Clearing The Air

Are Governor Pawlenty and other pro-smoking ban politicians original thinkers or just following pharmaceutical nicotine orders?

It's old news that Pawlenty introduced the "health impact fee" on tobacco products last session. Healthcare officials and non-profits heralded this bill with praises and adulation.....So was the health impact fee an unexpected move to non-profit organizations like American Lung, American Cancer, the AMA, American Non-Smoker's Rights, etc.?
Not exactly, you see they've been paid by the pharmaceutical nicotine industry for years to lobby politicians for similar tax increases on tobacco products in all 50 states. Here is a preliminary funding grant by RWJF (of Nicoderm financial interests) to study legislative compliance to pharmaceutical nicotine interests:

http://www.rwjf.org/reports/grr/026698s.htm
Grantee: American Cancer Society $874,000 paid by the Nicoderm company (RWJF). Purpose of grant: ......planned to mobilize ACS's state and local staff and volunteers to promote ..........benefits of tobacco taxes and provide materials, policy analysis, and media plans. Over the full course, the above grant led to a total of $50,000,000.00 to "educate" our policy makers to RWJF's (Nicoderm) way of thinking.

http://www.rwjf.org/reports/grr/022933.htm This early grant explored the possibilities of legislator's bending to the will of the RWJF (Nicoderm) funded non-profits. One of the grant finding reports: Almost all legislators reported that medical society and nonprofit health organization lobbyists were credible on tobacco issues and slightly more than half believed that these lobbyists were important sources of information.......Overall, three to four times more legislators said they could be persuaded on tobacco issues by medical society and nonprofit health lobbyists ....... I wonder if their opinion changes when they find out Nicoderm money is used to fund the nonprofit health lobbyists?

http://www.rwjf.org/reports/grr/031814s.htm This grant seems to suggest that once tobacco taxes were raised, RWJF attempted to influence the use of the tax revenues for further tobacco control legislation. In other words tobacco users were paying for further legislative action against them. How clever.

http://www.rwjf.org/reports/grr/041530.htm This Nicoderm grant titled Smokeless Wisconsin, targeted WI state officials to give in to RWJF demands.

You can research more of these tobacco tax initiatives from the Nicoderm affiliates here:
http://www.rwjf.org/search/grrresults.jsp?query=cigarette+tax&omitCommon=true&behaviorType=1&

RWJF doesn't fund legislation out of concern for anyone's health, rather because they are concerned about their own financial health and expansion. And recent Health Dept. air quality studies as well as the California EPA studies on secondhand smoke show SHS concentrations are between 50,000 to 15 times safer than OSHA guidelines.

Therefore I expect, after the full financial damage to individuals and businesses are realized due to smoking bans, attorney generals and law firms will go after the pharmaceutical nicotine industry as well as those funded by them, with the same fervor they once pursued the tobacco industry.

posted by marcus aurelius @ 11:09 AM