LizzieMaine
Bartender
- Messages
- 33,763
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- Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
Pulmonary and heart disease and strokes, combined, cause more smoking-related deaths than lung cancer. None of my relatives ever had any form of cancer -- my grandfather, a smoker from the age of thirteen, died of severe emphysema, which is a grisly, debilitating, completely undignified way to die, and both my grandmother and uncle died from smoking-related heart disease. My grandmother had smoked two packs a day of Pall Malls when she was young and stupid, and had her first heart attack at 35. My uncle, a steady pipe and cigarette smoker from the age of fifteen, dropped dead when he was forty-six years old.
Cancer gets most of the publicity. But tobacco has dozens of ways it can kill you, and the odds are pretty good that if one of them doesn't get you one of the others will. It's Russian Roulette, only there's just one empty spot in the cylinder.
And it's not that the industry didn't know what it was doing to people all along. As far back as the twenties, there was research on the deleterious health effects of tobacco, and the industry was very active all along in subverting, undermining, or trying to buy off this research. The journalist George Seldes, in his "In Fact" newsletter, published a detailed, fully-documented expose in 1940 of how mainstream journalism was deliberately suppressing the results of these studies due to heavy advertising buys by the tobacco industry. The Boys, even then, were soaked in blood, and they didn't care as long as the money continued to flow.
Cancer gets most of the publicity. But tobacco has dozens of ways it can kill you, and the odds are pretty good that if one of them doesn't get you one of the others will. It's Russian Roulette, only there's just one empty spot in the cylinder.
And it's not that the industry didn't know what it was doing to people all along. As far back as the twenties, there was research on the deleterious health effects of tobacco, and the industry was very active all along in subverting, undermining, or trying to buy off this research. The journalist George Seldes, in his "In Fact" newsletter, published a detailed, fully-documented expose in 1940 of how mainstream journalism was deliberately suppressing the results of these studies due to heavy advertising buys by the tobacco industry. The Boys, even then, were soaked in blood, and they didn't care as long as the money continued to flow.
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