Smokers Rights Canada

From Frank magazine: “Joni Mitchell’s lament for our desecrated environment”. Song titles include “Big Yellow Fingers” and “Wild Smokers Don’t Run Very Fast”.

Click here to view the full-size image.

This time, it’s from George Jonas instead of Terence Corcoran. Here’s a response:

Editor, National Post;

With the publication of If you won’t shoot, don’t Taser by George Jonas (Nov. 24), the public discussion of the relationship of tobacco with death and disease has gone full circle.

People in Denial about this relationship have put considerable energy in identifying alternative causes for the many illnesses caused by tobacco; chlorine in swimming pools, x-rays, increased radiation in the environment, even “bad karma”. To relate just one of many cases I am familiar with, Californian Mary Herrin chose to identify her doctor as the cause of her two heart attacks, instead of her cigarette habit; Ms. Herrin died at the age of 58.

What Mr. Jonas has now given us, based on what he calls his own “mini-inquiry”, is that the death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport was caused by Dziekanski’s cigarette habit, not by over-eager use of tasers by the police. Jonas, however, was not willing to blame Dziekanski for his own addiction to cigarettes. Nor was he willing to blame the manufacturers of the cigarettes Dziekanski consumed, even though those manufacturers lied to the public for many years about the adverse effects of their products, including the addictive nature of them.

Instead, Jonas chose to blame “Big Nanny”.

This is silly nonsense. No “nanny”, big or small, deprived Dziekanski of the ability to communicate in either of Canada’s official languages. No nanny separated him from the relatives he was supposed to meet at the airport. No nanny caused him to “create a disturbance”, attracting the attention of the police. No nanny caused the police to over-react.

George Jonas may well be looking for a big nanny to change his diapers for him. Good luck with finding a volunteer.

Robert Broughton

Here’s a worthwhile article by Bryan Farrell in In These Times: Tobacco Stains: The global footprint of a deadly crop.

Excerpt: “Without even factoring in the paper wrapping, packaging and print advertisements—which require as much paper by weight as the tobacco being grown—nearly 600 million trees are felled each year to provide the fuel necessary for drying out the tobacco. That means one in eight trees cut down each year worldwide is being destroyed for tobacco production.”