Pop Culture Saturday: Big Tobacco Smokes Public

Pop Culture Saturday is intended to be a more light-hearted look at American culture. There's much more going on in America than the darkness of Liberalism.

Greenville County (South Carolina) recently passed an ordinance prohibiting smoking inside most public facilities - including restaurants and bars - and within 10 feet of the entrance. As I explained in a previous post, I want smoking to be taxed out of existence. So what about the prohibition? I believe that prohibiting smoking in public places is a band-aid approach to a seriously nasty, self-destructive habit. Smoking also has significant impacts on the cost of healthcare in the United States. The Big Tobacco companies lost the multi-million dollar lawsuit a few years ago because of the purposefully addictive nature of cigarettes.

People who choose to smoke are electing to die by cancer or emphysema (a chronic lung disease). If you're a smoker, you certainly have the privilege to commit suicide by smoke - but you don't have the right to expose me to your carcinogens. As part of the agreement in Big Tobacco's loss, the companies were required to produce media campaigns to deter the youth of America from picking up the addictive habit. But critics are speculating whether this anti-smoking initiative was genuine - or just another clever advertising stunt to hook a new generation of potential smokers.

According to Danny McGoldrick of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the ads released by Big Tobacco were duplicitous in nature. "The tobacco companies are up to their old tricks," he told Healthday. A recent investigation into tobacco commercials and their rates of exposure to young children, which was the idea behind this theory, revealed that many found smoking to be less dangerous, more acceptable and showed a higher likelihood of taking on the habit at a later age. As anti-smoking activists, McGoldrick and I are growing increasingly distressed.

Carolyn Levy, Director of the Philip-Morris youth smoking prevention programs, admitted that the aim of their programs was to delay smoking until age 18. As a result, kids still believe that smoking is all right. Let me be clear: addiction to nicotine and other toxic substances is never all right! By contrast, the objective of public health-funded programs is to encourage people to never take up smoking. The anti-smoking campaign is merely a public relations stunt by Big Tobacco to serve the needs of drug dealers like Philip-Morris.