Dick Morris
C/O The New York Post
1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10036-8790
Dear Mr. Morris,
I am writing in response to your column
in the New York Post on March 29, 2000, “How Bill
and Al Blew the Anti-Tobacco Fight.” It should be noted that
I am neither writing on behalf of
any smoker’s rights group or as a mouthpiece for any tobacco company.
I am writing as a
concerned citizen and adult who chooses to smoke.
You open your column by blasting Bill Clinton,
Al Gore and Donna Shalala for using politics
to undermine the effort to curb teen smoking. Everyone agrees
that teens are not in any position
to determine whether or not they should take up smoking. That
is an adult decision and as such
ample laws have been enacted to restrict teens from purchasing cigarettes.
Contrary to your
opening statement this is where government oversight should end and
parental guidance begins.
At what point did you or the government decide that parents have lost
the fundamental right to
teach their children what choices to make in life? No outside
influence should have the right or
belief that they need to, or even worse, must, take over the duties
of parenting. The President,
Congress, the FDA, numerous health organizations and the media have
severely overstepped the
boundaries of what their role is in life choices of American youth
by dictating and forcing their
ideas down the throats of everyone through legislation. Their
job only goes so far as to suggest
or warn what the right and wrong choices would be for anyone, short
of a criminal act. After
that it is up to parents to try to instill these warnings on their
children.
Furthermore, you look to “blame” someone or
some group for teens smoking. There is no
one that should be “blamed” for not keeping teens from smoking.
To blame someone is to hold
them responsible for something. You, and others who think like
you, have lost the meaning of
what the government is responsible for. You have replaced parenting
with government
intervention. Did your parents ever threaten you that if
you didn’t listen to them they would get
the government after you? That sounds silly, doesn’t it?
Yet, this is blatantly what you want to
have happen and aren’t even taking parenting into allowance.
Parenting also only goes so far as
offering guidance and advice but cannot be blamed when that advice
eventually goes unheeded.
Would you blame parents who, in only wanting the best for their child,
try to steer their child
toward becoming a doctor or lawyer, but the child decides to
work as a clerk when they enter
the age of employment? The best psychologists will tell you that
no child can be molded to
think or do as a parent does in that everyone is an individual who
eventually forms their own
opinions, decisions and goals based on their own personality, mixed
with experiences, when a
certain age is reached. The parents were certainly responsible
in their efforts to have that child
choose a highly respected profession but cannot be “held responsible”
when that child does not
choose that profession. It is unconsionable of you to work to
remove an option (the ability to
purchase cigarettes) based on your likes or dislikes, in the name of
the children, when there are
millions of adults who choose the option you dislike. It is up
to parents, not you, not politicians,
to discuss with their children their options and what each option consists
of.
You go on to say, “The FDA has been stripped
of the capacity to ban cigarette ads, to block
sales to minors, to stop the spiking of cigarettes with extra-addictive
nicotine and to protect kids
from the wiles of Big Tobacco. The kids are fair game and tobacco
can do its evil will.”
Cigarette ads are already restricted to the point that if the tobacco
companies stopped bending to
the will of the government in order to remain in operation they would
certainly have a righteous
legal claim concerning their 1st Amendment rights being violated.
Tobacco is a legal product
whether you like it or not. As such it has every right to advertise
in any venue other legal
products have the same right to. Furthermore, what other laws
could possibly be enacted which
block sales to minors? All 50 states restricts the sale of cigarettes
to minors. Are you
suggesting, without actually saying so because to do so would bring
the wrath of adult smokers
down on you, that cigarettes be regulated and “prescribed” so that
teens will not even be able to
fool the store clerk? Again, it is not your job to dictate
anything that interferes with adult
consumption of a legal product through the misguided idea you have
the right to overstep
parental guidance. Every single pack of cigarettes come with
warnings that have been forced
upon an industry. Mr. Morris, every research study regarding
smoking has said that smoking
may cause cancer but the warnings on the cigarette packs say “Smoking
causes cancer.” In
actuality, the government is promoting a lie through strong-arming
tactics and still you find it
necessary to call tobacco evil? That is laughable.
Your emotions are misdirected. You have
lost your sense of reality in the hate you have for cigarettes.
No one can do their “evil will”
unless someone let’s them. The tobacco companies haven’t created
a bunch of zombies who are
under some kind of spell as you’d like to believe (the “wiles of Big
Tobacco”). How mighty
does it make you feel to call millions of people brainless? That
is what you are doing, you know.
Yes, I smoke because I enjoy it but I haven’t yet been enticed to drink
Budweiser beer no matter
how many times I see those cute frogs in a commercial.
Advertising and nicotine content is not
the monster you portray it to be. If that were true, you yourself
would be a smoker and everyone
whoever tried smoking would turn into full time smokers. How
you have the audacity to believe
that you should have the power to decide what is the right choice for
society is, as you said when
referring to the President and other individuals, “the most blatant
and disgusting act of political
demagoguery.” How can you not see that in yourself?
“FDA regulation would have sounded the death
knell of smoking in the United States.” Who
are you to decide for millions of Americans of adult age what is right
for them? I know you
believe that it is the “addictive” nicotine talking but let me assure
you that if nicotine were to be
removed from cigarette manufacturing tomorrow, millions of Americans
would continue to
smoke. It is not so much the nicotine (there are studies that
dispute the addictive nature of
nicotine) but the pleasure and rituals and habits associated with smoking
that keeps Americans
smoking. It is my wish that nicotine would be removed from tobacco
so that we could all laugh
in your faces when we continue to smoke. Regardless of whatever
addictive quality there may
be to nicotine or whatever the risk factor may be in smoking and health,
it is up to the adult
individual, not you and your puritanical ilk, to decide what risks
in life they are to take. Have
you ever done any independent research on the risks of smoking or are
you repeating the
statistical health risks the over-zealous health organizations have
used to brainwash you? Will
you decide next to do away with airplanes? I undertake a great
risk of being killed in a plane
crash everytime I fly. We don’t have to have airplanes, do we?
Boats still exist, don’t they?
The point being that because you have a personal prejudice against
cigarettes does not give you
the authority to choose to demonize one thing when so many others fall
into the same category of
risk. If you are going to point the finger at one item because
it is risky, you should be equally
willing to point the finger at another that poses risks to human life.
Otherwise, you are proving
your prejudice which has no place in determining how others should
act or what others should
choose to do. And should you go on to point the finger at foods
such as meat and desserts full of
fat and sugar which is allegedly the #2 killer of people through heart
disease then you have
shown that maybe you are not prejudice against cigarettes, only morally
self-righteous in your
belief that you know what’s best for everyone. Either trait is
disturbing.
You say “literally” millions of lives would
be saved if tobacco were no longer available. Are
you aware of the way the CDC arrives at the number of smoking related
deaths? Are you also
aware that the CDC reported in 1998 that the average age of smoking
related deaths was 71.9
and that they also announced, separately, that the average age of death
in the US was now 70.0.
So, using their own numbers, smoking increases your lifespan by almost
two years! You report
that 160,000 Americans die from lung-cancer every year. What
are the confounding factors
included in each of those deaths? Did they work with or around
asbestos? Is there family
history of lung cancer? Do they live in a city where air pollutants
are more concentrated? What
was the age of the patient? Were they current smokers or ex-smokers?
All the figures you
reported from lung cancer to heart disease to emphysema are based on
nothing more than the
CDC’s guidelines to doctors to note whether a patient who has died
has smoked. There is no
autopsy or examination to back up an individual doctor’s claims that
any death is due only to
smoking. In 1998, the World Health Organization, after completing
one of the largest studies
ever done, found no link between heart disease and smoking. The
American Cancer Society
reports that the population’s lifetime cancer risk is 1 in 2 for men
and 1 in 3 for women. That’s
odd since the New York City Department of Health is running T.V. advertisements
that say 1 in
3 smokers die of cancer. I don’t believe that was what the American
Cancer Society meant, do
you? That would mean that all cancers are due to smoking and
of course that would be an
outright lie any intelligent individual would see. Have you ever
questioned anything you’ve
heard?
It is understood that you are only repeating,
and believing, the one side of the story that has
ever been allowed to be reported. As a reporter yourself, you
should be fully aware that what the
health organizations do not want us to hear is suppressed and the media
itself is biased in its
reporting. Scare tactics sell. Also, that makes reporters
like yourself strictly that... reporters.
You “report” on what you are told like parrots. That is a disservice
to the public. Do you have
any ethics or is this just a paycheck to you? Right now I’m sure
you are mumbling about how
your ethics on this topic is about saving the children. You do
finish up by saying, “... to avert
this slaughter of the innocents.” However, it is not up to Daddy
Clinton or Uncle Morris or any
other politically or self-appointed nanny to subvert the authority
of parenting and in so doing use
communistic tactics to force “correct” behavior, especially when it
is quite obvious that “saving
the children” is a front in your campaign to create a smoke-free society
based on your personal
prejudice. How else do you explain your column going from speaking
of teen smoking to “the
death knell of smoking?” Believe it or not adults willingly choose
to smoke without any
coercion. I am a personal testament to that and I refuse to have
you speak for me or decide for
me what it is I should or should not choose to do.
You are the one who is disgraceful. I
can only hope that should tobacco be illegalized that it
is your hamburger and your cheesecake that is pulled from your hands
first in the name of saving
the children from “the slaughter of the innocents” by big bad McDonalds,
Burger King , Wendys,
Entenmanns, Hostess and Drakes. It is people like you, a totalitarian,
that the true American
needs to keep an eye on . You are un-American.
Sincerely,
Audrey Silk