent so many years convincing people that Tobacco was the worst possible thing for their health that they weren’t going to publish anything that might suggest that it might not be the Tobacco that’s the problem at all.
This industry is completely protected at the institutional/governmental level, and it seems that all of the “anti-Tobacco” movements in the world have also been effectively co-opted.
This industry has been earning more real wealth than any other tightly-held industry in the world for generations and that wealth has gone into ownership of hundreds of companies in every industry and every financial sector in the world. So as sincere and well-motivated as our Australian Oncologist is, I’m afraid that the hideous damage she sees in her “Tobacco” smoking patients has little or nothing to do with Tobacco, and the so-called “Tobacco” companies are fully divested out of range of any possible legal or regulatory action.
Many of those hundreds of companies owned by “Tobacco” money are consumer products, food, transportation, retail and leisure companies that advertise heavily in every medium. So any story about any strategy that had even a remote chance of actually harming the interests that profit directly or indirectly from the slaughter would not make it into any medium that relies on advertising. Stories that are really dangerous to the “tobacco” industry somehow don’t make it through the media screening process. And there’s not a whiff of “tobacco” anywhere in the room where the decision is made to kill the story at the editorial level – they’ve simply heard from a few of their best retailer and consumer products advertisers. I have personally seen this happen.
So you can be that the “Tobacco industry” isn’t worried about the “Tobacco-free Portfolio” movement one bit.
Divesting “Tobacco” company stock as a means to rein in their murderous behavior is worse than ineffective – it makes people feel that they are actually accomplishing something. No portfolio manager could divest of every stock and bond connected to every company owned by “Tobacco” money – there wouldn’t be many stocks or bonds left to own.
But you can’t even scratch the “Tobacco” industry by selling off its stocks. However, the industry still puts on a good show for the quixotic victors whenever someone like our plucky Aussie Oncologist does appear.
It fights and fights and then gives up and wails and gnashes its teeth – just like it did with the “big” Tobacco Liability settlements a few years ago. “Oh stop, stop. Here, take a few billion dollars. You’ve got us. We give up. We’ll do better from now on.”
We’ve all heard it and seen it and while a lot of us know it’s just an act very few of us can see what a truly well-crafted act it is. This act cost hundreds of millions, probably billions of dollars and decades to craft to perfection. The industry has been hiring the best behavior modification scientists in the world for decades, along with thousands of other scientists in many other disciplines, either directly or through hidden sponsorship with “research grants”. The industry almost has a 100% effective mindset in place at all levels of society, and keeping people fixated on “Tobacco” and “Nicotine” is at the core of the strategy.
However, if you have read this far you are one of the people that the “Tobacco” industry really, really hopes will just shrug your shoulders and walk away. Oh well, it’s all true but what can be done about it?
I do have a small suggestion. A class action lawsuit that actually identifies a class of cigarette smokers that consists of people who have been damaged by this industry in specific ways by cigarette products based on a specific, broad and deep knowledge ON THE PART OF THE ATTORNEYS of how the industry operates, would succeed quite nicely and not just in a monetary awards for the plaintiffs. Such a lawsuit could actually lead to meaningful change, if not from the existing “Tobacco” industry then from an alternative heirloom, truly natural Tobacco movement on the local level, perhaps right alongside legalized Cannabis. I don’t believe this kind of legal action has ever been tried, but would love to hear from anyone who knows of such a case.
This industry’s vulnerability is that it is so wealthy, powerful, diversified and protected that it has come to rely completely on its ability to keep on fooling all the people all the time. This industry believes that it controls all of the rules of the game that it has us all playing. And Rule #1 is that we all agree that Tobacco and Nicotine are the problems. So, all together now …..
This industry is pure psychosis in institutional form.
panaceachronicles 