Kill Tobacco Fat Cats

Quotes from this essay are taken from an article published on The Huffington Post and smokefree.org.  The expose of big tobacco in The Huffington Post was written by David Winograd. 

I was once a smoker.  My addiction to cigarettes started when I was serving time in a correctional facility for assaulting a police officer.  I continued to smoke for five years after being released.  Quitting came when I concluded my path would lead either towards non-smoking or homelessness.  Here’s a fact: smoking one pack of cigarettes a day will cost a smoker $5000 a year. 

Other facts about big tobacco:  One in every five deaths in the United States is caused by smoking tobacco; every year tobacco use kills more people than HIV, drug and alcohol abuse, suicides, murders, and car accidents combined.

What is a proper anarchist stance regarding big tobacco?  Regulation would require government control which is just a more polite way of saying state oppression.  But are we prepared, simply, to go to war with big tobacco? 

Take this into account:  If tobacco farmers around the world were to grow food instead of tobacco they could feed 70% of the world’s 28 million malnourished people.

I really don’t want to be apathetic about this; people are starving because the social consciousness is so polluted by capitalism that we stand by and let big tobacco run a slave trade in the name of free market capitalism.  Are these the principles which our founding fathers had in mind when they drafted the constitution? 

Freedoms once existed in this country so that the people could have power distributed well enough that our government could keep the needs of the poor, working, and middle classes close at hand.  Big tobacco—along with big pharma—and the Pentagon—all have distorted the function of democracy into nothing more than a puppet show.  And the people of the twenty-first century need to act to re-route the disaster course of our era’s political structure.

I cannot foresee myself leading an assault on big tobacco; I’m just not quite that capable of a leader.  Cigarettes are, however, the deadliest form of slavery which has ever been conceived in the human consciousness.  And my job, as a journalist in a free country, is to be loud enough and subversive enough, to confront the social acceptability of traditional thinking regarding profit earning at the expense of the actual lives of many millions of people.

We are at war with a machine that dilutes the public mind; the intention of this war is to kill and enslave as many people as is necessary to profit as much as is possible.  It is as simple as that.