Who is the real addict?

Similarities exist with the Gambling Industry that few seem to notice.

Who is the real addict?
By Janice Kennedy, Ottawa Citizen

You Janice Kdy can't help feeling twinges of sympathy. You did smoke for 20 years, after all. You had an intimate knowledge of cigarettes - their toasty taste first thing in the morning, their comforting solidity between your fingers, their near-magic capacity to quell relentless yearnings that overpowered you whenever you went for too long without nicotine.

And you experienced firsthand the torture of quitting (several times, in fact), a memory that endures even after 28 years.

Occasionally, you think of the cost, realizing that, had you maintained your habit at the same rate, you'd now be watching roughly $100 a week go up in toxic smoke. You'd be a pariah, too, banished to a butt-strewn patch in the rain or snow for every shivering cigarette break.

So you are not unmoved. When you see those smokers on television explaining why they are going after the tobacco industry - which they claim tricked them into smoking and therefore ruining their lives - you find yourself experiencing a slight frisson of something like sympathy.

But it's very, very slight.

A landmark class-action suit against the Canadian tobacco industry got underway in Montreal last week, with a group representing almost two million Quebec smokers seeking damages of $27 billion. It claims the industry knowingly sold them harmful products and got them addicted, permanently and helplessly.

One 65-year-old lead plaintiff complained that she had tried to quit, but "it didn't work." Another, a 68-year-old with lung cancer and emphysema, chain-smoked through the interview, saying he couldn't quit, either.

Not their fault, it seems. Both started smoking when nobody, apparently, knew it was harmful. (Isn't memory strange? Generationally, these are my people. And yet I can't remember a time when I didn't know smoking was dumb.)

And while all eyes are on the Quebec case, provincial governments across the country, including Ontario, are pushing ahead with their ongoing efforts to sue the tobacco companies for smoking-related health care costs. Everybody's going the legal route, it seems, ever since Big Tobacco in the United States was ordered in 1998 to pay out $206 billion.

Revenge is sweet, I guess. But do these slaps in the bad guy's face make any sense? Are they even right?

Don't misunderstand. I hate smoking. As a longtime non-smoker now, I hate the smell and dirtiness. I hate the fact that it caused my father's protracted and painful death from emphysema, and that it probably contributed to my mother's death from lung cancer, contracted two full decades after she'd actually quit.

And I hate the tobacco industry, which has indisputably waged relentless campaigns over the years against initiatives to reduce smoking - i.e. cut into profits. Tobacco execs have been duplicitous, selfserving and dedicated to the promotion of their poison.

Personally, I'd put the whole death-dealing industry right out of business. Outlaw tobacco. Period.

And no, I don't think the resulting black market with unregulated product is reason enough not to do the right thing.

It's a question of principle. If government truly believes tobacco is nothing but injurious, as its legal initiatives suggest, then why does it allow its sale? How about some honesty? How about, "We're shutting you down because your product harms and kills?"

Oh. Wait a minute.

Could it be that addiction thing again? In recent weeks, discussion has been heated on the subject of the Ontario government's plans to increase the problem gamblers in this province by adding more venues and more ways for more people to lose more money. Numerous observers have noted that the government, unwilling to dam up that rich (if unconscionable) revenue stream, has a gambling addiction all its own.

Well, it also has a tobacco addiction, one it shares with the feds.

Buy a pack of cigarettes in Ontario, and - with provincial and federal tobacco taxes, as well as provincial and federal shares of the HST - more than 60 per cent of the cost goes to the government. In every other province except Quebec, the taxes are even higher.

That's an awful lot of money. That's a huge amount to go missing if, say, some politician with an attack of scruples ill-advisedly suggested shutting down Big Tobacco.

So we won't hold our breath. But might we at least hope for modest reductions in the egregious double standards by which governments operate? "We think you're evil, and we plan to sue the pants off you," does not coexist rationally with "But how about that revenue stream you generate, eh?"

It's as jarring as hacking smokers lighting up and suggesting some unseen third party is sticking the thing in their mouths and forcing them to inhale.

The devil made us do it, addicts and governments keep saying about the tobacco industry, a most convenient devil. Instead, they might try taking a look in the mirror.



Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/health/real+addict/6352240/story.html#ixzz1q3BA0cia