Reply #3: "Smoking may be unhealt[h]ful, but we'll never know"???

[gratuitous]

I have a database of some 250 persons that I've interviewed who have lost their health to smoking. You can ask them whether they know smoking is unhealthful or not. Well, at least you can ask the survivors, because I know that in the time since I talked with quite a number of them, they've died. What kind of nonsense is that? Smoking "may be" unhealthful?

Smoking is deadly and addictive. Of that, there is not the slightest controversy among informed medical opinion. Tobacco companies, including BAT, Philip Morris and RJR Nabisco, have lied for decades about what they know about smoking, its impact on smokers' health, its addictiveness, and their own manipulation of tobacco and nicotine levels to keep smokers addicted.

Tobacco companies have also engaged in a methodical, systematic program of fraud on the public to maintain a "false controversy"* over the dangers of smoking, and to provide a psychological "crutch" for smokers to justify keeping up their habit. Tobacco companies have researched the properties of tobacco and smoke to a fare-thee-well, calculating exactly how much nicotine each cigarette must deliver to keep a statistically valid number of smokers smoking to maintain their high profit margins. In addition to research on nicotine, and manipulation of levels of nicotine, tobacco companies have also "cured" tobacco with various substances, including sugars and ammonia, which increase the nicotine "kick" during combustion.

The data and the research are fully compiled on smoking, and the deceptive practices of tobacco companies to maintain a false controversy over smoking and health have long been discredited. Tobacco companies have made billions and billions of dollars in profits off the intentional infliction of misery and death on millions of smokers. They have used their blood money to buy the cooperation of government agencies and regulators who are supposed to work on behalf of public health, not compromise it. If you're unsure whether smoking is unhealthful, it's because the tobacco companies have spent a lot of money to persuade you of that. Take the blinders off.

*These quotations are from plaintiff's exhibits of Philip Morris documents in the trial of Williams v. Philip Morris, Multnomah County Circuit Court (Oregon) case number 9705-03957.