Dear Editor:
It’s good to see that someone’s finally sticking up for he poor tobacco companies. It’s not like they mean to kill people, right?
Well, I don’t deny the importance of personal responsibility when it comes to smoking. I personally would like to postpone my tour of the wonderful world of emphysema indefinitely. But big tobacco is far from blameless in smoking deaths.
According to The Washington Post, agents of big tobacco infiltrated the World Health Organization and kept anti-smoking resolutions embroiled in red tape for years.
They use bribery and intimidation to further their interests domestically. Remember that the tobacco complaines are making much of their profit from overseas business, where information about the ills of smoking is not as readily available.
This is not a laissez-faire economy. Government regularly intrudes in business affairs, breaking up monopolies and forcing recalls of dangerous products. By restricting tobacco advertising, the government is just doing its job.
As for the offensiveness of the Truth ads, I find Phillip Morris’ exploitation of its altruistic endeavors for damage control to be much more tasteless.
The Truth campaign tries to separate the role of the consumer and the role of the peddler in apportioning blame for smoking, when the two are inextricably intertwined.
But a half-Truth is better than none at all.
I-Hsien Sherwood

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