Reefer Madness II: Corporate war on natural plants continues. : Cleveland IMC (((i)))

The public has until Sept. 29 to submit Public Comments on the FDA's "tobacco regulation" law.

See: http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/fda_seeks_comment_on_tobacco_l.html

Also: Go here to comment...and to click on an icon to see the whole law: You have to see it for yourself to believe it.
http://www.regulations.gov/search/search_results.jsp?css=0&&Ntk=All&Ntx=mode+matchall&Ne=2+8+11+8053+8054+8098+8074+8066+8084+8055&N=0&Ntt=tobacco&sid=122375715857

There is plenty to comment about:

* The law wrongly says nicotine is "harmful"---but even the FDA itself finds it safe in other products.
* Law says that tobacco kills---but the term "tobacco" is unqualified. No studies have been brought forward about Plain UnContaminated tobacco killing anyone. It may have---but who knows until the studies are done? Highly-Contaminated smoking concoctions cannot help but cause harm, but that is quite different from just tobacco.
* The FDA can reduce nicotine to all but nothing---a tactic long used by cigarette makers to prompt more smoking, sales, and "sin taxes". But this also causes deeper inhaling and more exposures to harmful cigarette contaminants. This point makes this law effectively a new Prohibition.
[The FDA cannot remove all nicotine because---well, then they'd have no "drug" to "regulate".]
* The FDA is forbidden to address or regulate easily the most toxic, cancer-causing, and child-harming parts of typical cigarettes...the many tobacco pesticides and their residues, many of them being chlorine chemicals that produce dioxin---an industrial substance that is especially harmful to children, fetuses, and pregnant mothers. You'd think the FDA never heard of Agent Orange or Love Canal, etc.
* The FDA is forbidden to address or regulate another farm component---radiation-contaminated phosphate tobacco fertilizers which have been found to cause over 90% of upper respiratory "smoking related" cancers. The cancers are more accurately Radiation Related or Fertilizer Related. To say "smoking related" is to blame the unwitting, unprotected victims---the ones doing this smoking...the ones who thought they were protected from such things by our sworn and paid public officials.
* The FDA, by applying huge costs to proving a cigarette has "reduced risk" (even if that reduced risk is just implied), makes it virtually impossible for an alternative cigarette maker to make and accurately label a cigarette as "organic" or "pesticide free" or "dioxin free" or "burn accelerant free" or "natural" or "additive free".
* The FDA bans Cigarette Makers from being on the regulatory board---but it says nothing about representatives from tobacco pesticide manufacturers, pharmaceuticals that make tobacco pesticides and/or non-tobacco cigarette additives, fertilizer interests, agricultural firms that supply many non-tobacco ingredients, chlorine interests that hope to keep the chlorine-dioxin topic Off The Table because of implications on their businesses, pharmaceuticals that are competitors to tobacco for various medical purposes, or any of their insurers and investors. Even health insurers that invest billions in cigarette manufacturing are not prohibited from the regulatory committees.
* The FDA law ignores many US Patents for Fake Tobacco products (made from all sorts of waste cellulose materials) that are designed to "simulate tobacco"---or, to lie by appearances. Products are given measured shots of nicotine to complete the deception. Any number of low-end cigarettes may contain no tobacco at all. If such products are not tobacco, and cannot emit tobacco smoke, and have not been studied for health effects, they must be exempt from the law---but nothing states this or even mentions the topic.
* The law threatens and even admits that it will cause Prohibition-style crimes in illicit trade and smuggling---even trade that will support "terrorists". Escalation of crime is a threat to the public interest.
* The FDA, by not barring cigarette makers from passing "user fee" costs for the regulation onto customers in price hikes, increases the value of cigarettes for smugglers, illicit traders, and "terrorists".
* The FDA has no words about banning use of added burn-accelerants in typical cigarettes though they are complicit in thousands of fires, injuries and deaths each year.
* The US EPA has acknowledged that chlorine is man-made/industry made, and is "not likely in nature"...such as from tobacco plants. The EPA also acknowledged that there is dioxin in smoke from (typical) cigarettes. The USA has classified dioxin as a Known Human Carcinogen, the worst level. And, the USA has signed the Stockholm Convention to phase out dioxin and 11 other worst industrial pollutants from the earth. Many, if not most, diseases said to be "smoking related" (hardly a medical/scientific term) are known effects of dioxin exposures, and many if not most are not possible effects of exposure to smoke from any plant. Further, the worst possible exposure route for dioxin is through inhalation because of the high efficiency of the lungs. Beyond that, dioxins cause "the Promoter Effect" ---accelerating cell-damage from other carcinogens...in this case, such as the radiation from the fertilizers, and other non-tobacco cigarette components that are carcinogenic or become so when burned.
This FDA law utterly ignores all of that. It says nothing about chlorine-bleached cigarette paper, chlorine tobacco pesticide residues, and more pesticide residues from non-tobacco agricultural crop additives.

Whether one likes smoking or not...or even if one hates smokers and hopes they die...this law affects everyone. It is a product of Corporate "science" at its worst. It is a virtual re-play of Reefer Madness that gave us 62 years of the horrific war on cannabis, and it lets chlorine and other chemical interests off the hook for easilyone of the industry's worst and most extensive and most costly crimes. Those homicidal industries affect all of our foods, our drugs, many household products, and our air and water. What they have done to smokers is what they do to everyone---except in less obviously visible ways. If one is getting ones dioxin and pesticide doses from a cigarette, or from household pesticides and cleansers and non-organic foods and emissions from plastics and the rest...the results are the same---cancers, immune problems, fetal damages, cardio-vascular problems, learning disabilities, pregnancy disruption, sperm loss, endocrine disruption---and on and on. If one is sickened by all that, and if one happens to smoke---guess what will be blamed.
Of course, smokers get it the worst because of the delivery path---direct inhalation. Smokers are the canaries in our coal mines. This FDA law is an attempt to strangle the canaries, the evidence agaisnt Industrial Chemicals. It is not to protect anyone's health.

Cleveland Indy Media Center