Tobacco

[Guest guest]

dear Friends

 

I got this article through e-mail.

 

Smoking is realy Harmful. So here I am sending this mail to our

group.

 

regards

 

TOMS

 

 

I went outside today to check on the garden, and happened to run into

my nextdoor neighbor, with whom I had a brief conversation:

 

He asked me about selling some stuff on eBay---whether such-and-such

an item is worth very much.

 

The reason?

 

He is trying to raise money any way he can to try to pay off the sea

of medical bills in which he is drowning.

 

The reason for the medical bills?

 

He has very serious heart and lung dis-ease, to the extent that he

has only gone to work for 3 weeks out of the last year.

 

The reason for the heart and lung dis-ease?

 

He has smoked for most of his life.

 

The reason?

 

He began smoking long before there was "proof positive" that smoking

is terrible for one's health. (I feel sure he also eats a terrible

diet and gets scarcely any exercise, but he is only in his mid-to-

late 40's. Smoking no doubt greatly accelerated his bodily

degeneration.)

 

Now the poor fellow is griping about how nasty and unfair the

hospitals are that they turned him over to lawyers and collection

agencies.

 

How many more vitims like him are there all across the country? There

are those who say about my neighbor and others: "He knew what he was

doing. He could have quit smoking. He has no right to blame anyone

but himself" As someone who has several far less addictive habits I

continually struggle with, I have to disagree.

 

60 or more years ago the tobacco companies that sold it knew smoking

tobacco was harmful; the TV networks and other media that advertised

it knew it was harmful; the government that gave it out in soldiers'

mess kits knew it was harmful; and the FDA knew it was harmful! How

could they know? For crying buckets of tears---ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS

TO LIGHT A CIGARETTE AND INHALE THE SMOKE ONE TIME, AND PAY ATTENTION

TO HOW THEIR BODY REACTED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They NEVER

had to waste decades of research time and money to "figure it out!"

 

And who knew LEAST about how harmful cigarette smoking was? Members

of the public---whom the government and the FDA were supposed to be

looking out for and protecting.

 

Someone pulls another person out of a burning, smokey building and

they treat him for "smoke inhalation." But someone inhales the smoke

from a burning wad of tobacco and they call it "smoking"!

 

There is an excellent chapter on the history of tobacco in a book

titled, "Narcotics, Nature's Dangerous Gifts." Here is an exerpt:

 

"The lively image and pattern of Hell"---so wrote the bitterest enemy

of tobacco in a little book, published in London in 1604

entitled "Counterblaste To Tobacco." England was on tiptoe as to the

identity of this anonymous writer, for Sir Walter Raleigh and his

aristocratic cronies, as well as thousands of the "lower orders,"

were puffing their pipes in perfect peace ij spite of it. They would

have liked to know the identity of the man who so loathed the

recently introduced weed, and deplored its mounting popularity, that

he tagged smoking "a custom loathesome to the eye, hateful to the

nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black,

stinking fumes thereof nearest resembling the horrible stygian smoke

of the pit that is bottomless.

 

Little did anyone dream that this profound effusion was written by

the man who presided in 1604 at the Hampton Court Conference, and was

none other than "The Most High and Mightie Prince James, by the Grace

of God King of Great Britain"---otherwise James the First."

 

######################################################################

 

In 1604, there were no high-tech laboratories at which to spend

millions of dollars and decades of time "studying" the effects of

tobacco smoke inhalation. King James merely used his naturally

endowed equipment,(which is far higher tech than anything man has

come up with), namely his eyes, his nose and his brain, to tell him

immediately that tobacco smoke was a horrible hateful poison.

 

Aah, my poor, ignorant, terribly addicted neighbor, who is STILL

smoking beneath that pile of medical bills he hasn't the means to

pay.....

 

Best wishes

M T