CDC Launches Graphic Anti-Smoking Campaign

The CDC launched a graphic ad campaign on the grim effects of smoking. (CDC)

By: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Tobacco taxes and smoking bans haven’t budged the U.S. smoking rate in years. Now the government is trying to shock smokers into quitting with a graphic nationwide advertising campaign.

The billboards and print, radio and TV ads show people whose smoking resulted in heart surgery, a tracheotomy, lost limbs or paralysis. The $54 million campaign is the largest and starkest anti-smoking push by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its first national advertising effort.

The agency is hoping the spots, which begin Monday, will persuade as many as 50,000 Americans to stop smoking.
“This is incredibly important. It’s not every day we release something that will save thousands of lives,” CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden said in a telephone interview.

That bold prediction is based on earlier research that found aggressive anti-smoking campaigns using hard-hitting images sometimes led to decreases in smoking. After decades of decline, the U.S. smoking rate has stalled at about 20 percent in recent years.

CNN: Graphic Anti-Smoking Ads Begin Airing

Guest:

Danny McGoldrick, vice president at Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids

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http://pulse.yahoo.com/_IUXDHQFVNYHUXZDAU7GZAMOUJQ j_jonik

Who can oppose a campaign aimed at saving lives? But what if that campaign serves to protect those who, by way of highly-adulterated smoking products, have risked the lives and even taken the lives of many millions of deceived, unprotected, un-informed smokers for many decades?

A person from Tobacco Free Kids, on the air Thursday, said that “tobacco kills…” some big number of people. Disregarding for now that any number of cigarettes may contain no tobacco at all, that statement ignores that most cigarettes are contaminated with residues of many tobacco pesticides, with dioxin-creating chlorine from some pesticides and the still legal chlorine-bleached paper, with radiation from the still legal use of certain phosphate fertilizers, and with any of well over 1000 untested, often toxic non-tobacco additives.

That tobacco is the Sixth Most Pesticide Intensive Crop (according to the GAO) is of no interest to “anti tobacco” activists. That the US stopped testing import tobacco for pesticides (legal ones or illegal) is also off their radar screens.

Since many of those cigarette contaminants are already notorious for causing cancers and other ailments that are identical to what are called “tobacco-related” or “smoking-related” diseases, it is an affront to science and medicine (and to victims) to ignore those elements…and to distract from them by blaming the conveniently “sinful” natural tobacco plant.

That is pure scapegoating. It undeservedly protects the cigarette makers (not “tobacco makers”, please), the chlorine, pesticide and fertilizer industries, pharmaceuticals that supply both pesticides and additives, all of their insurers and investors, and the complicit industry-allied public officials and agencies responsible for enabling those industries for so long.

Inhaling smoke of any kind has its problems, but it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, for smoke from any plain natural plant to cause the “smoking-related” diseases that are blamed on the “lifestyle” of unwitting victims, and on the public-domain tobacco plant.
In fact, not one study presented to legislatures or courts, or medical journals, to justify anti-tobacco laws has qualified the term “tobacco” for clarity and understanding. We do not know if they studied A) effects of plain tobacco, or B) highly-adulterated, radiation-contaminated, pesticide-contaminated, dioxin-delivering tobacco, or C) fake tobacco made in patented ways to resemble tobacco from all sorts of industrial waste cellulose.

We do not know if improved health of ex-smokers is due to reduced exposure to the dioxins and pesticides and so forth, or if it is because they aren’t exposed to smoke from tobacco plants. We do not know what is meant by “tobacco” or even what was studied. Tobacco, with still unknown possible risks, has been “convicted” without a trial.

Many references for the above collected at http://fauxbacco.blogspot.com