Copyright © 1996 by Bill Drake All Rights Reserved
Last Updated February 27, 2002
Welcome to this site. Limited permission is hereby granted to individuals to print a single hard copy of these materials for personal reading, and to individual teachers and health professionals to make limited copies of these materials for distribution to students or patients. With these limited exceptions, none of these copyrighted materials may be printed or distributed, nor incorporated into any other body of work for distribution of any kind in any medium, without prior written permission from the author, which will be readily provided in most cases. Please contact me directly bdrake@ktc.com
Because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the problem being addressed, existing worldwide efforts to deal effectively with the health hazards clearly presented by cigarette smoking and other so-called tobacco product use continue to have limited success, and the industry is able to quietly stifle most attempts to regulate smoking wherever they arise, whatever strategy they develop.
The strategic problem shared by tobacco and smoking opposition and control groups worldwide is that they assume that the tobacco products they oppose or want to regulate actually contain tobacco. This leads directly to the assumption that smoking-related disease is caused by tobacco smoke. Both of these assumptions are at least partly wrong in the case of most tobacco products, and are completely wrong in many cases. This leads to an unfortunate world in which, I believe, many good people have been deceived into literally tilting at windmills in a fog of smoke and illusion.
The tobacco products industry stopped being the tobacco industry over thirty years ago, and many brands of contemporary American cigarettes actually contain very little tobacco. Some American cigarette, pipe tobacco, cheap cigars, wet snuff, and chewing tobacco brands contain leaf tobacco - but very few. Many contain reconstituted tobacco, made from waste and scrap, not from leaf. Many American cigarette, pipe tobacco, cheap cigars, wet snuff, and chewing tobacco brands are also manufactured partially, and some are made exclusively from a material called alpha-cellulose, which has been chemically stripped out of such natural resources as food processing waste, municipal waste, and forest industry waste.
Alpha cellulose is cellulose in its most basic form, stripped of every identifying natural compound that gave whatever its parent plant was its aroma, flavor, character, and identity. It is pure cellulose, ready to accept whatever chemical treatments the tobacco industry wants to apply.
They have to apply plenty of chemicals, especially solvents, because the cellular structure of alpha-cellulose is very densely packed, and it is very difficult to get flavoring agents, smoker satisfaction chemicals, and other additives and specialty cigarette manufacturing chemicals to penetrate these dense cellulose fibers.
That's why the dyes, flavoring chemicals, aromatics, and a wide range of substances and materials are carried into the cell structure of the alpha-cellulose by powerful solvents like benzene, phosgene, and cyclohexane. Many of these processing chemicals remain in medically significant amounts as residue in the final cigarette product, and are inhaled by the smoker and by passive smoking victims.
As an example, take this quote from U.S.Patent # 4,079,742, dated March 21, 1978 and titled "Process For The Manufacture Of Synthetic Smoking Materials"
"Many attempts have been made to utilize cellulosic materials, such as alpha-cellulose, as smoking materials to be used as tobacco replacements or supplements. However alpha-cellulose and similar materials have, in their untreated form, not been found to be entirely satisfactory materials, either with regard to their burning characteristics or with regard to their smoke properties."
The inventors then go on to describe their invention, which uses acids, solvents, and a range of chemicals to produce special flavorings which, they claim, effectively turns alpha-cellulose into smokable materials.
They give several examples of how well their invention disguises non-tobacco smoking materials, including one in which some "fine grade excelsior cut from Virginia Loblolly pine" was treated with NO2 gas at 25ºC for 12 hours. The material was then heated, extracted, soaked in acids, and washed. This material was then sprayed with 3% glycerine and 3% of the newly invented flavorants, and then dried. This processed Loblolly pine sawdust was then blended with shredded tobacco in a 1:2 ratio and made up into cigarettes.
Finally, the inventors reported that
"Cigarettes containing the smoking material of this invention were adjudged by a panel of 10 experienced smokers to be comparable to control cigarettes consisting entirely of tobacco."
Another U.S.Patent # 4,473,085 dated Sept 25, 1984 and assigned to Philip Morris Inc., NY enthusiastically describes a process which can be used to convert anything, from tobacco stems and stalks to alpha-cellulose, into smoking materials. In defining their invention, the inventors specify that
"The term "non-tobacco substitute" is meant to include smoking filler materials such as are disclosed in U.S. Patents #s 3,529, 602; 3,703,177; 3,796,222; 4,019,521; 4,079, 742. Illustratively, U.S.Patent # 3,529,602 describes a burnable sheet which may be used as a tobacco substitute, which sheet contains ingredients which include (1) a film-forming ingredient comprising a pectinaceous material derived from tobacco plant parts, and (2) a mineral ingredient comprising an alkaline earth metal salt or a clay."
As we said, cigarettes and other so-called tobacco products today are manufactured with dense cellulose materials which have to be processed using solvents such as benzene, cyclohexane, and phosgene, all of which have been known for years to leave carcinogenic residue in significant concentrations. Hundreds of other chemicals and substances are used by multinational cigarette manufacturers completely without regulatory oversight concerning the known or potential health risks posed by their residues to both smokers and nonsmokers alike.
As an example, consider U.S.Patent # 3,920,026 dated November 18, 1975 and assigned to Liggett & Myers Inc., Durham, N.C.
In this patent the inventors discuss the use of solvents to inject flavor into inert synthetic smoking materials, and the industry's inability to remove these solvent residues, at least two of which are known carcinogens appearing regularly in assays of cigarette smokestreams and by implication attributed to tobacco.
"Undesirable taste characteristics of reconstituted tobacco products are often encountered, which are related to the green taste of poor tobaccos, or the papery taste of stem materials. Incorporation of flavorants or flavorant release agents into tobacco has typically been accomplished by dissolving the flavorant or agent into a suitable solvent. The solution of flavorant material is thereupon sprayed on the tobacco or injected into the tobacco matrix - in the case of reconstituted sheet."
" The solvent employed depends upon the particular flavorant material employed. Solvents have included water and various organic materials such as alcohol, acetone, or cyclohexane. Distribution of additives on the tobacco fibers may often be uneven, and more importantly, full penetration of the added substances into the cellular structure may not be achieved. Removal of residual solvent is often a problem."(emphasis added)
Not all cigarettes are manufactured from residue-contaminated synthetic materials; many actually contain a form of reconstituted material called sheet tobacco, which allows the manufacturers to claim that they are using tobacco in their products. However this sheet tobacco is not what we are led to assume by subtle and very expensive industry advertising techniques. Almost without exception I'm sure that Americans believe that cigarette tobacco is little strands of golden leaf, carefully cured in sagging but sturdy barns by southern rustics, all of whom have twelve children and live on their tobacco allotment check from the government.
In reality most of what the cigarette manufacturers call tobacco in their products is hardly what comes out of sturdy southern barns. Demonstrating the irony of cigarettes' continuing exemption from regulation based on the argument that they are tobacco, or even agricultural products consider this passage from U.S.Patent # 4,286,606 entitled Tobacco Flavorants. This patent is dated Sept. 1, 1981 and assigned to Philip Morris Inc., NY. In their introduction describing the state of the art, the inventors give a brief synopsis of materials which tobacco industry manufacturers routinely include in their products.
"The term "smoking material" encompasses all types of tobacco, such as shredded filler, leaf, stem, stalk, homogenized leaf, reconstituted tobacco, and blended mixtures thereof. In addition, "smoking materials" may encompass the various smoking substitutes formulated from non-tobacco materials. These materials may be utilized alone or blended in varying proportions with tobacco components."
It may be startling enough to see that tobacco products are evidently made with tobacco trash and non-tobacco waste, but consider this - a large percentage of the tobacco trash used to make American cigarettes is brought in from processing plants in Third World countries. While the US government makes a pretense of regulating the pesticide residue contaminants of imported foreign tobacco leaf it relies on certification from the importers, who rely on certification from the producers. In addition many categories of imported tobacco materials other than leaf are exempt, and the regulations apply only to pesticide residues banned for use on tobacco in the U.S. Finally, only Virginia and Flue-cured leaf imports fall under any kind of effective scrutiny, even within the narrow parameters of the regulations.
One of the biggest problems with cigarette pesticides is that while a high proportion of the pesticides, contaminants, additives and residues in cigarettes survive the smoking process in one form or another, some are changed by the process of heating and smoking from a dangerous carcinogenic substance such as DDT, into a highly dangerous substance like benzo-a-pyrene. Research reported in 10/96 by US scientists has established benzo-a-pyrene as a positive causal agent in cigarette smoke, leaving unanswered the question of how the benzo-a-pyrene gets there. On the internet see http://www.sciencemag.org:80/science/scripts/display/full/274/5286/430.html
While some benzo-a-pyrene may come from natural tobacco being combusted in the cigarette, and this portion would be unpreventable even if the cigarette were 100% uncontaminated tobacco, some of the benzo-a-pyrene comes from the combustion of DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbon contaminants of cigarettes made from reconstituted foreign waste and scrap.
Some of the pesticides which have been routinely present in American cigarettes beginning in the early 1950s include medically significant concentrations of DDT, Endrin, Dieldrin, Aldrin, BHC, EDB, Chlordane, Heptachlor, Aldicarb, and Carbaryl. Many of these pesticides are detailed elsewhere in this site, and there is extensive literature on their health implications, much of it connected with EPA registration procedures.
While many of the contaminants, additives and residues in cigarettes and cigarette smoke are not carcinogenic, they have other dangerous properties. Some are known to be damaging to rapidly dividing fetal tissues; some attack and mutate or destroy genetic materialsand some interfere with reproduction and produce damaged babies, both insect and human; while others suppress immune system function. Smokers expose themselves and their families to all of the health risks just listed as a direct result of the total lack of product content regulation enjoyed by cigarette manufacturers.
If cigarettes were regulated to standards of content and contaminant levels comparable with any other food, drug or cosmetic product, a major portion of the health risk for smokers and non-smokers alike would simply disappear. The industry cleverly disassociated itself from the Pure Food, Drug & Cosmetic act, arguing successfully ( in a heavily southern democratic congress) that tobacco was neither a food nor a drug and should be exempt from FDA and other such regulation.
The best measure of the impact of contemporary cigarette manufacturing practices is to look at smoking-related death and disease statistics in the US in the 1920-1940 period, and in the period 1940 to present. Although oversimplification is always a danger, so is the tendency to lose sight of simple and true observations.
Cigarettes produced before 1940 were largely tobacco, and until the development of DDT were relatively free of agricultural and manufacturing chemical additives. From 1940-1965 cigarettes were still largely manufactured from tobacco, but were increasingly heavily contaminated with pesticides and other agrichemicals soon discovered to be carcinogenic like Dieldrin, Aldrin, and Endrin.
In fairness, its useful to realize that people were trying to invent smoking additives and substitutes long before the cigarette companies began messing around with industrial wastes. Inventors of tobacco substitutes were at work very early in this country's history. For example, U.S.Patent # 12,417 describes the use of cornstalks boiled to make a syrup which is put on leaves of Indian corn shucks to smoke as a tobacco substitute, and U.S.Patent # 97,962 describes the use of crushed eucalyptus leaves treated with flavors and made up into cigars.
The really dangerous trend, from the standpoint of public health impact, has been that from 1965 to present, cigarette manufacturers have increasingly substituted reconstituted and synthetic smoking materials for leaf tobacco in cigarettes, and these high-tech materials require use of a wide range of hazardous chemicals, none of which comes under any regulatory review due to the exempt status of "tobacco" products.
Much of the slaughter caused by the cigarette industry could be ended with simple Federal legislation. The cigarette industry's exemption from regulation under the federal Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act is based on the assumption that cigarettes are made from tobacco, which is exempt from regulation. However, since cigarettes are no longer manufactured from exempt materials, they should no longer be granted exemption from regulations designed to protect the public.
Once it is clear that cigarette manufacturers can no longer justify an exemption, based on being a "tobacco" product, from the Federal Pure Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act, the gate will open to successful regulation of the worst hazards presented by this renegade industry. I believe that a proper hearing before Congress would reveal the extent of the hazard presented by unregulated use of chemicals and synthetic materials, and uninspected product evidently contaminated by a range of dangerous substances picked up during manufacturing. I believe that product liability lawsuits can be successfully brought by victims of this industry, given appropriate information resources and legal assistance.
For an informative and poignant look at the perspectives of a long-time employee of the tobacco industry who lost his wife to cigarette-related cancer, read "Memoirs In A Country Churchyard- A Tobaccoman's Plea: Clean Up Tobacco Row!", by Howard Nuttall, published by Brunswick Publishing Company, 1-800-336-7154. Recommended by Larry Breed. You can also look over a review of the book on the internet at http://www.gateway-va.com/pages/news/tobac/1223phil.htm
Please contribute comments, information, research or suggestions, which will enhance the effectiveness of this site by contacting bdrake@ktc.com
If the best way to hide an idea is to make it obvious, then the secret that tobacco is a highly psychoactive plant with a long and involved history of Native American magical, spiritual, ritualistic, and purely hedonistic usage has been effectively obscured by the universal assumption that cigarettes are tobacco and that to have smoked cigarettes is to have experienced tobacco.
As an early enthnologist remarked:
"It is a curious fact that while the Whites took the material tobacco from the Indians they took with it no fragment of the world that accompanied it, nor were they at first aware that there was such a world. After all of the generations that have elapsed since its introduction among the Whites, it has woven itself scarcely at all into their psychology and mythology. Lady Nicotine is enshrined among the Whites only as a drug, as a taste, as a habit, along with the seeking after mild and tasty forms, while the Native peoples make tobacco a heritage from the gods, a strange path which juts from there into this world and leads to the very ends of magic."
It's important to keep in mind that all aboriginal and natural people are very familiar with the toxic plants in their environment. Many of these plants have a place in the medicine chest of shamans, but are left alone by regular people, who respect their powers. But tobacco, with deadly nicotine resins shining on its leaves, is eagerly and routinely smoked and snorted by millions of native, natural people who understand plants, toxins, medicines, and gifts from the gods.
Indian peoples of North, Central and South America were uniformly familiar with the plant and prized its use in opening the doors of perception, curing bodily disease and infirmity, reducing the impact of life's twin afflictions, hunger and fatigue, and for its role in deepening and broadening human relationships on both the personal and community level.
And then, as in any society there were those among the Native Americans who disregarded the sacred and simply enjoyed the intoxicating aspects of this great plant - people like Vaskok.
Sometimes when the tobacco is strong the man himself when he smokes does not know when he faints away. Sometimes he falls to the ground and does not know it. Somebody else says "Look, he is fainting". They see his hands shake. He feels good for a long time after he smokes, if he likes to smoke he feels good for a long while. Sometimes he falls on the ground when he feels faint.
He feels good over all his meat when he takes it into his lungs. Sometimes he rolls up his eyes. And sometimes he falls over, backward he falls over backward. He puts his pipe quickly on the ground, then he falls over. Then they laugh at him, they all laugh at him. Nobody takes heed when one faints from smoking, but if he faints because he is sick, then they throw water on him. When it is from tobacco that he faints, they know he does not lie there stiff long.
They say that some old men have to walk with a cane when they have finished smoking, they feel it so good over their whole meat. I used to see them, the old men. It was the strong tobacco, that was what they liked. They fall on the ground. They awaken, and they smoke again. People always laugh at the old men smoking. When they smoke they talk in the sweathouse. All at once one man quits talking. That is the way they used to do in the old times. They used to like the tobacco so well. They used to like the tobacco strong. Whenever they faint from tobacco, they always get ashamed. They used to do that way, get stunned.
Sometimes one fellow will have so strong tobacco that nobody can stand it without fainting, it is so strong. He feels proud of his strong tobacco. Some were fainters when they smoked, others never did faint. Some faint when the tobacco gets strong from them, and others do not.
Vaskok was a fainter when he smoked. Everybody knew that Vaskok was a fainter. Vaskok used to faint, but he liked it. When he first starts to smoke he does not fall. It is when he finishes smoking a pipeful of tobacco that he falls; it is then as it gets strong for him that he falls.
From Travels Among The Aleuts
Alexander Griggs, 1874
What happened? Where did psychoactive tobacco go? What are all these little paper tubes that so many people are sucking on at the rate of 20, 40 and more a day? How come nobody seems to be aware of the magical, spiritual, visionary and euphoric uses of native, herbal tobacco? And where did this idea come from that growing tobacco was a complicated and tricky business, better left to experts, who then sell it to the public in little, expensive packages.
In much of the world today, tobacco is home-grown and used for pleasure, for relief from hunger and fatigue, for minor profit sold to neighbors or at the marketplace, and for use as an herbal remedy. So why don't Americans and Europeans seem to know much of anything about the true nature of this plant - to the extent that the suffering and death of millions of people every year is blamed on their consumption of tobacco?
This site is dedicated to making argument and evidence available to you, and to others who visit, that it is not pure, natural tobacco that is responsible for much, if not most of the death and disease attributed to so-called tobacco products.
First contact between tobacco and the White race took place during the first voyage of Admiral Columbus in 1492. After touching land at San Salvador, Columbus steered south by southwest and, after a few hours, spotted a canoe in the open sea. Pulling alongside the canoe, the Europeans saw a single Carib Indian rower with a cargo of dried leaves. The Europeans were transfixed by what they saw the Indian doing.
On a long sea voyage the rowers of Carib merchant canoes kept a small brazier of coals going amidships. Every 30 minutes or so, a small wad of tobacco leaves was placed on the brazier and, as the smoke began to rise, the rowers would put a forked nosepipe made from the breastbone of a seabird into the fumes and draw them in. After holding the smoke for awhile, a rower would exhale powerfully with a shout like high school players breaking a football huddle and then go back to the awesome task of single-handedly rowing a fully-loaded commercial canoe over the open seas.
We can only imagine the feelings of this Indian, alone in his canoe on the ocean where his ancestors had traveled forever as lords, suddenly being appraised by strange white beings leaning over the rails of the biggest ship he had ever seen.
If there was ever a time for a smoke, that must have been it. Luckily for that Carib none of the Europeans spoke to him to ask what he was doing, so he didn't have to deal with their ignorance of what must have been a commonplace experience to him.
The next landfall of this first European expedition was the island of Hispanola, which today is called Santo Domingo where Columbus, sweeping the south side of the land mass, detected signs of an organized civilization. He anchored and sent ashore two men, one of whom could speak Italian, Spanish, Chaldean, Hebrew and Arabic, insuring that he would be able to communicate with the local deputy of the Grand Khan of Cathay.
Upon landing, this deputy and his guard were met by a party of Carib Indians, who came to the beach with torches, and held out strange objects to the two amazed White people. Lighting one end of these objects in the torch, the New World People sucked the smoke out the other end, explaining by both sign and voice that it relaxed them, intoxicated them, and lessened their weariness. The Indians called the objects "tobacos." To the Carib, "tobaco" was not the herb itself, but the object that was created by rolling the leaves of the herb. Columbus' deputy, however, took tobacco to be the name of the herb rather than the rolled object, and recorded it that way for posterity.
So, we get our word tobacco from the very first encounter between the new World and the Old, perhaps from the first word spoken. Ironic that this first communication creates such a fundamental misunderstanding, the beginning of a long series of wrong conclusions which come down to our own times, about tobacco, about the Native Americans, and about the New World.
There are over 100 varieties of the tobacco plant, all of which contain the psychoactive principle Nicotine in the leaves, though in varying degrees of concentration. Besides true Virginia tobacco, Nicotiana tabacum,for which the genus was composed, here are just a few of the species and varieties that are interesting for their potential as organic, natural homegrown tobacco, or possibly as items for boutique grower/producers.
Tobacco belongs to the elite order of dark knights, the Solanaceae. It's a plant to be respected as potent and toxic. The darkness of the Solanacae is illustrated by the three princes who share the order with tobacco:
People who believe with every good reason that they have been injured by the cigarette companies have certainly not found much relief from the law. Over 200 tobacco product liability cases have been tried in recent years, and not one of them has been won by the person or family who felt that they were the victim.
The cigarette companies are getting so accustomed to winning that they have become even more arrogant than ever, and these days they go into court with an aggressive bullying attitude, having shucked the false humility and "Gee Whiz" attitude which has marked their public relations face in the past.
Every time a major product liability case is won by the companies their stock increases in value, more than paying for any expenses they may have incurred in defending themselves in court, and effectively discouraging many victims around the country from going to court in their own behalf. It is easy to imagine how reluctant most lawyers are to take on clients these days for such a case, given the vast expenses in time and money which must be incurred, and given that in almost every case the lawyers make no money unless the case against the cigarette industry is won. It is remarkable that any tobacco product liability cases are being filed at all, considering how discouraging are the statistics and the prospects of recovering even one penny in damages against the increasingly well-prepared and infinitely wealthy industry.
Lawyers for people injured by cigarettes and other products, such as snuff, have traditionally operated under the assumption that they were fighting for clients injured by tobacco and tobacco products. Consequently they have spent immense amounts of their time and resources trying to prove a case against tobacco and tobacco products, and because of this fundamental flaw, they have lost every time.
In most cases, the lawyers have focussed on nicotine addiction as a primary culprit, usually attempting to show in court that their clients were addicted to nicotine, and therefore were unable to stop using the product in question. After attempting to establish this fact- never very successfully- the lawyers have usually gone on to attempt to prove that the cigarettes, or snuff, or other "tobacco" product in question was dangerous to their client's health, usually by dragging in some variation of conventional scientific and medical evidence which supported their case.
Product liability law requires that the injured party be able to prove two principal points concerning the behavior of the accused manufacturer. First, the injured person must be able to prove that the manufacturer knowingly or unknowingly produced an unreasonably dangerous product, regardless of whether or not the injured party was warned of the unreasonable danger, or had reason to know of the danger otherwise. Second, the injured person must be able to prove that they were deceived, misled, or not informed in such a way that they were deprived of specific knowledge of the unreasonable danger which would have caused them to avoid or cease using the product.
The evidence laid out at this site certainly suggests, if not proves that the cigarette companies provide ample grounds for civil liability and possibly criminal indictment on both grounds - knowingly producing, and deliberately misleading and deceiving.
As one of many examples you'll be shown at this site, consider U.S.Patent # 3,720,214 dated March 13, 1973, titled "Smoking Composition", and assigned to Liggett & Myers Inc., NY. As this patent describes the benefits of a new kind of synthetic smoking material, the inventor notes as an aside that
"Observations of the mechanism of combustion in tobacco compositions such as cigarettes indicate that the smoke components responsible for the biological activity are formed in the pyrolysis zone of the cigarette cone."
The cigarette industry evidently knows that the smoke components formed in the pyrolysis zone of cigarettes have biological activity, and here is seeking a cheaper smoking material that will have less biological activity.
As an example of this literature, U.S.Patent # 3,638,600 describes a tobacco substitute prepared from papermill waste pulp containing at least 90% alpha-cellulose which is heated, whipped and then formed into a sheet. Various ammonium compounds and other materials, such as magnesiuum and potassium salts, are then incorporated into the sheet. Thus prepared, the sheet is fed into giant milling machines and rolled into little tubes of paper to millions of smokers who think that they are risking the health hazards of smoking tobacco.
A wide range of processes involving the use of alpha-cellulose as a synthetic smoking material for cigarette manufacturing have been invented by the cigarette companies, including: U.S.Patents # 3,556,109; #3,556,110; #3,559, 655; #3,575,117; #3,577,994; # 3,608,560; and #3,612,063. This area is a fruitful research focus for people seeking to discover how they have been injured by a specific cigarette manufacturer, once they realize that it may not have been tobacco that injured them.
What remains, of course, is to build a case, and to do this cigarette smoking victims will have to identify the substances which scientific literature associates with their type of affliction, and search for these substances in their cigarette brand. Each victim must decide what kind of smoking-related disease they have. Is it lung cancer? If so, what kind of lung cancer. Different kinds of lung cancer are known to result from exposure to certain specific chemicals, including most of those present in cigarettes as residues, either as the result of manufacturing or production decisions by cigarette company management. Does the medical and scientific literature on this type of lung cancer recognize chronic, sublethal exposure to Benzene or Hexane as a cause? How about exposure to DDT, EDB, or Endrin? What about asbestos? With a list of the contaminants, additives, and other unregulated chemicals in cigarettes a victim of cigarettes will be in excellent position to show how such exposure may have led to their disease or injury.
If a smoking victim examines the literature on their type of smoking-related disease, they will find numerous known originating agents listed which can also be shown to be present in many brands of cigarettes. Tests on the brand of cigarettes they smoked in the process of developing their disease will demonstrate whether or not that brand currently is contaminated with the suspected causative agent.
As long as the victim can show that the Benzene, for instance, was in the cigarette with the knowledge of the manufacturer, and that Benzene is a known causative agent for their type of lung cancer, they will at least be able to force the cigarette industry to prove in court that the Benzene in their product did not cause their cancer. They will have shifted the burden of proof from the victim to the industry- a major first step.
Taking another tack, let's suppose you do your homework and discover that an individual's lung cancer is causally associated to benzo-a-pyrene exposure in the research literature, so the question can then become - could the lung cancer have been caused by exposure to benzo-a-pyrene which was the result of deliberate neglect and misleading representations by the manufacturer of your client's particular brand?.
Let's say that you also know that Company X, which manufactures the brand your client smokes, is a major importer from a country where chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides are in heavy, regular use. Since chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides generate benzo-a-pyrene when burned, it would seem reasonable to require that the cigarette manufacturer in question prove that chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticide contamination of this particular brand of cigarette was not a source of benzo-a-pyrene exposure for the individual with lung cancer.
This approach can be applied to each part of the manufacturing process by tracking available information such as foreign grown tobacco imports, cigarette industry patent literature, and the world research literature which tracks and reports pesticide use on major commercial crops including especially tobacco and cotton. Using this literature in an informed way and tracking as much as possible the specific contaminants, combustion byproducts, manufacturing additives, process contaminants etc used by a particular manufacturer, and then requiring that cigarette company which manufactured the brand in question to prove that they do not allow this contaminant, use this process, or add this chemical, should prove an effective way of creating evidentiary linkage between the manufacturers deliberate actions and the disease and injury suffered by specific cigarette smokers.
Some of the best sources for tracking world tobacco and tobacco parts trade are found at Oregon State University's government information access site at http://govinfo.kerr.orst.edu/ To track tobacco leaf, stem, reconstituted, and trash movements between the US and any other country, look in the Imports & Exports database located on the home page of this site. By the way, if you want to track the export and import of manufactured pesticides, you'll find them obscurely listed under miscellaneous in this same database.
You may also want to look at International Tobacco Growers Association page at http://www.tobaccoleaf.org for an industry-eye view of world tobacco trade in far less detail.
As another example, most cigarette smokers have a brand and are loyal to it, at least in part because there are chemicals in each brand specifically designed to hook the smoker to that brand. If a manufacturer is granted the public trust position of operating without regulation, and uses that regulatory shield to incorporate deliberately addictive chemicals other than naturally-occuring nicotine into its products, isn't that company ethically if not legally required to provide a safe product to hose it is free to addict?
And what is the responsibility of the government agencies who know specifically what is going on, but who are so hog-tied that even the US Surgeon General refers to tobacco and cigarettes as though they were the same thing, when he should know very well they are not. How about the FDA and EPA which know of the situation but claim impotence? Of course the USDA and the dreaded ATF would also have to be a primary focus in any investigation involving federal agency involvement in maintaining the deadly fictions upon which the cigarette industry's existence depends.
The story of chemicalized, synthetic tobacco is only a part of the description of the wholesale slaughter which has been done by the cigarette companies worldwide, with the knowledge and cooperation of many if not most governments and regulatory agencies outside of Europe and even there the government authorities have the power to limit the damage from cigarette chemicals but not to stop the contamination altogether. It is clear that nobody in authority is going to be able to actually stop the killing, and it is also clear that the only way to bring these corporate murderers to justice is to sue them and to win in an American court.
If you are among the millions of victims of this brutal conspiracy, then take what action you can, because if you don't, nobody else in government, the health professions, or any other institution in our society is going to lift a finger to help you. Remember, everyone has been conditioned to think of your death as an inevitable result of your own deliberate behavior and while they may be sorry for you even help you die nobody will help you get justice because everybody - including probably you - think that you basically deserve what's happening to you even though it's a crying shame, etc. In spite of years of so-called public education and research, no government agency or private group has ever raised any of the issues presented here. There has been a curious silence on the subject- considering its magnitude and relevance.
If you have been injured by cigarettes, or snuff, or some other "tobacco" product, then the fact is you have been injured by an unreasonably dangerous product, which the manufacturers had every reason to know was unreasonably dangerous, because they deliberately made it that way. If you are a smoker, you have been deliberately deceived, misled, and kept uninformed in ways intended to prevent you from making an informed decision on whether or not to smoke. If you are not a smoker, but have to breathe air full of cigarette smoke, you have been deliberately deceived, misled, and kept uninformed about the true nature of the dangers involved.
In either case, you have been injured in a way which seems to satisfy the most basic requirements of a successful lawsuit involving product liability. The fact that only one of the recent tobacco products liability lawsuits has been "won" by the victim should not discourage you at all. These poor people have not had the benefit of the necessary knowledge it would have taken to win. They have not known the true facts behind their disease, and their lawyers have been swinging blind.
My hope is that one or more of us, with the information presented here, and with a good deal of additional hard work, will be able to prove in an American court that these companies have truly been engaged in monstrous criminal behavior which renders them liable by all criteria of product liability law. All it will take is for one of the millions of us who have been injured to win such a case in open court, presenting proper evidence and obtaining a full public airing of the real facts, and the game will be begin to be over for some of the most fantastic renegade criminals in history. Let's get on with that job.
The rights of smokers and non-smokers are not fundamentally in conflict, but because the rights of smokers are rarely seen as legitimate by non-smokers, they have little popular constituency. Smokers are in no position to stand up for their rights because deep in their hearts they have been convinced that their nasty habit disenfranchises them.
This apparent conflict is a classic case of people being set against each other by powerful interests who benefit from having victims attacking victims. This ploy is of course a basic tyrant technique, one which has generated and sustained enormous human suffering over the centuries.
With the battle lines drawn between smokers and non-smokers, and with plenty of legal activity and anger on both sides, and with the government playing people's advocate while permitting the atrocity to continue, the cigarette companies are then able to step in smoothly, suggesting that the issue is really just a difference in points of view among reasonable adults, who surely can learn to accommodate each other.
This also allows the cigarette companies to deflect the entire population into debating a non-issue, which is usually expressed in three parts:
The reason that these are all non-issues is that some, perhaps most of the disease and death associated with cigarette smoking are caused by man-made chemical contaminants, additives, and synthetic materials which can be controlled or removed from tobacco products, and not by the tobacco itself. Both nonsmokers and smokers have been grossly deceived into thinking that the debate is, and should be about tobacco. All the while the cigarette industry, and its government cronies, have been using cheap, contaminated foreign tobacco and synthetic smoking materials made from paper mill waste to make cigarettes which have - wonder of wonders - been killing people in droves.
And quite conveniently, since most of the smoking victims and their grieving families blame themselves for the resulting disease, along with society in general, the manufacturer of this lethal product is protected from liability. After all, they smoked, didn't they? Well, what did they expect?
You can almost bet the farm that you'll never hear a deathbed conversation which includes rage that the manufacturer of those damn cigarettes, and the government bureaucrats responsible for health and safety, knew all along that cigarettes are contaminated with chemicals which absolutely cause cancer in even the smallest doses if they're taken in regularly - as in a pack or two a day.
You won't hear people angry about being deceived into thinking that smokers were smoking American tobacco when they were really smoking processed foreign tobacco stems and stalks combined with reprocessed industrial waste, flavored with man-made agents designed to produce chemically-dependent brand loyalty.
What you'll hear is regret, blame, guilt, pain and suffering, and an overwhelming agreement that the victim brought it on themselves and everybody around them.
To the extent that the victim is seen by family and friends as responsible for causing his own disease, the manufacturers are completely protected from investigation and even from blame. Likewise, when the victim is seen as responsible, the crime is not recognized by governmental and legal systems designed to protect and seek redress for victims of corporate crime.
Victims and their protective institutions have been manipulated by powerful commercial, financial, and regulatory government agencies into accepting massive numbers of deaths from smoking as regrettable but inevitable. Most of us see the half million deaths in America and the millions more worldwide each year as due to the inherently dangerous nature of the product, and place responsibility on the dying smoker for knowingly engaging in such behavior.
This blames the victim for the crime, and such skewed reasoning is accepted, largely because even minute traces of the crime have been skillfully and conspiratorially hidden. The evidence of deliberately crafted misdirection and sleight of hand is everywhere, from warning labels on packs which subtly specify cigarettes instead of tobacco when warning the smoker, to phrases like "Pure Tobacco Pleasure" which to reasonable but innocent people seem to promise "tobacco inside".
There are long lists of how smokers and nonsmokers feel about each other. But the most important point is usually missed completely; that in both groups most people basically agree that smokers deserve whatever happens to them, largely because they've been warned - right on the pack. At least, that's what everyone from the victims to the lawyers and judges seem to assume - smokers have been warned. And the fact is that, in the shadowy way of the cigarette industry, they have.
Maybe smokers, nonsmokers, doctors, or somebody should have noticed that the US Surgeon General's warnings
never mention "tobacco" when they talk about disease, genetic damage, suffering, and death. All the warnings mention the cause as either smoking, or cigarettes, but they never mention "tobacco".
Now, maybe they should have noticed this little language switcheroo and said to themselves - "Hold on there, those guys may be leaving out the "tobacco" part of those warnings for a good reason. Maybe I ought to find out what else is in cigarettes besides tobacco, since they don't ever seem to come out and actually mention it by name?"
That would have been a wonderful affirmation of the power of the human mind to penetrate a carefully laid snare of illusion, but it also demands powers of observation along the lines of the child who once observed that the Emperor wore no clothes. So it amounts to this. On the issue of "Is it the tobacco, or is it something else that's killing all these people", what we've got is one naked Emperor walking down the middle of the street and so far nobody in the entire society is seeing skin.
Meaning nobody seriously questions the "legitimacy" of all the massive suffering and dying caused by cigarettes. The presence of the atrocity is accepted because its occurrence is seen as natural. "Of course 4,000,000 people a year are dying worldwide - they smoke don't they?"
Blaming the victim while attracting willing, excited new victims, especially on such massive scale, takes real skill and innovative, persistent brainwashing techniques - which have clearly been successful. People who smoke see themselves as glamorous, independent, freethinking, young, and vigorous, and people who die from smoking are viewed unlucky, obscure, and definitely as someone else.
Institutions with the mission of protecting the health and welfare of the public have been effectively manipulated into treating death from smoking as inevitable, if regrettable. Vast resources are directed toward reducing the number of smokers, and preventing the attraction of young people to the product, but with only moderate effectiveness and little impact on disease and death numbers. In this environment it is only natural that the idea of smokers' rights seems bizarre.
However, the bottom line is that smokers and non-smokers alike have a common interest in eliminating known carcinogens and other hazardous chemicals as contaminants in cigarettes just as the public health would demand their removal from any other item produced for human consumption in the US. It benefits only the so-called tobacco industry for these two constituencies to agree to continue victimizing each other rather than working to make the vice of the smokers a vice only, and not a mortal sin against themselves, their families, and the public at large.
I ask only how each of us will feel if it turns out, upon complete investigation, that smoking a moderate amount of uncontaminated tobacco is no more harmful than living in an urban environment, and that many if not most of the loved ones we have each lost to cigarettes over the past decades could have been with us still, living out their natural lifespans, if not for the pesticides, additives, and experimental chemicals which these manufacturers have fed to an enslaved portion of the world for the last fifty years?
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What exactly are these substitutes for real tobacco leaf in modern cigarettes, and why are they significant cause for alarm?
There is a critical and poorly understood distinction between the health hazards of smoking tobacco, and smoking cigarettes, which comprised in whole or in part of synthetic materials representing a whole different, complex class of health menace. The medical & health community has been conned along with the public into believing in the phoney issues raised and choreographed by the cigarette industry around the hazards of smoking tobacco when the industry knew that many consumers were smoking little or no real, natural tobacco and were instead being exposed to a wide range of known carcinogens, fetus-damaging compounds, neurological toxins, and genetic mutagens.
The story of pesticide contamination is told in detail elsewhere on this site. Here we'll tell you about another connected part of the story of this atrocity - the story of sheet.
Reconstituted tobacco, known as sheet in the cigarette industry, is a major ingredient in modern cigarettes, and is manufactured from waste tobacco. This tobacco has a variety of origins, including:
Many US cigarette brands are made partially or totally from ground up stems, stalks, and tobacco processing waste. This potentially toxic mixture is ground and shredded, then pressed into what the industry calls "sheet tobacco", which closely resembles lumber particle board.
As an example of why stems and stalks are so popular with the cigarette companies, consider U.S.Patent # 4,379,464, titled "Cooked Flavors For Smoking Products".
This patent is dated April 12, 1983 and is assigned to Philip Morris Inc., NY. It's probably fair to assume that the inventors' discussion in this patent reflects the overall state of knowledge in the industry, including such remarks as
"In general tobacco stems and midribs represent an unsatisfactory portion of the cured tobacco leaf, from the standpoint of smoking, in the sense that they produce a stemmy taste on smoking and lack the desirable aroma and taste generally associated with tobacco lamina (leaves). Stems are usually separated from the desirable leaf, or lamina of the tobacco. To throw away the stems and midribs is uneconomical and, for this reason, methods have been devised to make them usable in smoking products."
A large proportion of the stems and stalks used to produce American sheet are of foreign, third world origin, where unregulated pesticides, often concocted on-site by illiterate workers, are routinely applied in heavy concentrations on tobacco crops, which in many countries are the single most valuable export crop, and which therefore receive the bulk of the chemicals. Many of these tobacco-specific chemicals are designed to translocate from leaves, where they might affect taste and thus price, into the stems, stalks, and roots where they are concentrated but nobody pays attention. After the tobacco leaves have been removed for sale to quality markets, the remaining stems and stalks are sent to the US where they become sheet.
Tobacco stems & stalks from around the world are routinely shown to be heavily contaminated with specific types of agrichemical residues, especially soil-applied chemicals and suckering agents, as well as solvent residues. Stems, stalks, and scrap routinely receive heavy fumigation in storage because by their nature they are heavily infested. For example, leaf and scrap tobacco in storage around the world is regularly fumigated with methyl bromide, a highly dangerous wide spectrum insecticide, which is known to leave high concentrations of residue in high protein plant materials like tobacco, as well as with other potent carcinogenic & mutagenic compounds like the tobacco fumigant gas chlorpyrophos.
Davis DL, Blair A, Hoel DG. (1992b). Agricultural exposures and cancer trends in developed countries. Environ Health Perspect 100:39 44.
Reconstituted tobacco is manufactured using tobacco scrap and waste materials which are are first ground to a fine powder. Then using acids and solvents, residual nicotine and natural tobacco materials are chemically stripped from the cellulose tobacco material.
At this point in the process, non-tobacco filler is added. This filler material is manufactured from cellulosic waste materials like recycled municipal paper waste, forest products industry waste, and food processing waste.
Artificial flavoring chemicals & a wide variety of task-specific chemical additives are then incorporated into the slurry, using a range of solvents as carrier solutions. The solvents used in sheet manufacturing include benzene, cyclohexane, and toluene - which are all known carcinogens occurring in medically significant concentrations as residues in cigarettes.
At the beginning of the process, Nicotine is removed from whatever natural materials are used, and the Nicotine is later re-incorporated in precise dosages using nicotine-impregnated polysaccharide fibers and a variety of other ingenious engineering techniques. A wide range of other materials and chemicals are used in production of reconstituted sheet tobacco, including glue, burn rate control agents, filler materials , etc.
This chemical slurry mixture is then rolled out into a thin sheet. Using a variety of chemical and physical processes, this sheet material is then expanded, or "puffed up". The resulting sheet looks like particle board, and it is ready to be fed into giant mills which shave it into the little golden curls you see if you take many modern cigarette brands apart. It looks like tobacco, and by stretching the truth the manufacturer can claim that it offers real tobacco taste, pure tobacco pleasure, and imply in every other way that the cigarette contains tobacco. That little bit of shading of the truth may turn out to be a central clue to why so many cigarette smokers are sick and dead from what they had every reason to believe was their tobacco smoking habit.
It's useful to glance just at a few of the categories which the US Patent Office maintains for reconstituted and synthetic tobacco patents
Just in case you're wondering by now why these cigarette companies need all those patented processes for using tobacco dust, particles, and extracts, at least part of the answer can be found by examining what these companies import for manufacturing into cigarettes and other so-called tobacco products.
Although the cigarette companies no doubt use the sweepings and waste materials from their own US mills to make reconstituted tobacco smoking materials, they also practice the philosophy of "Waste not, want not" regarding their overseas operations. The following tables display only a portion of the import trade in tobacco stems, roots, waste and trash through only one port - Norfolk, Virginia.
By the way, the origins and destinations of this
tobacco trash trade can be easily traced online using the import/export
databases provided by Oregon State University at their Government
Information Sharing site http://govinfo.kerr.orst.edu/.
Simply log onto the site and choose the Imports & Exports
Database, then select tobacco as your search term.
Source:
US Customs, US Imports of Merchandise
| U.S. Imports - Tobacco Stems, not cut, ground, or pulverized | ||||
| General Imports | Imports For Consumption | |||
| Kilograms | Customs Value | Kilograms | Customs Value | |
| 1991 | 18,724,033 | 8,168,226 | 19,697,111 | 8,358,368 |
| 1992 | 74,588,691 | 34,755,278 | 74,833,791 | 34,832,860 |
| 1993 | 79,778,622 | 34,756,148 | 80,175,244 | 34,970,699 |
| U.S. Imports - Tobacco Refuse, not from stems | ||||
| General Imports | Imports For Consumption | |||
| Kilograms | Customs Value | Kilograms | Customs Value | |
| 1991 | 3,686,830 | 2,622,882 | 5,161,935 | 3,059,390 |
| 1992 | 2,143,061 | 2,032,872 | 1,366,109 | 1,954,287 |
| 1993 | 1,248,138 | 1,485,673 | 1,203,060 | 1,896,376 |
| 1994 | 1,346,299 | 1,414,278 | 829,860 | 1,329,417 |
Just as an example of where some of this stuff is coming from, let's take a look at Zimbabwe's tobacco exports to the US.
| Tobacco Stems, not cut, ground or pulverized | ||
| kilograms | Customs Value | |
| 1991 | 260,000 | 36,000 |
| 1992 | 2,700,000 | 832,000 |
| 1993 | 6,800,000 | 2,415,000 |
Also, just in case you're wondering, the US exports huge amounts of stems, stalks, roots, dust, trash and waste. Isn't it interesting that we bring in tobacco stems and trash from third world destinations, and ship our own stems and trash to places like Japan - a heavy user. The US stems and trash are far less contaminated than the foreign stems and trash that we smoke in this country, and it's interesting to note the relatively low customs values of the imported trash vs the relatively high value of the exported trash.
Remember, you can check out country-by-country origins and destinations of this trade in tobacco stems and trash in the imports/exports database at http://govinfo.kerr.orst.edu/.
| U.S. Exports - Tobacco Stems | ||||
| Domestic Exports | Foreign Exports | |||
| Kilograms | Customs Value | Kilograms | Customs Value | |
| 1991 | 25,883,591 | 15,516,547 | 558,762 | 741,117 |
| 1992 | 30,069,251 | 15,744,230 | 499,974 | 213,319 |
| 1993 | 26,158,919 | 17,388,378 | 366,963 | 267,254 |
| 1994 | 18,718,368 | 11,588,953 | 75,593 | 42,064 |
| 1995 | 17,412,604 | 9,104,350 | 100,050 | 47,024 |
| U.S. Exports - Tobacco Refuse | ||||
| Domestic Exports | Foreign Exports | |||
| Kilograms | Customs Value | Kilograms | Customs Value | |
| 1991 | 1,883,799 | 1,392,407 | 12,768 | 5,218 |
| 1992 | 1,390,170 | 960,433 | 486,976 | 488,679 |
| 1993 | 2,312,941 | 2,945,173 | 366,963 | 19,706 |
| 1994 | 1,362,864 | 1,000,869 | 75,593 | 15,840 |
| 1995 | 1,989,786 | 1,605,690 | 0 | 0 |
We also export a lot of tobacco sheet components
for manufacturing cigarettes and other tobacco products in other
countries. This means that to some extent at least we're importing
contaminated scrap and waste, manufacturing it into an even more dangerous
smoking material, and re-exporting it to its countries of origin to be
made into cigarettes for the locals. As an example, here the value of our
exports in just one of several categories that have to do with sheet.
Source: US Customs ( values rounded)
| U.S. Exports -Homogenized/Reconstituted Tobacco | ||||
| Domestic Exports | Foreign Exports | |||
| Kilograms | Customs Value | Kilograms | Customs Value | |
| 1991 | 31,330,951 | 69,500,539 | - | - |
| 1992 | 29,693,417 | 63,504,725 | - | - |
| 1993 | 19,823,263 | 53,053,358 | - | - |
| 1994 | 26,702,108 | 67,851,973 | - | - |
| 1995 | 31,183,793 | 97,893,870 | - | - |
A little challenge: look at the contents of any cigarette under magnification, and see how much of it looks like actual, natural leaf material, and how much looks like granular little strips of brown flavored glued pressed powder. Can you tell? If you don't see leaf material with ribs in it, look a little closer. That reconstituted material in there could have come from stems, or mill trash, from any one of the dozens of countries from which the US imports these materials.
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Tobacco is the most profitable crop available to farmers in Third World countries, yet it actually plays a major role in creating deeper economic deprivation everywhere it is grown.
Tobacco production adds to rural employment, creates cash flow in local economies, and contributes to national gross revenue figures, but tobacco production also takes control of the land away from the peasant farmer and places it in the hands of central authority and multinational corporations.
As tobacco production rises in developing countries, the now-landless peasant farmer goes to work for a wage. The peasant working for wages rather than subsistence falls victim to consumer propaganda and spends at least some of these wages on consumer goods rather than on the basic means of existence, actually creating deeper poverty and a lower standard of living than before wages were introduced.
Since he is now a worker and no longer a farmer, he must pay for the basic means of existence rather than producing them himself. As per-capita income figures rise in Third World countries, so do consumption figures for all types of imported goods- including cigarettes. Not surprisingly, there is a strong statistical correlation between increasing per-capita income and rising smoking-related disease rates.
Coca Cola imperialism is a term describing the corporate equivalent of the simple but shrewd "trinkets & baubles" approach used by early traders and deal makers on the North American Indians. Third World people have all kinds of enticing images dangled before them, and are easy victims for created needs associated with the immensely attractive US life-styles as portrayed in commercials on television and through commercial music, movies. Electronic sounds & images, packaged music, movies, styles, urban consumer, shoes, soft drinks, cigarettes, alcohol, processed foods - all so desirable, all so distant. A connection with the desirable American life-style is so sought after by Third World people that many willingly spend the equivalent of $0.50 on bottled drinks like Coca Cola in countries where an average family may earn $200-$300 a year.
Tobacco production places increasing amounts of wealth in progressively fewer hands, who periodically transfer that wealth into foreign accounts. The wealth is generated largely by the consumer spending on the part of wage-earning peasants, but is controlled almost exclusively by powerful domestic political and economic interests. Income from tobacco production is largely channeled into luxury consumption at home or speculative investments abroad- only in rare instances does it serve to finance the production of basic foodstuffs or capital equipment.
In addition to creating new mechanisms of economic deprivation, tobacco production creates radical new public health problems in developing countries. Tobacco is a pesticide-intensive crop, consuming as much as 50% of the total pesticides used in any given country. The agricultural use of these pesticides is directed almost exclusively at insects causing economic damage to the tobacco crop, but fallout from agricultural spraying enters the total ecosystem, where it operates to select resistant insect disease vectors, particularly the mosquito.
Pesticide use in Tobacco production exposes agricultural workers to a wide range of highly toxic substances in the most unfavorable conditions. Many pesticide formulations utilized in Third World countries are composed of substances totally banned for use in the US and Europe. There is substantial evidence of the existance of "gypsy" chemical plants throughout the Third World, manufacturing substances of unknown hazard. Few if any of the pesticides used in Third World agriculture are properly labelled regarding usage, and even fewer peasant workers are equipped to read and understand the instructions-often written in English or German.
Commercial agriculture such as tobacco production is often located in precisely those regions recently cleared of major insect-borne disease like Malaria. As the danger of illness subsides, landowners are stimulated by the high prices of commodities such as tobacco and Cotton; they reduce their production of basic food crops on existing land and buy up more land to install high value commodity production.
In order to service commodity crop production, workers are imported from other areas of the country, creating a densely packed population which stimulates re-emergence of all types of disease including those with insect vectors. In addition this process serves to augment the number of poor, landless workers, and concentrates agricultural resources in progressively fewer hands.
Madeley, J. The Environmental Impact of Tobacco Production in Developing Countries (in) New York State Journal of Medicine 83 (13):1310-1311, December 1983.
"In the first four months of tobacco production at least sixteen different chemical applications are needed, yet farmers often do not understand the instructions, cannot afford protective clothing, do not have soap or access to medical care, and cannot prevent the pesticides from entering the streams and rivers."
Krieger NK, Wolff MS, Hiatt RA, Rivera M, Vogelman J, Orentreich N. (1994). Breast cancer and serum organochlorines: A prospective study among white, black, and Asian women. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 86:589-99.
Agricultural Production And Malaria Resurgence in Central America and India, Georganne Chapin & Robert Wasserstrom, Nature, Vol 293, 17 Sept, 1981 pp181-185 An excellent discussion of the gross interruption of tropical ecological systems by pesticides related to tobacco and cotton production.
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One of the things that seems to have been lost in the debate over smoking and health is that smokers are people with health-related rights, and they are victims of manipulation of the discussion over their rights. Smokers have been manipulated into defending their right to smoke cigarettes, rather than into demanding their right to have an uncontaminated product which meets ordinary standards for freedom from dangerous man-made chemicals.Of course, they had to have known that their health rights were being violated, and the cigarette companies claim that smokers have received fair notice of the dangers of smoking. The fact is that smokers and nonsmokers alike have been cleverly, persistently and effectively convinced that cigarettes and tobacco are one and the same thing, with the clear implication that most or all of the risks of smoking come from tobacco.
As long as people believe implicitly that what they are smoking, or what other people are smoking is tobacco, and then watch then all the cleverly worded warnings which about the evils of tobacco and the consequences of smoking becoming true as people who smoke drop like flies compared with those who don't, it's hard not to associate tobacco and smoking and death. Which from the cigarette companies' perspective is a lot better than people associating smoking and death with deliberately manufactured man-made chemically contaminated unregulated products containing known lethal chemicals having nothing to do with tobacco. As long as these companies can hide behind the absolute illusion that their products are tobacco then they can continue to be protected by the almost universal belief that tobacco causes all that disease and death because that's just the kind of plant it is - poisonous, dangerous, possibly evil.
Would you like to see an example (contributed by Larry Breed) of how this kind of thinking works?
" In 1981 the Australian Government Analytical Laboratories (AGAL) determined that Australian cigarettes contained 43 times more DDT and 30 times more dieldrin than samples of British or American cigarettes. In its 92nd session in October 1981, the National Health and Medical Research Council made the following observations:
The Council noted that certain pesticide residues in Australian manufactured cigarettes were at levels appreciably higher than in overseas brands. Council directed its Pesticides and Agricultural Chemicals Committee to undertake a scientific investigation into the levels of potentially harmful residues in cigarettes.
Meanwhile, it considered that public health authorities should encourage awareness of the hazards of cigarette smoking, and recommended that to avoid such risks altogether people should not smoke. Although the Department of Primary Industry suggested in 1985 that appropriate upper limits for agricultural chemical content in tobacco be set, this has not occurred.
In press reports, spokespeople for the National Health and Medical Research Council have stated the informal view that as tobacco is already known to contain large numbers of carcinogens and other toxins, and in view of the pronouncements which the NH & MRC has already issued about the dangers of smoking to health, there is no imperative to spend time and resources on measuring pesticide residues."(emphasis added)
One wonders how many tens of thousands of Australians have died since 1981(85) because the national health authorities have concluded that since everybody already knows that tobacco is toxic, why worry about a few chemicals - and by extension, why worry about cigarette smokers?
The late 20th Century is not the only time in history that tobacco and smokers have been social outcasts, and even subjected to the legal sanctions. Smokers have a long history of defending their right to smoke, and American society has a constitution which arguably says that a free adult has the right to smoke, eat, drink, or otherwise use any substance affecting only his own body or mind, so long as this use does not harm others or place an unreasonable burden on them.
If we accept smoking as a proper exercise of individual rights, however personally distasteful it may be, then society must extend every legitimate protection to those rights, as it does with any other proper exercise of individual rights guaranteed by our constitution.
The right to smoke has strong historical precedent. Any behavior which has attracted so many adherents and even fanatics for centuries has established its place as a legitimate personal practice. Tobacco also has a legitimate place in the agricultural and business mix of the world economy, and is particularly important as a source of income for small farmers around the world in spite of the fact that the cigarette companies dominate this area as well. There is clearly something in the act of smoking which appeals to a certain segment of the human race, and as such smoking must be allowed its rightful place.
Non-smokers, on the other hand, have an indisputable right to a smoke free environment, but regulating smokers' behavior is only a small part of the solution. The rights of smokers have been self-servingly defined by the cigarette industry as a matter of individual freedoms in conflict, a matter best left to mature individuals reaching accommodation over what constitutes each others' reasonable rights. In fact a far more important right for both smokers and non-smokers is for smokers to have access to products which are not unreasonably dangerous.
Manufacturers are protected from effective sanctions by the public's almost total misunderstanding of the issues, and by a complete lack of accurate information about the real nature of cigarettes. A carefully erected legal structure protects these companies from liability, with the Surgeon General's warning labels as a central pillar of this structure. These warnings are generally considered "fair notice" to the smoker of the hazards of using the product. Few people notice that these warnings never mention the word tobacco, but refer instead specifically to cigarettes, and to smoking, as the source of cancer, emphysema, birth defects, and death.
There's a very good reason for this. Some brands of cigarettes contain little or no tobacco, but instead are made from synthetic smoking materials, which are reprocessed from industrial waste resources like paper mill pulp. Other brands technically contain tobacco, except the contents are actually tobacco stems, stalks and waste processed into flat compressed composite materials the industry calls sheet, which is then shaved and made into cigarettes. And of course there are many brands of cigarettes which are made from tobacco, but it's more likely to be from Zimbabwe than from Virginia. So it's easy to see why the Surgeon General warns us against cigarettes, not tobacco.
In some ways this is a simple problem. Some people just plain like to smoke, and some people feel that smoking is a dangerous personal assault on others. This basic level of conflict has generated a complex web of social problems, with the rights of non-smokers to breathe smoke free air, as part of their broader rights to a livable environment, set in direct opposition to the rights of smokers to engage in behavior of a kind protected under our American concepts of personal liberty.
All of which suits the cigarette industry just fine, because for every year the final reckoning can be delayed the enormous profits continue. And that's what it's all about.
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Please contribute comments, information, research or suggestions, which will enhance the effectiveness of this site bdrake@ktc.com
According to who is expounding, smoking may be a genetically moderated behavior, an acquired pleasure, an acquired vice, a personality enhancement, a character defect, an irresistible biochemically triggered urge, an adult free-will decision, the work of demons, or a gift from the Gods.
Before Europeans "discovered" the Americas the practice of smoking was unknown in the rest of the world. Nobody smoked opium in Asia- it was eaten, drunk, and used as a suppository, but not smoked. Likewise in early Europe and the Middle East nobody smoked cannabis or hashish; cannabis was used in a mildly medicinal drink, and hashish was dissolved in hot, thickly sugared milk or tea and used as an aphrodisiac, or as an aid to metaphysical and artistic inspiration.
While regular smoking was not practiced by the majority of the Native Americans, almost all Native American people smoked as part of their spiritual and religious life. Even though the classic Native American tobaccos are far stronger in taste, aroma, and impact than anything available commercially today, there is no historical evidence of Native American smokers being addicted in today's sense.
The Native American, much like the Hindus, observed that in many kinds of plants a higher spirit dwells, and distinguishes the personality of the plant type much the same way as animal personality types differ. The Native American understood that tobacco harbors a powerful spirit, and they believed tobacco to be a gift to humans by the Great Spirit. They used tobacco for social events and personal pleasure as well as for spiritual and religious practices, but they always used it with respect for the power of the tobacco spirit.
While it's easy to pass over such historical observations as quaint relics of primitive religious doctrine, they are not only literally true, but they also bear directly on events today, when tobacco is seen by many as a major but somehow "natural" scourge of much of the world, when in fact the scourge, while man-made, can also be seen as evidence that certain of the great Native American Gods did not die with the extinction of their peoples, the great Native American civilizations.
When the Spanish conquerors first set foot on the shores of the "new world", they fulfilled many ancient Indian prophesies, including those of the powerful god Quetzalcoatl. In an event dismissed by conventional historians as coincidence, the ancient writings of the new world told of Quetzalcoatl's periodic returns to earth, and pinpointed the equivalent of Good Friday, 1519 as the precise date for the god's return in his seventh cycle. For this date, with its Christian significance, and its prophetic significance in the new world codices, to be coincidentally the date of Cortez landing at Veracruz (True Cross), would seem at first glance too contrived a story to be true.
Yet there is the evidence of many writings, tablets, temple adornments, and the like, which were seen by many, and recorded by a few of the early Spanish & other Europeans. These writings tell of specific prophecies, many of them hundreds, perhaps thousands of years old, pointing directly to this day as the moment of Quetzalcoatl's reappearance on earth. And the form, in this cycle, of the many-formed god, was to be that of a bearded white-skinned being, arriving from the direction of the rising sun in great winged ships of wood, bearing the sign of the cross.
When we look at tobacco we see clearly the curious relationship between the white man and the new world alkaloids; curious principally because it is the same spiritually and physically destructive relationship as the one between Native Americans and alcohol, their drug endowment from the white man.
Of course, the attraction of the white man to the new world alkaloids, and their powerful indwelling spirits, was not limited to tobacco. Coffee and cocaine are two excellent examples of new world alkaloids which have manifested, in very different ways, aspects of this destructiveness, which can be interpreted in mythic terms as the vengeance of the indwelling spirits of these sophisticated plants, representing the cosmic anger of their extinguished peoples.
Coca was originally a minor spirit vessel, a source of relief from physical fatigue, a mild stimulant. In its highly refined form, developed to appeal to the contemporary love for instant chemical pleasures, the demon assumes a powerful psychic shape, manifest in the world of cocaine with its intense sensation, destruction of values, and the awakening of deeply buried, extremely dangerous psychic shapes.
In the character of the Native American gods, however, this vengeance, while it is total, is also meant to instruct, if the one having his heart torn out is able to take in the lesson at the moment it is given. (Curious that the image of the priest tearing out the heart of a sacrificial boy on the obsidian alter has so much in common with the image of the surgeon taking out the diseased lung of a shrivelled cigarette victim. )
The Quetzalcoatl legends are at least as forceful, from the standpoint of historical evidence, and contemporary force and relevance, as those surrounding the historical Jesus, and the more ancient prophets. In other words, the historical Quetzalcoatl was as real as the historical Jesus, and approximately the same quantity and quality of evidence supports the historical reality of both mythic figures.
References to Quetzalcoatl as the feathered serpent, or fiery serpent, point to an interpretation of the radiant energy which beings such as Quetzalcoatl and Jesus emanate.
When painters in the Christian and Judaic traditions of the old world portray Jesus, and other prophets, saints and mythic figures, the aura of spiritual radiance is portrayed as a disciplined, tight little halo of light over the head, whereas when the exuberant new world Indian cultures saw spiritual light, they saw it as the sinuous aurora of fiery plumage which they immortalized in portrayals of their savior god Quetzalcoatl.
The gods of the new world were a very different breed than those of our own Judeo-Christian world. They ruled a world where terrible deeds called up terrible vengeance, and as the Spanish overthrew the Native American people, and tore down the temples, though many of the gods were destroyed, a few of the strongest survived. Quetzalcoatl in particular survived because the power of tobacco, a primary earthly vessel for the manifestation of his spirit power, entranced the white man.
Europeans were enchanted with tobacco smoking on first encounter. Tobacco became a favorite of wide ranges of people in all classes, from the daring intellectual to the street sweeper, from soldier & sailor, to doctor & minister. Tobacco was the first exposure of the European mind to a powerful, vision-inducing psychoactive drug. The tobacco smoked by early Europeans was the real stuff, straight from the new world, full of strength and spirit.
Much of the early opposition to tobacco as a spiritual evil may in fact have been based on actual, real spiritual perception of the various manifestations of the enraged, vengeful god Quetzalcoatl, although to the European mind these aspects of the "Fiery Serpent" were interpreted as manifestations of the devil from Christian mythology.
Perhaps without knowing exactly what it was they were seeing, for hundreds of years people from kings to popes, from doctors to scientists have warned smokers about the evils of tobacco. Curiously, in spite of generations of such dedicated activity nobody has yet been able to get a handle on tobacco, or on the tobacco interests, or what is more relevant, on the vengeful god Quetzalcoatl, who may be pursuing vengence for his lost peoples even into the 21st century, and using the "evil empire" of the tobacco interests as his instrument of destruction.
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Throughout history the persistence of certain great illusions has presented tyrants with some of their greatest opportunities. Enormous privileges and wealth accrue to those who succeed in institutionalizing any one of the basic human illusions. The making of war, the manipulation of money, the bureaucracy of the church, the unrestrainable corporation, the self-justifying government agency- all such creations rest upon the ability of organized bands of people to exploit specific illusion systems resident in popular psychology.
Huge commercial enterprises rest upon the fact that people willingly pay large sums for a few hours of illusion, whether for the services of an entertainer or a prostitute, for tickets to a concert or show, for a video, a movie, a book, or a limo ride. Business exploits human desires, and often takes unfair advantage, but of course caveat emptor. However, in the history of the exploitation of illusions few success stories rival that of the so-called "tobacco industry".
There's the basic illusion- right up front, in the name. The cigarette industry likes to style itself as an industry based on the glorious weed tobacco, and it does so for many reasons. But modern American cigarettes stopped being real tobacco many years ago. Yet even today you'll hear people like the Surgeon General using the words "tobacco" and "cigarettes" interchangeably, as though there were no difference.
Because we believe in the tobacco illusion, we believe somehow that most of these people died as a result of their own behavior. Even though we blame the "tobacco" companies for providing our smoking dead with their cigarettes, we can't really get mad at them because it was really our loved ones fault. After all, everybody knows that tobacco smokers get lung cancer.
But, what if it turns out that our loved ones haven't been smoking real tobacco for years, but a synthetic chemical blend of materials which include reprocessed tobacco scrap and recycled municipal waste, as well as agribusiness scrap like sawmill tailings. And what if it also turned out that these synthetic cigarettes also contained chemicals to hook the smoker on that particular brand? What if millions of dollars of sophisticated research had been done so that you get a vaporized cloud of these chemicals when you open a pack of your "favorites", and another volatilized dose when you first light up?
What if exposure to even tiny residues of any one of the dozens of banned pesticides in modern cigarettes were known to create more cancer in African-American and Mexican-Americans than in Anglo-Americans, and what if it can be shown that the cigarette companies knew about the problem of pesticide-related cigarette disease as early as the mid-1960's and have done nothing? And finally, what if it turns out that the cigarette industry is totally unregulated regarding contamination of its products with agrichemical residues, toxic solvent residues, asbestos, pesticides, and untested additives as the result of covert understandings struck with a government which has been jailing, ruining, and killing tens of thousands of people because they use or deal in "dangerous drugs"?
What if all these synthetic smoking materials and chemicals and contaminants are the real cause of most of the human damage done by cigarettes, and what if almost all of the horrible damage done so far could have been prevented? Finally, what if the damage was deliberately tolerated and even designed into the product, because there are greater profits that way?
Would that not constitute a crime on the scale of war against humanity? And should those responsible not be arrested and tried as war criminals, by an international tribunal? I believe that the answer would be affirmative, that the evidence points in that direction, and that the public forum of a "Crimes Against Humanity" trial is the proper place to initiate the process.
The counts of the indictment for such a trial should roughly parallel the Tokyo/ Nuremburg models.
The basic rationale of the Nuremburg and Tokyo war crimes trials was that over time there has been a development of the concept of "limitations on the harshness of war". The Crimes Against Humanity trials would be based on the parallel concept of a developing limitation on the social license granted to organized interests to exploit unprotected individuals or groups.
At the core of the concept of indicting high officials in both war crimes models is the concept that they either knew, or by virtue of their position and command authority should have known of the existence of the crimes enumerated, and that they either actively conspired to execute these crimes or tacitly facilitated their commission by failure to use their authority to intervene.
Its not as if any of this is truly hidden - the presence of pesticides and the requirement to comply with varying levels of health regulations worldwide has actually created a niche ind