So if you live near a highway, cigarette smoking won't cause any decline in your health? Your non-smoking neighbor is just as likely to get lung cancer or COPD? Not buying it.
I think his point was that so what if smoking is unhealthy for you. I smoke cigars occasionally, and that's my choice. I don't have nearly a problem with drugs for the same reason, though I don't oppose any measure that could get people help when they need it, but I prefer private charitable means more than any government means, since government isn't at all interested in helping people like this. The point here I was making was that government did not go after Big Tobacco for your health or mine. They did it for money, power.
You have to look at our government rather like a commodities exchange. I don't know if you've ever been to one, but most major American cities have them (not to mention every major city in the Western Hemisphere, China, and Japan). What they do is exchange commodities like gold, oil, iron and steel, agricultural products like sugar, wheat, livestock, all without actually having them on hand right there. Well, our government, not to mention the British, Japanese, Chinese, Australian, French, German, Italian, etc. trades in political power. Anywhere there is a legislature that is democratically elected, you have a power brokerage.
Here's how it works, in a small but common example. Say you want a new highway extension going by some land you own? The basic way to get that highway going through your area is merely to go to a Department of Transportation commission and ask for it. That usually doesn't work. So you have your lobbyists go and privately talk to Congressmen and other politicians and officials. One of the little secrets of being a Congressman is that a Congressman can practice insider trading, and not be prosecuted for it. So your lobbyist goes to these guys and, while they can't directly bribe them, they can mention that there is some really cheap land in such-and-such neck of the woods, and boy, think of how great it would be if a highway went through there? The next year, the appropriation is made in an Omnibus spending bill and voila! The highway is going where you want, and then you sell some of that property you own to various subsidiary corporations that happen to have major shareholders among certain members of Congress. They, in turn, either develop it or sell it to developers for a higher price.
When it came down to Tobacco, Big Law and Big Insurance lobbyists, among others, went to Congress, and they also went to the media with a lot of their own information on the health risks of Tobacco. A lot of hoopla was made, but what you didn't see were the deals that went along behind closed doors. While Big Tobacco was successfully sued for billions, most of that money went to lawyers, and insurance companies, all the while in various states you have tobacco taxes, and they, in turn, get circulated and laundered right back into the coffers of the Tobacco companies, in exchange for all the regulations on the sale and transport of tobacco products, mainly cigarettes. This didn't really have to do with the health risks, but about the money. Always follow the money. If Big Tobacco wasn't so big, likely as not nothing would've happened to them, just as nothing really happened to the Distillers and Brewers in the country post Prohibition.
You might not be aware, but until recently Cigars were very unregulated. Cigar makers were not part of all this. Just major Tobacco makers, who make cigarettes and chewing tobacco. It has, just recently, though.
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