On May 6 the Arkansas Cancer Coalition posted a disturbing op ed online written by Billy Parish their Community Outreach person. The editorial is disturbing primarily because it frames the issue of tobacco prevention in language tobacco companies use and questions the limits to tobacco prevention. Ostensibly the piece asks how we will get more Arkansans to show support for tobacco control policies. That question seems to have been rhetorical because my response disappeared from both the comments section on their website and the ACC FaceBook profile page, where I first linked to the editorial. For your amusement, my response, and answer to his question, appears below.
Handsel Art
6 May 2011
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
contact J.R. Few
or 870-427-1365
“How we frame the question usually leads to an answer.”
The fact that you question the pandemic of tobacco related disease as some sort of libertarian issue about smokers tells me you are still under the thrall of industry propaganda. We don’t ask these kinds of questions about sanitation or hand washing requirements. We don’t carefully weigh an individual’s right to drive drunk or faster than the speed limit. Why should we phrase the question about tobacco prevention as one of personal liberties? The fact is we shouldn’t. Tobacco prevention is a matter of public health. And the only place that rights come into play is a human right to every opportunity for health and safety.
The tobacco industry loves it when we phrase the issue as a matter of personal choices made by smokers because it distracts from the much more appropriate focus of allowing, even subsidizing with our permissive laws, a predatory rogue industry responsible for an obscene majority of the death and disease on this planet. A tobacco free advocate has very little interest in interfering with anyone’s decisions. Tobacco free advocacy challenges the perception that this kind of tolerance for tobacco related disease is not and does not have to be a normal part of our lives. It is not the tobacco free advocate that blankets our parking lots with advertising. It is not the advocate who makes sure that every time a child enters a convenience store they will pass eye level logos and at every check out look up at a colorful wall of tobacco. It is not the advocate who manipulates the nicotine in their product to enhance addiction to a product so flawed that it will eventually kill half of all users because they were unable to quit. It is not the advocate spending millions challenging public health legislation to reduce tobacco use. It is not the smoker doing this either. It is the multi-national corporations whose sole aim is to profit and profit at any cost. This is the focus of tobacco prevention.
The tobacco free advocate seeks to de-normalize tobacco use in our society to the point where no one ever wants to smoke enough to become addicted, to change the social norm to where no addiction can support the demand for profit the industry needs to survive. We create tobacco free spaces not merely because secondhand smoke is deadly but also because it helps smokers quit and is the example to young people that tobacco is not normal or appropriate. We place significant taxes on tobacco not merely to offset revenue losses from tobacco related disease but also because it makes tobacco more expensive and less accessible. We regulate marketing for the same reasons, to de-normalize tobacco use.
In 2006 the tobacco industry was convicted in Federal court of racketeering and fraud for 50 years of deceit and manipulation of our laws and public opinion. To confuse tobacco prevention with something we are doing to smokers and even suggest that there is a question about the limits tobacco free advocacy should accommodate demonstrates just how effective this fraud has been and continues to be.
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