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Big Tobacco Loses 11-Year Fight, Forced To Broadcast 'Dangers of Smoking' Ads (nbcnews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes NBC News:
Smoking kills 1,200 people a day. The tobacco companies worked to make them as addictive as possible. There is no such thing as a safer cigarette. Ads with these statements hit the major television networks and newspapers this weekend, but they are not being placed by the American Cancer Society or other health groups. They're being placed by major tobacco companies, under the orders of the federal courts. "The ads will finally run after 11 years of appeals by the tobacco companies aimed at delaying and weakening them," the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, American Lung Association, Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights, National African American Tobacco Prevention Network and the Tobacco-Free Kids Action Fund said in a joint statement.
"It's a pretty significant moment," the American Cancer Society's Cliff Douglas said. "This is the first time they have had to âfess up and tell the whole truth." The Justice Department started its racketeering lawsuit against the tobacco companies in 1999, seeking to force them to make up for decades of deception. Federal district judge Gladys Kessler ruled in 2006 that they'd have to pay for and place the ads, but the companies kept tying things up with appeals. "Employing the highest paid lawyers in America, the tobacco companies used every tool at their disposal to delay and complicate this litigation to avoid their day of reckoning," Douglas added.
The ads will inform Americans TV viewers that "More people die every year from smoking than from murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes, and alcohol, combined," according to one of the ads." Besides $170 billion every year in medical costs -- plus another $156 billion in lost productivity -- roughly one in five deaths in America are smoking-related, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with cigarettes killing 480,000 Americans every year.
"It's a pretty significant moment," the American Cancer Society's Cliff Douglas said. "This is the first time they have had to âfess up and tell the whole truth." The Justice Department started its racketeering lawsuit against the tobacco companies in 1999, seeking to force them to make up for decades of deception. Federal district judge Gladys Kessler ruled in 2006 that they'd have to pay for and place the ads, but the companies kept tying things up with appeals. "Employing the highest paid lawyers in America, the tobacco companies used every tool at their disposal to delay and complicate this litigation to avoid their day of reckoning," Douglas added.
The ads will inform Americans TV viewers that "More people die every year from smoking than from murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes, and alcohol, combined," according to one of the ads." Besides $170 billion every year in medical costs -- plus another $156 billion in lost productivity -- roughly one in five deaths in America are smoking-related, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with cigarettes killing 480,000 Americans every year.
And who makes more money from tobacco sales than anyone, including the tobacco companies themselves??? That's right, friends. The government.
Hopefully to eventually be followed up by advertisements by the sugar industry reporting the severe risks to health posed by their product. Honestly, if I had any kind of power at all, Big Tobacco and Big Sugar's leading figures would be defendants in crimes against humanity trials. They've killed more people than the Nazis, and with as much planning and strategy as the Third Reich.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
We don't need to know how much money could have been made exploiting them.
Why not? It's the only thing the big game capitalist understands. The world is a ledger. You gotta play the numbers game. To them, everything else is gibberish.
It's a shame the verdict wasn't that the tobacco companies had to put up an equal anti-smoking advertisement for every advert they use to sell their products.
If they pay for a full-page advert in a magazine? Then they need to pay for a second full-page advert three pages later. Huge-ass billboard on the side of the highway? An equally large billboard by the next exit. Put a sign in store window saying your product is sold here ? There better be an equally large sign right next to it. Paying to have your product prominently featured in a film? Pay for that actress who is painfully suffering from smoking-induced lung-cancer in the next scene.
That way the more the tobacco industry advertises FOR their products, the more they advertise AGAINST their products too. Right now it's pretty much a one-shot deal whose effects will be gone almost as soon as the adverts are in the paper.
Their existing and past attempts at prohibition have worked out really well!
Putting things in financial terms is also important when deciding how to allocate limited resources. As a society should we invest more in anti-smoking ads, or highway guardrails? The only way to make rational decisions is to look at the cost and the quality-life-years added. We currently make some poor decisions, such as spending billions on extending the lives of geriatric patients for a few more miserable months, when that money would be far better spent on something like prenatal nutrition.
For smokers, TFS is only giving one side of the financial ledger. Sure, productivity is lost when someone gets lung cancer in the prime of their life. But on the other side of the ledger, we save a fortune on Social Security and Medicare payments when elderly smokers die years earlier. It isn't clear that smoking is a net loss to society.
Agreed, since probably the late 60's you'd have to have lived under a rock your whole life not to know smoking is bad, very bad.
Most people start smoking when they are still minors, and don't have the maturity to disregard peer pressure and make good long term decisions.
Many tobacco ads specifically targeted young people.
Sure, productivity is lost when someone gets lung cancer in the prime of their life. But on the other side of the ledger, we save a fortune on Social Security and Medicare payments when elderly smokers die years earlier. It isn't clear that smoking is a net loss to society.
Exactly. And if a morbidly obese person suffers a massive heart attack and dies in 5 minutes, it saves money as well.
In the age of illusional denial, there are a huge number of people who seem to thing that if we only do X, Y, and Z, and not do A, B, and C, then we'll live forever or at worse, die peacefully in our sleep at the age of 180. This is why I laugh every time I her how much a smoker cost society. And how little "healthy habit people" cost to society/
Meanwhile my mother died at 80 of a massive heart attack, my father at 86 and my father in law at 85, and my step mother in law at 70 of pancreatic cancer. They hardly cost society anything. They did have one thing in common - they smoked cigarettes.
Meanwhile, my mother in law did everything right. She didn't smoke or drink, exercised regularly, and did it all right. She spent the last ten years in a nursing home, and in the final year of her life at 78, racked up over 600 thousand dollars in medical bills. Overall, for her it cost over a million dollars to die. 10 years of it not knowing who she was.
I suspect a lot of these "Fame!, I'm gonna live forever!" people are in for a nasty shock when they find out that the only thing thay are going to be is the healthiest person in the graveyard.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The truth is that non-smokers don't like cigarette smoke because it STINKS. Concerns of getting cancer after 40 years of passive exposure is secondary.
Opiates have far less side effects than a large majority medications even at extreme dosages. Acetaminophen toxicity is a result of DEA policy, not medical policy. The medically appropriate choice in cases of tolerance is to switch to a single-drug opioid then continue with a standard NSAID dose. You can safely take enough opiates in a day to kill a theater full of people with little ill effect. It's also factually incorrect to assert they work in only the short term. While it's true they don't work for all chronic pain conditions, there are a substantial number of conditions where opioids offer the only prospect of relief. Development of addiction (which is not dependence) is also a medical issue, and in the uncommon case it does develop in a patient, be it by accident or because it's someone predisposed to drugs, is best addressed within the medical system as well. Cutting them off to either painfully detox and live in agony, or turn to black markets, is counterproductive and is responsible for the spike in ODs.
Yeah I know it's fashionable to hate on opiates, but please know what you're talking about instead of repeating what the DEA and its mouthpiece the CDC are saying that runs counter to medical knowledge.
Nah, they're lying to you. It's because that smoker stink lasts forever in an apartment. You can paint, change the carpets, and that smell is still noticeable.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So what would you prefer - Prohibition? That's always been a disaster when tried, creating black markets, crime, and making millions of people convicts for non-violent drug use. Forcing tobacco companies to break up and cease operations? You'd have Rand rolling in her grave.
Cigarrette taxes are a market-based approach (aren't you guys supposed to love that shit?) to discourage people from smoking and make users pay for (some) of the immense medical costs they'll be generating for themselves and non-smoker's close by them.
So - what should be done instead of taxes?
American stupidity is only part of the problem.
The other part is that the tobacco companies have been DELIBERATELY, and FLAGRANTLY, lying their ASSES off about it.
When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, it was the SERPENT who got the worst punishment of all for fibbing.
If you guessed the fossil fuel industry and their Global Warming denier shills, you'd be correct.
"Big Oil created the organized apparatus of doubt...It used the same playbook of misinformation, obfuscation, and research laundered through front groups to attack science and sow uncertainty on lead, on smog, and in the early debates on climate change. Big Tobacco used and refined that playbook for decades in its fight to keep us smoking â" just as Big Oil is using it now, again, to keep us burning fossil fuels.â
http://www.ciel.org/news/oil-tobacco-denial-playbook/
Putinista downmodding in three, two, one...
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I don't like the speech ramifications of curtailing messages I don't like, nor would I choose to curtail your freedom to say what you did, but I also think the reasons why people smoke are far more complicated and require more compassion than can be addressed by calling them "stupid". Persistent messages telling people smoking is socially advantageous plus addictive chemicals engineered to keep users hooked are apparently a potent combination.
We do ourselves and the people suffering from a problem we seek to "fix" a disservice by belittling them. Real solutions won't come in the form of curtailing free speech or such namecalling. We could do a lot better to get the tobacco companies to fund health and recovery programs for smokers, programs they fund but have no say in designing or administering (since they've clearly declared themselves to be untrustworthy for such a task), even if that means these companies end up paying billions of dollars which reallocate all of their profits. Putting more people into single-payer healthcare (Medicare for all) would help focus people's attention on chronic issues as well.
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