That’s a gross oversimplification but if there was any doubt that the Republican Party is the tobacco industry’s bitch, this story should dispel it.
What’s especially revealing is the fact that even the tobacco companies’ lawyers are flabbergasted by the Justice Department’s sudden capitulation as seen is this passage:
Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Justice Department knew exactly what it was doing: securing further support by the Tobacco Lobby for the Republican Party.
Just another example of the GOP sucking down a Big Brown “Big Tobacco” Cigar.
Good. The government has no business interfering with the production and distribution of a legal product, the tobacco lawsuits were for the most part bullshit, and I don’t think it’s cool that smokers are paying upwards of $3 a pack in tax, giving the rest of you a HELL of a tax break, and yet we’re looked upon with scorn.
You can’t legislate morality. Didn’t anyone learn anything from Prohibition or the “War on Drugs”? So screw the government (as far as tobacco goes, anyway), and screw the people who claimed ignorance of the health risks of smoking and were believed.
That ain’t all they’re sucking.
Here it is again. Tobacco. Why don’t you self-righteous Dums go ahead and ban it already? A Republican proposed banning tobacco in all forms from North Dakota a couple years back. (Mike Grosz of Grand Forks if interesting in looking it up) Guess who lobbied against the ban. The Am Cancer Soc, Amer Heart Assoc, state public health depts. Get the fuck off the high horse of being so superior to everyone because you hate Big Tobacco. Start by refusing the taxes that pay for a lot of your neat little pet projects.
I thought the settlement payments were supposed to offset the increased health care costs. Yet every goddamned year we hear about the burden imposed on states for health care related to smoking. States that collect huge amounts of taxes from the evil, vile, deadly scourge. I’ve gotten so fed up with the bullshit I declined further association with the state GOP because of support for the statewide ban going in effect this August. Look for my pit thread on the topic.
Yeah, fuck all those laws about selling tobacco to minors! Damn government, trying to keep the tobacco company from marketing to children!
What does this thread have to do with “looking upon smokers with scorn”? Persecution complex much? And if you don’t want to pay tax on cigarettes, don’t buy them.
Didn’t see anything in the story about “legislating morality.” I saw quite a bit about attempting to penalize the tobacco industry for engaging in a decades-long conspiracy to conceal the health risks of its product, and when that was ruled unavailable requiring them to pay to clean up the mess they helped create. Comparisons to prohibition and the WOD are inapplicable as there is no government movement (other than apparently duffer’s unsupported claim about North Dakota) to ban tobacco.
Yeah, screw those people for believing the millions of dollars of advertising touting the wonderfulness of smoking tobacco! Screw them for falling for print and TV ads that explicitly talked about which cigarettes were most soothing for people with sore throats to smoke!
Yeah, screw the people that ignored the rather large warning labels containing a message from the Surgeon General that explicitly states that smoking is hazardous to your health that has been there since 1964. I love the precedent that the cigarette lawsuits have set. 40 years from now, as I lie dying from lung cancer, I can sue the cigarette companies because, well, I just didn’t know it was going to kill me despite all warnings (and sore throats and coughing, which should be the first clue) to the contrary.
I’m glad that the government has chosen not to gouge businesses out of money that, in my opinion, they are not entitled to, despite what the courts may have said. I think the courts were way off base.
I’m glad that I have the government to be my mother and father. Now that I know that they will take care of me no matter what I can dismiss by birth parents as wholly unnecessary, and I certainly don’t have to take responsibility for my own child because we have people who know better than me how to raise him and they pass laws proving it.
Prosecution of tobacco companies was about fraud, or at least it was supposed to be about fraud. The tobacco companies misrepresented their product, knowing that is was dangerous. That said, no tobacco company official went to jail. Even the fines levied against them weren’t paid by the companies, but by the consumers whom they had defrauded. It seems that all Congress cared about was getting its hands on the loot.
Until the public wakes up and realizes that all that these tobacco suits do is make government more dependant upon tobacco sales nothing is going to change. I’m a non-smoker, and one who hates sharing resturaunt space with tobacco smoke and walking through the haze outside public buildings, but I hate the way that the gov’t is using sin taxes to make up more and more of it’s income.
Liberal, I thought that the tobacco lawsuits bypassed Congress, but were a combination of civil suits being pursued by several states to recoup ‘damages’ incurred by the fraudulent advertising creating a population of people who had to get state money for medical care. (To say the reasoning seems a bit odd when stated baldly is understating things.) The only involvement of Congress was to debate whether to impose some kind of tort reform upon the civil litigation process. Am I wrong?
duffer and Airman Doors USAF: For all you smokers who are complaining about businesses being forced to go smoke-free I would like to point out that for a lot of us non-smokers it was the behavior of assholes who smoke making it clear that any attempt at a compromise would not work. I cannot count the number of times that I had seen people light up in non-smoking areas or resturaunts. Without a publicized law, there always seemed to be some asshole who was determined to smoke out those of us who wanted to taste our food. It’s easier to enact a smoking ban than it is to police assholes.
For a scenario, consider this: go into a resturaunt with prominent No Smoking signs all through the establishment, order a meal, start eating it, and then have a jerk come to the table next to me, and light up. Upon asking him not to smoke I get told that there’s no law against smoking, and he was going to smoke where he wanted.
My enjoyment of my meal is now ruined, but my choices, as a consumer, are - walk out and get charged with shoplifting or suck it up and deal. The resturaunteer can’t evict the jerk, because without a law the police couldn’t do a damned thing.
This is not a single specific incident, but a generic description of something that happened more than I care to count. Without enough people having such experiences I don’t think that any smoking ban would have been enacted.
Having said that - I certainly didn’t support the push to make all bars and resturaunts smoke free in NY. As you say, it is a legal product, and the previous legislation seemed to have enough teeth to keep the assholes in check.
I think it’s a little of both: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/july97/tobacco_7-11.html. The fraud manifested as a lie to Congress under oath.
What exactly is so terrible about expecting the people who contributed to making the mess also contribute to helping to clean it up?
Yes, because that’s exactly what I was suggesting. Every word in my post can properly be construed as meaning that government should be mother and father.
Obviously your parents didn’t do a good enough job raising you, since they couldn’t keep you from becoming a smoker (whenever it was you started smoking). I hope you’re able to teach your children not to smoke better than your shitty parents taught you. But assuming that you’re as bad a parent as your parents were, do you think maybe it’s a good idea that merchants not be allowed to sell cigarettes to children? Or are you OK with the idea of your child at age ten being able to buy a pack of smokes? Should he pick up a bottle of Jack to go with them or is it maybe a good idea to keep kids from buying that too? Maybe he can buy a handgun to go with the smokes and the booze too. Wouldn’t want to abridge your parenting by keeping alcohol, tobacco and firearms out of the hands of elementary school kids.
But you know, if you want your kids smoking, drinking and shooting guns then by all means get yourself elected to Congress and start repealing those terrible laws.
But shouldn’t the contribution come from the profits of the companies and the liberties of its officers, rather than from those whom they deceived into buying their products? I never cease to be amazed at how our system “works” when our resident lawyers explain it to me, but surely there is no precedent for taking money from the victims of a con artist to pay for a fine levied agains him, is there? That seems to be what is happening with tobacco. The tobacco companies have lost suits against them and are passing the costs of their losses on to the people whom they hoodooed.
Otto, I have to side with Liberal, and Airman Doors, USAF.
What has the tobacco settlement accomplished - in terms of effects on the ground, so to speak? It has raised the price of tobacco to users who are addicted to the product, done nothing for the profit margins of the companies, done nothing to reduce the Medicaid costs claimed as the rationale for the suits in the first place, the various state and local governments now have a **vested[b/] interest in allowing tobacco sales to continue at their current levels, and perhaps even at higher rates, and almost none of the monies being collected are actually being used for any kind of tobacco related uses. Oh, and made many lawyers and law firms filthy, stinking rich.
Can you point to any real benefit of the tobacco settlement and suits? Even the percieved tax break for non-smokers is pretty illusuary, since most counties used the tobacco settlement monies to create pork projects, or pay off other public spending boondoggles.
Has there ever been a suggestion of banning nicotine from cigarettes, I wonder? I guess not. But its a drug a lot more powerful than, say, THC in marijuana. In fact, it’s more powerful than just about anything else. So why not go that route?
Speaking for myself: because it is unethical. A man should be free to poison himself. It’s just that the poison manufacturer ought not to misrepresent his product.
Should he be free to poison those in his immediate vicinity?
Certainly not. But banning nicotine affects, for example, snuff.
Right. That makes about as much sense as me calling your parents shitty because you’re gay. My smoking has nothing to do with their quality of care. My parents watched what I was doing and meted out appropriate discipline when necessary. I didn’t even start smoking until I was long out of their care.
It is a parent’s job, not the government’s, to make the decisions for their children’s welfare. If the parent decides that a child can have a glass of wine with their dinner, does that make them a shitty parent? You might think so, but it’s not for you to say. Nor is it for Congress, the President, or state legislatures to say. Some things should be left beyond governmental control, and those are the things that do not affect society as a whole. Those are my responsibility, and I refuse to abdicate it.
Yes, but then you’d also be in favor of legalising all other drugs. I’d like to see some consistency here. As you can make tea from pot (the recommended intake procedure for medicinal marijuana here), surely you can find another way to consume nicotine without the ill effects for innocent bystanders? Perhaps a nicotine spray that you can inhale or something? Except that if anything like a cigarette would be brought on the market as a new product today, it would be very likely to be banned before it even hit the shelves, or am I wrong?
Arwin, you’re not going to trip up Liberal that way. 
At least I don’t think so. He’s a rather vocal libertarian, to the best of my memory at least (I may be wrong, and I don’t know whether he’s a lowercase or capital ‘L’ libertarian.), so I expect he is in favor of dumping the whole war on drugs, anyways.
Though, you’re certainly right about how hard it would be to bring such a product to market today.