Clearing The Air

RICO suave'.....appropriately describes the pharmaceutical nicotine industry

As a non-smoker, I've written in the past about my disdain for the smoking ban movement. An excerpt from a previous post went something like this:

"...The agenda of the tobacco control activists is to stop smokers from smoking...because smoking MAY be hazardous to the smokers' health. A noble cause when it was conducted through voluntary education and marketing. Smoking bans on the other hand are coercive, collusive, and frankly bordering on racketeering in my opinion......"

I was reminded of that earlier comment when I came across this article from NewsTarget.com. In that article, titled Big Tobacco racketeering charges mirror pharmaceutical industry crimes, columnist Mike Adams gives us a brief history lesson which we seem to have forgotten:

"Physicians promoted tobacco and drugs

If prescription drugs are so dangerous, you might ask, then why are so many physicians still strongly in support of them? The answer is that not too long ago, physicians were strongly in favor of cigarettes, too! In fact, a quick search through historical print ads in mainstream magazines like TIME showed physicians actually endorsing cigarettes.

It just goes to show you that doctors can be trained to push practically anything to the public, as long as there's a buck involved. That's not an exaggeration: it's historical fact. (The AMA isn't too proud of that, so you won't find it mentioned in the AMA's history books...)

Today, physicians are prescribing another dangerous class of products to consumers: prescription drugs. And they are causing just as much death and suffering as tobacco products. Simultaneously, they're generating substantial profits for powerful corporations, just as cigarettes once did. "

Specifically today, doctors are being trained to push pharmaceutical nicotine products like Nicoderm and Nicoderm CQ on the public, while at the same time they testify at public hearings to demand that politicians implement smoking bans in an effort to eliminate tobacco nicotine use. All of which might seem innocent enough until you find out in this financial grant, that the AMA was the recipient of $88 million from Nicoderm interests at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and of course RWJF is tied at the hip to the Nicoderm manufacturer Johnson & Johnson Company.

But the most indictable offense in my mind is that in order to get politicians to eliminate their competitor tobacco nicotine, the pharmaceutical interests are spreading exaggerations and outright lies about secondhand smoke; even as the American Cancer Society proves indoor smoke concentrations are up to 25,000 times safer than OSHA regulations, found here.

If all of this is not a tale of racketeering.....I don't know what is, which leads me to say...........Robert Wood Johnson......very RICO suave'.

posted by marcus aurelius @ 5:52 PM