I’d prefer kids to grow up in a world where they are allowed to take decisions about how to live their life, not one in which the nanny state tells them what they are and are not permitted to do.
Perhaps we should not allow people to drive, eat fatty foods, go out in the dark, use mobile phones, live in a city, drink alcohol, etc etc etc. Or perhaps we should allow people to make intelligent choices and weigh up the risks for themselves.
Two reasons:
1.) As far as the “Truth” campaign, ALF seems to be in violation of the agreement set forth by 1998 lawsuit and in breach of contract with Lorilard Tobacco. If the violation is proven, Lorilard has every right to yank all funding from ALF. Breaches of contract are never ethical. If Phizer Pharmaceuticals gave an organization money to promote erectile dysfunction awareness, shouldn’t they have the right to complain if that organization spent the money on breast cancer research instead? Sure, breast cancer research is probably more important, but that’s not what the organization was paid to do.
2.) Propaganda is only acceptable if it does not slip into the areas of slander and scientific lies. The Truth campaign is flirting dangerously close with defamation and outright character attacks. Also, their representation of the science behind smoking is a bit questionable and frequently misleading. ALF should not sacrifice honesty for agression, regardless of any perceived nobility behind the cause. As a previous poster succinctly put it: “The ends do not justify the means”.
It wasn’t confirmation of something we always susptected. We knew fully all along (since the 1950s anyway) how harmful cigarettes were. Everyone knew this. I was born in 1961, and I knew that cigarettes were very unhealthy from the earliest times I can remember. Apparently, when science looked into the health effect of cigarettes (to measure it, because it was already known that they were unhelathy) in the 1940s, the cigarette companies did their own research to make sure it was done fairly. They found the same thing that public scientists did, but the cigarette companies didn’t publish theirs. I’m sure that if their internal research had shown less of an effect, they would have published it. So what’s to get upset about? They weren’t keeping us from knowing anything we didn’t already know.
I think cigarette smoking is a disgusting habit, and it especially bothers me to see teenagers smoking. But they’re not smoking because the tobacco companies hid their research, or even because the tobacco companies marketed to them. They’re smoking because they’re rebelling against us old folks who don’t want them to smoke.
I hate to break it to you, but the government already does tell us what we’re not permitted to do. How should one have any form of law enforcement without imposing any constraints on what the citizens can do?
That seems like just as good an argument for withholding judgment on the Truth campaign.
I’m not trying to defend the campaign, mind you, as I haven’t made up my mind on them. However, if we demand absolute of their effectiveness, then we would have to hold all other campaigns to the same standard – and by extension, none of them would be considered “effective.”
Depends on what that "something"is, doesn’t it?
Besides, we’re talking about what’s ethical and moral, which isn’t always the same as what’s legal.
If it is a FACT, and not simply your opinion, that the ends justify the means, then why not impose the death penalty for selling cigarettes? Certainly executing any one selling cigarettes without bothering with an arrest or trial would
If it is a FACT, and not simply your opinion, that the ends justify the means, then why not impose the death penalty for selling cigarettes? Certainly executing any one selling cigarettes without bothering with an arrest or trial would drastically reduce the amount of smoking. If all smokers were shot on sight, we could have a smoke free nation within our lifetime.
The ends do NOT justify the means.
Further, these ads go by the name Truth. Instead of the truth, they contain distortions, and lies.
Re-What We Knew And When
I am 27. That SG’s warning has been on the packs and in the ads since I could read. Teachers told us that nicotine was addictive in lectures to my 2nd grade class. The tobbacco industry did keep things from the public, but we’ve known for a long time.
Good Lord, how did I miss this?
To add to what Doc said: The perceived nobility of a cause does not justify any evils done in the name of that cause. We can not pick and choose ethics and morals in the name of pragmatism. We can not abandon our consiences so easily. What would we be if we could cast aside our moral compasses whenever it is convenient? Fascists? Something worse?
Do we really need to explain this to you, Eternal?
“The ends do not justify the means.” is indeed my opinion. It is not a fact, nor do I hold it to be one. It may be a widely held opinion, but opinion it remains.
Further-Why didn’t anyone tell me this wuz a Cornpone meetin’ ?
:eek:
Ya comes a runnin’ to a Cornpone meetin ! 
You are acutely underestimating the real world effect of cigarettes. To compare them to an unhealthy diet, being outside at night, and using a cell phone is nothing short of absurd. According to the National Center for Health Statistics Alcohol-induced deaths, Assault (homicide), Drug-induced deaths, HIV/ AIDS, Injury by firearms, and Motor Vehicle Accidents all combined equal only one third of the deaths due to tobacco use. I’m sorry that you don’t want a nanny, but that is the nature of modern society – without artificial controls ala Hobbes’ and Locke’s social contract mankind will exist in anarchy. Without an authority figure to discourage the use of tobacco products by our children usage will never decease and we will see more articles like this one: International Union Against Cancer: If current global smoking patterns continue there will be 1,000 million (1 billion) tobacco deaths in the 21st century - a tenfold increase on the 20th century toll of 100 million… Apparently many of you seem fine with this. I can’t for the life of me understand why. I can understand the libertarian view point, but how can you justify a billion deaths simply on the principle that government shouldn’t have overreaching control over its citizens? The magnitude of the tobacco problem demands that serious action is taken.
I will most certainly concede this point. Some of the ads are dangerously close to crossing that threshold, but many are not. For example the ad where students place tags on all the doors of a hotel that informs us that tobacco kills 1000 people every day. The urea ad is somewhat specious, but cigarettes do in fact contain urea even if only in trace amounts naturally found in the tobacco plant, and the ad never claims the tobacco companies were adding it. If a minor and harmless deception like that will help lower tobacco use among kids I’m all for it. I am not arguing that ends justify the means in every case I’m referring exclusively to this case.
Yes, people always knew cigarettes were "unhealthy.” But, they didn’t always know that they were killing millions of people, they didn’t always know that kids were being intentionally targeted, they didn’t always know that nicotine is among the most addictive drugs in existence and that the tobacco companies were adding more of it to their product. They didn’t know because the people you are defending used every tool in their marketing arsenal to keep it from us for as long as they possibly could. I’m amazed that even now that the truth has come out, and these companies have been exposed as the deceitful scoundrels that they are some of you can still defend them.
Lastly, no one in this post is talking about a cigarette prohibition. No one is trying to pry that ‘coffin nail’ from your hand. The “Truth” Ads are promoting the slow but steady decline of cigarette use until all its current users have quit or died and no new users have any interest cigarettes. If anything this should be especially acceptable to civil libertarians, no one infringes on your so-called right to kill yourself, and government intervention is made unnecessary.
I cannot find the data here, and don’t have time to search through the site, but I would point out that death from “smoking related diseases” and “due to smoking” are not the same thing - this trick is usually used to show that smoking kills 50% of smokers, when in fact the truth is that 50% of smokers die from “related diseases”. Non-smokers die of heart attacks too, you know; once you strip the “normal” death rates from the figures, the figure left is somewhat smaller.
However, it is still clear that smoking kills significant numbers of people (1 billion in the 21st century according to your figures - again, depending on the definitions used, I would hazard that the actual number is much lower than this, though lets just take it at face value for now). My response can only be “so what?”. To put it bluntly, the world is supposedly overpopulated, so this seems a nice neat way of reducing the burden - and all through the free will of the generous volunteers. How is this a problem?
Would you be willing to say that to the mother of someone who died of lung cancer?
Besides, even if we grant that the world is overpopulated (a debatable proposition, IMO), is such a callous approach really justified? What about curbing the birth rate or promoting greater financial equity instead? And what about the loss of workplace productivity due to smoking-related diseases?
As for overpopulation, it seems to me that there are resources to spare, but that there is tremendous disparity in the way these are distributed.
Obviously good tact would stop me from saying such a thing to a grieving mother. But I wouldn’t be feeling sorry for the man who died - it was his choice to take the risk.
I am not proposing using smoking as a method of reducing the population. I am pointing out that if the effect of smoking is that people die, then this isn’t a bad thing overall. In fact, you would think that non-smokers would be grateful that smokers kill themselves…
Now there is something I can honestly say hadn’t occurred to me here. What is the net effect of lost productivity to the economy as a whole, bearing in mind the boosts the economy gets from taxes? If the net effect is significant, then it kind of blows the whole “smokers only disadvantage themselves” theory out of the water. I suspect that quantifying the amount is difficult, though. (Note that money lost to business isn’t the whole story, since this would be the same rate across all businesses.)
The only defence I can think of here is that people who go skiing can cost a company time and money too.
for the full gamut of tobacco morbidity and mortality reports check here But, no one is trying to trick you into thinking tobacco kills.
I assume you have forgetten about all the non smokers, including children who die from second-hand smoke.
And you still haven’t responded to the intentional targeting of minors by the tobacco industry.
sirjamesp already pointed out the dubious statistics used here, that a smoker who dies of a heart attack died from a smoking-related disease, but the non-smoker who dies of a heart attack just had a heart attack.
One other point is that deaths that really are due to smoking generally happen when those people are old. I’m not saying that it’s not a concern that people die two years before they would have otherwise, but it’s clearly not as tragic as someone dying in his teens or twenties. Almost all of the other causes of death that you listed kill younger people disproportionately. A good way to measure that would be “years of life lost.” You can find those numbers online, but the ones I’ve seen are separated by disease, and it’s pretty hard to figure out which are due to smoking. But by that measure, the numbers would look very different.
And I’m still not saying that’s OK - people taking off years of their own lives is not a good thing - but they made the choice themselves fully aware of the risks. There are old people who can claim that they started smoking before the risks were quantified, but they’re the exception. Anyone under 65 who started smoking did so knowing the risks.
Hey, I jumped out of an airplane 12 years ago and broke my second (C2) vertebra. I take responsibility for that. I knew there was a risk of injury or death. I don’t blame the parachute manufacturer.
Nice try, but those two things are not really analogous. In your example an overt action is done to me by someone else without my consent and this results in my death. In my example, the only person doing overt actions to me is me, by my own consent.
How about:
If I walk down the street in a bad neighborhood and I stop at a corner, buy some crack and smoke it. I die of a heart attack instantly. Whose fault is it? I knew damn well there were drug dealers there, I stopped at the corner, I bought the crack, I put it into my body, I died. All the dealer did was complete a business transaction with me that I willingly entered into and provide a product that I chose to buy.
Now, if I am 18 years old, I have been taught all my life that cigarettes are bad for me, I walk into a 7/11, I buy a pack of Camel Turkish Jades and a lighter, I go outside, I put one in my mouth, I light it, I smoke it, and I repeat this action a few thousand times before getting cancer and dying, whose fault is it? I knew damn well it was dangerous, I stopped at the store, I bought the cigarettes, I smoked them, I got cancer, I died. All the tobacco company did was complete a transaction I willingly entered into and provide a product I chose to buy.
I smoke. I accept the risk that I might get cancer, emphysema or some other terminal disease and die from this. I knew this going in. I chose to start smoking anyway, therefore if one of these things results, I have no one to blame but myself.
I skydive. I accept the risk that my canopy may not open, that my lines may become tangled, or that I may hit a bird or be caught in a tree on the way down and die. I knew this going in. I chose to start skydiving anyway, therefore if one of these things results, I have no one to blame but myself.
You people defending the “merchants of death” (as the N.Y. Health Commissioner used to call them) are all missing the important point: People (and policymakers) are only making a free decision if they are given all the relevant information. The cigarette companies lied. The CEOs even lied under oath. Some people who seemed to be upset about a lie under oath about a sexual escapade don’t seem to think it quite as important when thousands (to surely underestimate!) of lives hung in the balance.
And, you folks say, “But everyone already knew.” Yes and no. What the cigarette companies understood is the same thing that the purveyers of junk science on global warming understand these days: When we look back 20 years from now, there will be those people who say, “But we already knew global warming was a significant threat by, at the latest, the mid-late 1990s. The IPCC and NAS had written reports saying this.” However, (some of) the fossil fuel industry and others have created enough doubt with their junk science that it has had the effect of preventing people from taking action. It’s given ammunition to people who say, “But why should we spend money to deal with something which may not turn out to be a problem?”
Don’t underestimate people’s ability to deny a fact that they don’t want to face in the wake of some fairly flimsy excuse offered to them. And, at the policy level, don’t you think that if the government knew that the tobacco companies were manipulating the amount of nicotine in cigarettes in order to keep people addicted, the government might have stepped in to stop them from doing that or to regulate tobacco as the drug that it is!?!
Sorry, this “free choice” argument just doesn’t wash. The tobacco companies share some responsibility…I think a fairly significant share of responsibility…for the deaths that their product has caused.
Well, he made this claim but I don’t know whether the claim is true or not. It may be that they look at the differential rate of heart attack or the average age of the smokers and non-smokers having heart attacks in order to try to correct the data for this. I don’t know that they do this, but just saying the contrary doesn’t make it true without evidence.
No. The level of nicotine is irrelevant - we all know that cigarettes are addictive. We know they are harmful. People still choose to start smoking. This is not the companies’ or the government’s fault.
How does it not wash? Because you say so? Do you believe that the decision to take that first cigarette is forced upon people by the manufacturers?
Something tells me that you do not smoke; this may explain the strange belief you have that people are coerced into smoking by the evil corporations.
Well, let me tell you first hand, from a smoker: I chose out of my own free will to start smoking, despite knowing that they are highly addictive and dangerous to my health. Therefore, if they kill me, I have no-one to blame but myself.