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FDA to Protect Pesticide-Drenched Cigarette Cartel
by
Watchdog | 06.06.2009
Copy of letter to some US Congress members about the threatened FDA "tobacco regulation" act...a wholesomely-packaged tool that covers up so many crimes by pesticides, chlorine-dioxin, fertilizer, pharmaceutical etc etc industries---and their complicit insurers and investors---and their facilitators in government---that it's historic.
A reading of S.982, and H.1256, the “Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act”, turned up many troubling and serious problems. * If the FDA lowers nicotine levels, it will be creating the same "lite" cigarettes it condemns, doing the trick used for decades by industry to prompt people to smoke more (and more deeply) for the sake of more sales...and more "sin" tax revenues. * The bill alleges that nicotine is "harmful", which it is certifiably not. It is, after all, approved a safe in all sorts of alternative, patented, nicotine-delivery products. * It will do nothing about the 450 or so tobacco pesticides and their residues on tobacco except, in the future, require no more pesticides in imports than are already approved. * It will do nothing about dioxin-producing chlorine pesticide residues. * It will do nothing about dioxin-producing chlorine-bleached cigarette paper. * It will not forbid charcoal filters despite carcinogenic dust. * It will not address the carcinogenic levels of radiation in typical cigarettes from still legal use of certain phosphate tobacco fertilizers. That, like the pesticide problem, will remain a USDA farm matter. * It will use high-tech ways to track cigarettes from manufacturer to final vendor...(but for now will not require reporting of end customers). This is to address expected increased smuggling, etc., a virtual admission that this regulation will cause and exacerbate Prohibition style crimes. * The bill involves infringements on Indian Sovereignty. That will be done despite about ten thousand years of tobacco use by Native Americans for medicinal, social, cultural, religious, agricultural, and trade purposes. * Nothing is written about testing of any non-tobacco cigarette component, or about penalties against the industry for use of known harmful non-tobacco substances, or about compensation to victims for being poisoned, endangered, or experimented upon without Informed Consent. * Conflicts: The bill bars cigarette makers, sellers etc., from the regulatory committees but, by not going further, allows tobacco pesticide makers, pharmaceuticals that make pesticides and additives, pharmaceuticals that compete with public-domain tobacco, suppliers of fertilizers, suppliers of any other ingredients, chlorine industries that stand to suffer by association with chlorine-dioxin dangers in cigarettes, and any of their insurers and investors (including those who invest in cigarette manufacturers) to sit in the committee. * Nothing prohibits cigarette makers from passing costs of very large "user fees" (to pay for the regulations) on to customers. * Nothing is written about cigarettes made partly or entirely from "tobacco substitute material"...fake tobacco. The bill is worded in such a way as to ignore or exempt from regulation cigarettes made from, say, corncobs or peanut shells (nicotine and tobacco flavor, etc., added, of course), as per duly patented processes to camouflage such waste cellulose materials as tobacco. * Nothing addresses the question of selling that fake tobacco as being fraud or not. The cigarette makers avoid outright fraud charges by simply not labeling those products as made with tobacco or anything. It’s “caveat emptor”, with full government permission. * Despite untold numbers of so-called “smoking related” fires, the bill is silent about prohibiting added burn accelerants, and about industry liabilities for past fires. It is further silent about the quirky fact that current “fire-safe” cigarettes are not fire-safe…as even manufacturers acknowledge. The public is put at risk by assurances that the products are fire-safe. * Nothing in the bill acknowledges medicinal values of tobacco for stress relief, appetite suppression, alertness, digestive relief and, as we now know, symptomatic relief of Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other pathologies. And nothing prohibits manufacturers of patented drugs used for those purposes, business competitors to tobacco interests, from sitting in FDA regulatory capacity over tobacco. * Nothing in the bill notes that many symptoms of so-called "tobacco-related" diseases are known effects of exposures to pesticides, dioxins, and radiation---and that many of those diseases are unlikely or impossible to be caused by smoke from any plant. * It is Constitutionally-questionable that the bill will forbid cigarette makers from communicating in any way that their product has “reduced risks”. If one made a cigarette with no pesticides, no dioxin-producing chlorine substances, no burn accelerants, and no radiation-contaminated fertilizers, it would be illegal to let that be known. * The bill provides nothing for research of either actual or possible health effects from using tobacco itself…that is, tobacco without any contaminants or adulterants. The bill does not even acknowledge the existence of plain tobacco, which, after all, is what was used exclusively for all but roughly the last hundred out of ten thousand years. * Above all, perhaps, the bill claims that "tobacco kills", as if cigarettes are automatically tobacco or just tobacco, as if the Congress and the FDA accept, without question or study, the industry marketing claims and implications that cigarettes are just tobacco, and as if the harms are exclusively the fault of the natural plant itself, not the fault of Pesticide-Contaminated, Dioxin-Delivering, Radiation-Contaminated, Multi-Ingredient Cigarettes that almost inevitably cause disease and premature death. This legislation, though wrapped in wholesome packaging---and if my points prove valid---is a violation of basic principles of science, medicine, law…and human decency. Urgent Alternative legislation is required that would simply prohibit any and all untested or known or likely harmful non-tobacco component in smoking products, and mandate wrapping paper made from plain tobacco or other appropriate plant material. Benefits: This would eliminate all harms and risks from those additives and adulterants, significantly reduce withdrawal symptoms, make cigarettes less appealing to young tastes, cause decreased smoking rates, minimize the risk of fires, and, importantly, eliminate the threat of yet another costly, socially disruptive, crime-causing Prohibition…or a quasi-Prohibition, as the proposed FDA regulations will create. |
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