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Terry’s Tidbits

October 24, 2005

Terry Gray

A Good Point

          The following was forwarded to me.  I think it sums up nicely the great smoking debate and all the other health issues that are frantically and hysterically being magnified.

          “My oldest is in her 3rd year working as a Radiation Therapist at a major hospital in Boston, Ma. Her job is to administer radiation treatments for cancer to patients.

That's ALL she does, all day....every day. In 3 years not one of her lung cancer patients had been a smoker. Not ONE. She has asked her collegues there if any of their patients had been smokers. NONE.

She is a non-smoker who likes to bug me about my smoking....I harass her about her meat eating. It's all done in love and jest. I don't smoke in her home and she doesn't eat meat in mine.

She is also angry at the anti-smoking "crap" as she calls it. She says the biggest problem she has in treating her patients is that they feel so betrayed. They didn't smoke. They don't live with smokers. So they felt safe. They did all the "right" things and yet people they know of who have smoked 4 packs of non-filtered cigarettes for 40+ years don't have anything wrong with THEM. They can't understand why this has happened. Worse, they get little sympathy from others who assume that they smoked and somehow deserved the disease.

So while my oldest needles me about my smoking she isn't filling it with stories and her patients who smoked and are dying. I had told her she wouldn't.

I've tried over the years to explain research, the government and medicine to her. NOW she gets it.

People don't like getting sick. They don't like horrible diseases. The worst is when they don't know how to avoid them. So the government and the researchers blame something for the disease and people calm down. It doesn't matter if they are correct. Just that they name something.

          (They tell us that) smoking causes lung cancer. So if you don't smoke you are safe. If smoking causes cancer then so does second-hand smoke. So avoiding both is better. It's quite simple really.

          It's the feel-good lie that politicians and doctors tell people to make them feel better. You have an enemy to blame and avoid. It makes things so much easier for them. They get to look good and people get to die because they avoided the wrong things.

          If I worked for the government or an anti-smoking group I'd deduce that the reason those people being treated in Boston have lung cancer is because there is no ban on smoking in public places there.”

          And all this time fanatics like Nurse Ellen Hahn, Council-bunny Ellen Call and Nazi elite Mike Kuntz have been trying to convince us that we are dying of tobacco smoke.  I guess that “benevolent” groups will work to ban most anything if they get paid enough to do it.

Tobacco Sales Declining?

          Governor Fletcher would like us to believe that his backwater, underhanded money grab from the pockets of smokers has merit.  He is justifying the last tobacco tax increase of 1000% by telling us that the sale of cigarettes in Kentucky dropped from 161,000,000 to 145,000,000 from the same 2 month period last year. 

          An economist, Thomas Jones, says that smokers are taking to the social engineering quite well.  “We've seen a greater change in consumer behavior with this tax increase than we expected," he said.  

          A spokesperson for Discount Tobacco City near the Tennessee border said his sales were down by 40%.  Tennessee has a tobacco tax of 20 cents.  Virginia, another neighbor has a tobacco tax of 30 cents, the same as the new Kentucky tax.  Hmmmm. 

          The stats go on to say that the sales decline might have been bigger but that Ohio has just raised its tobacco tax to $1.25 per pack.

          Fletcher reads the same news that we read.  Does he see a correlation between surrounding states and Kentucky’s “declining” tobacco usage?  Heck no, he wants us to believe that his social engineering is saving lives.  Let’s not mention the windfall of money.  Ernie, Ernie, Ernie, we aren’t smoking less; we are just getting fewer visitors to our state - the same visitors who come for tobacco and also buy gas, lottery, food, and other things. 

          I wonder when politicians will begin taxing everything that is potentially dangerous.  Can you imagine paying a tax every time you climb a ladder to clean out your gutters?   And what about sun bathing?  As with most things, exposure does not equal harm.  If we are standing in 2 feet of water and some idiot with an agenda reduces the depth to 1 foot, don’t try to convince me that we have been saved from drowning.

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