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Source:
http://member.globalink.org/...
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The Moral Imperative to Fight Secondhand Smoke
An overview of the tobacco control community, the tobacco industry and the struggle to ban smoking in public places gives us all a unique and candid view of human nature in this corporate dominated world. Truth, health, compassion, empathy, fairness, logic, consciousness and responsibility are consistently brushed aside because greed has become an accepted motivation for almost everything in today’s world.
Tobacco is just the tip of the iceberg. The tobacco industry wrote the book on how to substitute the corporate entity for the human entity. We live in a world where people’s acts and ideas are often heartless, without humanity, because they are victims of advertising. They defend propaganda as though it originated in their own minds. We live under a form of corporate domination that has all of the elements of history’s most extreme examples of oppressive rulers. There is no remorse for acts of worldwide genocide. There are multitudes of everyday people who act, at their own peril, as foot soldiers for the oppressive rulers. But the most telling aspect of it all is to watch as otherwise good people willingly participate in the stoning of those whose personal stories threaten to expose the core of this corporate dictatorship.
Secondhand smoke continues to endanger and kill innocent people because most people in positions of power have neither the integrity nor the courage to even speak of the one and only effective solution. Smoke does not have to be the delivery device of nicotine! The manufacture, sale and use of smoking tobacco could and should be banned worldwide. The debate about banning the source of the smoke should not be connected in any way to the discussion of nicotine addiction, economics, prohibition, or any of the other fraudulent diversions used to protect the tobacco industry and its profits. Smoke is the element that brings nicotine addiction to the unaddicted because it respects no boundaries. It is the thing that brings drug use across a line where it is no longer a personal decision, but an act of violence. Smoke is the element that strips smokers of the ability to claim smokers’ rights, because smoke only manifests when the smoker creates it by lighting tobacco. The smoker i! s therefore totally and personally responsible for the harm tobacco smoke inflicts on others. Rationalizing by talking about how hard it is to quit is part of the abuse of the victims, because the addiction is to nicotine, not smoke. Speaking casually about ENJOYING a cigarette with a drink or meal reflects the unbelievable indifference and insensitivity for those who simply want to enjoy life by inhaling and exhaling the life affirming clean air the human lungs were created for.
Many still argue against making smoking tobacco illegal on totally false pretenses. They put it in the same context of a total ban on tobacco, when in reality they are not arguing in favor of tobacco, they are arguing in favor of smoke. It is not difficult to give up smoking. It is difficult to give up inhaling nicotine laden smoke! It is forbidden to speak of removing all nicotine from cigarettes because most smokers would quit if it were removed. It is forbidden to speak of chewing tobacco as an alternative to smoking tobacco because smokers and their addictions are more important to nicotine enablers than the innocent people smokers harm.
There is no rational, moral or economic argument for the continuation of the manufacture, sale or use of smoking tobacco. That is why the oppressive tobacco industry does everything in its power to prevent this conversation. That is why the conversation is always diverted to nonsense instead. That is why we need to talk about this continually if we are ever going to break the unfair hold tobacco cartels have over the entire world. The reason smoking tobacco continues to be sold as the primary delivery device for nicotine is because avoiding the expense of converting the industry to something other than smoking is deemed more important than saving lives and ending suffering and abuse.
Tobacco smoke pollution could feasibly be eliminated overnight. Instead, we take the bait, immersing ourselves in industry diversions, focusing on the absurd notion that polluting the air is a personal right. In understanding why we delay attaining the inevitable goal of eliminating all smoke, we create a mirror that reflects the source of most of the problems facing the twenty-first century. We have lost sight of the fact that people’s lives, their health, their well being, their basic human rights are more important than the profits of corporations and their investors. From now on, when we talk about secondhand smoke, let’s stick to talking about the smoke and how to eliminate it entirely! It’s a very simple equation. Two plus two equals four!
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