Tobacco
There is no doubt tobacco is a very harmful product that’s addictive and it kills people
It’s very, very sad that people do get sick from smoking
Anne Edwards
Director of Strategy and Planning
Philip Morris Tobacco Company
If you ask someone if they think people should have the right to smoke tobacco, most will say yes. The correct answer to this question is WTF? Are you crazy? That will kill millions of innocent people!
Now, if you didn’t respond this way, ask yourself if you think people have the right to force others to take a drug against their will? Your answer to that should be no. What if the drug is extremely toxic, highly addictive, and causes cancer? You should now be thinking ‘absolutely not’. Then ask yourself if it is okay to force children to take this highly addictive, extremely toxic drug that causes cancer. Now your answer should be the previously stated WTF? Are you crazy? So why didn’t you say that in the first place? Do you think the amount of tobacco smoke non-smokers breathe in is insignificant? It’s only a little bit? It won’t do them any real harm? If you’re talking about a single cigarette, then you’re probably right, but that’s not how things work in the real world.
If you live in a city of 5 million people where 20% of the population smoke an average of 20 cigarettes a day, that’s 20 million cigarettes being burned in the city every day. And if each cigarette weighs a gram, that’s 20 tonnes of tobacco being burned in the city every day. Not what I would call a little bit of tobacco. And not surprisingly, it does do harm.
Passive smoke kills 1.6 million people a year, including 50,000 children. To put this into context, illicit drugs kill around 580,000 people per year, around a third that of passive smoke. And bear in mind this is people who use these drugs, not innocent bystanders. Also note that this is the death toll, not the number who are harmed by it.1
If you initially thought people should have the right to smoke tobacco, you should now be wondering why you thought this. There are two possibilities.
One is that you were conned, and the other is that you have been brainwashed. You can tell which one is the case from your reaction to what you have just read. If you feel like someone has pulled back the curtains, and now you can see clearly that smoking tobacco should be illegal, then you were conned. If there is something inside of you that just can’t accept it, something that is rebelling against the information you have just been presented with, then you have been brainwashed.
If you are struggling to accept that smoking should be illegal, recall that the question was should people have the right to smoke tobacco? We are not talking about their right to take tobacco as a drug, just their right to take it in the one way that forces other people to take it with them. If you initially thought the question was the former, not the latter, then ask yourself why? Why did you think I was talking about banning tobacco? Not just banning smoking it?
Tobacco industry propaganda is very pervasive, and they are very good at controlling the narrative. Think about all the anti-smoking campaigns you’ve seen over the years, and how many of them were aimed at forcing smokers to take their poison in another way, one that doesn’t force others to take it with them. I can’t recall a single campaign that did this, which is a shame, because I think if done right it would succeed. If smokers had to take tobacco in a different way many of them would quit. As an ex-smoker myself I know I would have done.
Reference
- www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tobacco – WHO tobacco fact sheet. www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(21)00128-6/fulltext – Passive smoke 50,000 children. www.who.int/health-topics/drugs-psychoactive#tab=tab_2 – Illicit drug global deaths.