The current anti-smoking campaign
is not about public health or drug abuse...

It is about CONTROL... They want it!

Manipulative Advertising
Anti-smoking zealots hypocritically condemn alledged tobacco industry advertisment targeting youth, claiming their persuasive nature of capturing youngsters by the smoking message.

Cheryl Perry, a University of Minnesota expert on youth smoking, said internal tobacco industry documents show that cigarette makers considered underage smokers critical to their future business.

Testifying on behalf of the state and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota in their lawsuit to recover $1.77 billion, she pointed to, in one example, a 1963 ad showed Jed Clampett and his family riding in their jalopy alongside a Winston cigarette truck. The "Beverly Hillbillies" theme ended with the sponsor's slogan, "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should." Perry also cited TV commercials featuring "The Flintstones" and the Marlboro man and print ads for Camel cigarettes featuring the cartoon character Joe Camel. There is also the Kool ad that showed a long-legged, scantily clad woman on a beach gazing into the eyes of a man. Both are smoking Kools.

Almost everyone would object strongly to being manipulated mentally, right?

Anti-smoking advertising certainly is not guilt-free in this manipulation. The current wave of anti-smoking ads are clearly designed to play with your mind and turn the focus of the debate to children. Six months after the campaign shown to the left began in Kansas, local residents opinions about secondhand smoking showed a change. A survey taken by the Kansas Health Foundation found that the number of smokers who agreed that secondhand smoke is harmful to others had increased from 68 percent to 82 percent. The number of people who agreed that secondhand smoke is dangerous to children had increased from 74 percent to 93 percent.

Out of one side of their mouths politicians like Senator Kennedy and others speak about protecting the health of children by regulating cigarettes. Out of the other side of their mouths they indoctrinate your children with dancing condoms encouraging them to have so-called "safe sex," protect the abortionists right to kill millions of children every year, defend Hollywood's portrayal of homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle, and promote needle exchanges to make shooting heroin safer. What hypocrisy!

So, Why Do People Choose to Smoke?

Kids smoke because they think it's cool, this is how to impress girls, because of peer pressure, and because of lack of parental supervision. The inducement for underage smoking starts with the home, school and the individual, not marketing techniques. Young people smoke because their parents do, or their friends pressured them to.

Newt Gingrich said the Joe Camel ad campaign had nothing to do with teen smoking. The greater cause was the example of Hollywood stars smoking on screen, he said. The White House responded by accusing Gingrich of defending Big Tobacco's interests. Does that sound a little reminicent of Hillary's charge that all the accusations brought against her husband was orchestrated by a "vast right wing conspiracy"?

If Clinton is so concerned about the effects of media on children's smoking behavior why doesn't he press Hollywood producers to sign a "no smoking on screen" pledge? Why stop there? If Clinton is so convinced that smoking is killing our children, why doesn't he move to ban tobacco altogether? Why not? Because Bill Clinton doesn't care about your children. Here's a man responsible for providing cocaine to 14-year-old girls in exchange for sex ... and you think he's concerned about their health?

If stopping tobacco marketing and promotion is such a pivotal issue in curbing teen smoking, I wonder what advertisments Jess Willard Harris saw when he began smoking in 1924? Or I wonder what role Joe Camel had in the deaths of Jeanne's mother, brother, father, husband, and son who all died of heart attacks. How about Dorothy Ann Oster Wollard, 1920-1987, who began smoking in 1935. I wonder what Marlboro Man billboard she saw? Other victims of tobacco advertising surely include Gilbert Leo Meyer (born in 1927) and Marilyn Jean Kliebhan Meyer( born in 1932), both of whom began smoking as a teenager. These and others were part of INFACT's Face the Faces Photo Project where they attempted to blame the tobacco industry of promoting smoking to youth.

These hypocritical anti-smoking folks really don't care about your children. They are only using your children to heap false guilt on smokers and to further alienate you from the non-smoking folks.

It's politics of division ... and your children are the pawns!