The Evils of Tobacco Companies

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The Evils of Tobacco Companies

In our contemporary society smoking has sort of lost the appeal it once had. Families and states are suing big tobacco for multimillion-dollar lawsuits. Their advertising and promotions have been taken away from them. The whole world of tobacco is being turned upside down. The Seven Dwarfs are doing what ever they can to keep the appeal that smoking once had. The tobacco industry is trying to slow the social erosion of tobaccos appeal by creating the national smokers alliance, trying to smearing the statistics that hurt the appeal of smoking, and by trying to silence Dr. Jeffery Wigand.

In response to the growing number of smokefree ordinances showing up all over the country, Big tobacco hired a public relations firm to create the National Smoker's Alliance. The public relations giant Burson-Marsteller was funded by an estimated $4 million in Philip Morris and Brown and Williamson seed money. Burson-Marsteller has a history of spinning bad corporate practices into positives. This public relations giant also has a hand in another tobacco industry advocacy group: The Tobacco Institute. www.no-smoke.org

All the NSA is, is a front for big tobacco. It is a total puppet for the tobacco industry. They use the NSA to manipulate government officials. They had enough pull in the California legislature to postpone a smokefree ordinance for a year. That is all they accomplished. On a much smaller scale they have even tried similar things here in Michigan. After a year of community education on the issue of smokefree public places and workplaces in Marquette, a ordinance was introduced and scheduled for public hearings by the city commission. Three NSA representatives showed up. They joined forces with the Michigan Restaurant Association and distributed tobacco industry-sponsored studies claiming smokefree ordinances hurt restaurant sales. A coalition against the NSA returned fire with information on the NSA to the local media and the city commissioners. On July 27, 1997 the Marquette City commission voted in favor of Michigan's first 100 smoke free ordinances. It just goes to show how far they will go to keep smoking popular. www.no-smoke.org

Big tobacco has even went as far as to attack the science used to estimate how many people die from cigarette smoking each year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A claim was made that the government counts as a smoking-related death all smokers who die from a certain disease, even if they had other risk factors for the same disease.

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