(This was written in response to Pennsylvania's plan to hike cig taxes...but it applies to all other states.)

How Anti-Smokers Help the Cigarette Industries

How would this look as a headline? "Governor's Cigarette Tax To Benefit Cigarette Industry!" That is not quite what most people have in mind, or what the governor and others tell us when such sin taxes are proposed. It would be an accurate headline.

It is not that the cigarette industry will benefit in the future from new taxes, it has been benefiting for years by the "anti-smoking" policies as they have been conducted. What current programs do is as little as possible to protect smokers from disease, and as much as possible to protect the cigarette cartel from exposure, liabilities and, if there is any justice, criminal prosecution. But, with so many people having such a fine time thinking they are beating up on an evil industry, the evasive swindle continues.

Here's part of the story.

The cigarette tax money is to go to, among other things, prescription drugs and health coverage for the uninsured. Sounds wholesome. The trouble is that the State makes no provisions to make sure that the drug manufacturers or the insurance firms that will get cig tax money are not part of the cigarette industry.
Tobacco pesticides, which leave toxic, carcinogenic residues in typical cigarettes, are made by petrochemical and pharmaceutical firms. No warning label advises consumers of this fact. Health insurance corporations, according to required filings at the Securities & Exchange Commission, own large, multi-million dollar investments in top cigarette manufacturers. Likely, these insurers also have holdings in tobacco pesticides, cigarette paper suppliers, cigarette advertisers and many of the suppliers of the hundreds and hundreds of untested, often toxic and carcinogenic, addiction-enhancing non-tobacco cigarette ingredients.

It would be an easy and sensible matter of justice for the governor to insist that not one penny of any cigarette tax be allowed to benefit tobacco pesticide manufacturers or insurers that are part owners, or insurers, of cigarette businesses. No one would tolerate say, Al Capone getting public funding for programs to help victims of gangland shootings...yet this is exactly what will happen if the cigarette tax program is allowed to proceed as planned. One difference between Capone and Big Cig is that in his lifetime Capone and the entire Chicago Mob killed the number of people these contaminated cigarettes kill in maybe a day.

The cig tax also helps the cigarette cartel by allowing people to think something positive is being done to correct a health problem. This allows cigarette makers to continue adulterating the products with untested and often known deadly substances, it denies vital information and rights of compensation to uninformed, unprotected and insufficiently-warned consumers, and it distracts from the State's own complicity in allowing such contamination of smoking products. The state is so tolerant of the cigarette industry that there isn't even law to require listing non-tobacco ingredients, no matter how dangerous. How can public officials allow this? Well...the state loves those tax revenues, which do not come from officials' friends in the corporate sector (source of campaign funds and cushy future jobs) and officials do not want to displease or indict the corporate entities that supply, insure, advertise and invest in the broad cigarette cartel. The state prefers to tax and dump the burdens of law, disease and health costs onto the victims. The "anti-smoking", instead of anti-industrial-poisons-in-consumer-products, campaign is not so wholesome.

Like many patently illegitimate policies and programs, this smoking crusade is presented as being "for the kids". Really? The state says it's having trouble keeping youth away from cigarettes. Is the state surprised and "shocked"? It shouldn't be. The state permits sale of cigarettes that contain addiction-enhancing additives. The state permits cigs containing hosts of sweet, flavorful, aromatic and soothing additives that make the products maximally appealing to kids. The state allows menthol cigarettes...that so short-circuit one's natural defenses against smoke irritation that kids, or adults, will keep smoking and not feel the harm. The state allows nicotine levels to be adjusted downward, below natural levels, so that a person will be prompted to light up sooner to get that intentionally-denied "satisfaction". And then the state says "stop smoking"? No law against hypocrisy, even if it serves to defraud, sicken and kill people.

The big lie about concern for the kids is easily exposed. The state (and federal government) is not concerned about dioxins in cigarette smoke. It's not from tobacco or any natural source but from man-made chlorine. Chlorine is in typical products by way of the many chlorine pesticide residues, the chlorine-bleached cigarette paper, any number of agricultural additives and from the industrial waste cellulose used, in U.S. Patented processes, to make fake tobacco. Dioxins are particularly, especially harmful to kids and pregnant moms. Still State-Approved? Still ignored?
The U.S. has formally declared dioxin to be a Known Human Carcinogen, the worst class. The U.S. also signed an international treaty to globally ban dioxins and 11 other industrial pollutants. That's how notoriously bad this stuff is. Any public official who allows this to still be in cigarette smoke, without even a warning, is not only ignoring public duties but is contributing to mass public endangerment AND enormous public health costs...the costs they now dare to complain about.
To add injury to injury, there are "burn accelerants" still legal in typical cigs...for "even burning". The state, clearly, has no concerns about this stuff maximizing chances of fires that injure and kill kids, turn them into orphans or make them homeless.

The industries have a legal obligation to mitigate harms. They maximize them. The state, the governor included, has an obligation to protect the public from exactly this sort of fraud (the "tobacco" lie) and harm. It ignores this obligation. It blames the victims.
Those in the public who work to get private corporate influence out of our regulatory system need look no further than this situation for all the evidence needed to enact real, not cosmetic, reform.