The War on Smokers
ECONOMIC
LOSSES
—All of this in the face of the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world, the transfer of $246 BILLION from the pockets of smokers to those of politicians and trial attorneys.
- Nutshell Tavern, Rte 1, Biddeford, Maine closes its doors due to smoking bans
- Mingles Coffee Shoppe, Kitchener, closes after non-smoking bylaw passed–45% drop in business
- Twelve restaurants close in Brookline, MA, after smoking ban decimates business
- In British Columbia, 200 workers in 46 establishments have lost their jobs because of the smoking ban
- Hotelier Don Ritaller, Victoria, fired his entire staff of 12
- J. P. Malone’s Pub in Richmond, laid off eight of its 20 employees
- Clyde’s Restaurant Group, one of the most popular and successful restaurants chains in the Washington DC area since 1963, suffered a staggering loss of sales after smoking was banned
- A survey of 300 alcoholic beverage serving operations in California, selected at random from a list of 7,216 shows that:
- 60% experienced a decrease in business averaging more than 30%;
- 7% showed increased business averaging 8%.
- 50.4% of the respondents indicated an increase in customer complaints/fights;
- 65.0% indicated a loss of regular customers;
- 59.0% indicated a loss of tips/gratuities for the bar and/or serving
staff.
- The Duluth Grill has closed after 16 years due to the smoking ban
- 130 tobacconists in California have been forced to close since the 1998 smoking bans and punitive tax increases
- On average, sales at local bars, taverns and pubs have dropped nearly 30 percent since the enactment of the ban CA
- Thousands of employees have had their hours cut, and hundreds have lost their jobs because of the loss of the smoking customers who form a majority of their customer base
- A recent study from British Columbia pointed out major economic and job losses after a provincial smoking ban took effect in January: After 80 days of the bylaw, 730 employees were let go, 9 businesses closed and more than $16 million was lost
- A blind newsstand worker hired under a federal job program for blind people has been fired after selling cigarettes to a minor during a sting operation. Mike Redina, 44, was working at the Small Change newsstand at a state office building last week when he sold a pack of cigarettes to a 16-year-old sent in by the Suffolk County Health Department.
- Letter from a waitress in BC: “My livelihood is being jeopardized for my own protection, and I never asked to be saved.”
- Three more restaurants have closed in Weymouth, MA: Haijjar’s, in East Weymouth, J.C. Grear’s in South Weymouth and the Aloha in Hingham. A fourth restaurant said business is way off.
- Corvallis, OR: Employment at the Peacock has dropped from 50 to 14. Owner John Carter says the business has lost 38 percent of its lottery income and more than half of its basic bar revenue since the law took effect State records support Carter’s lament about lost business.
- Bud’s Place in Cambridge and said his sales have fallen 23 per cent since the smoking ban was implemented. His staff has shrunk to 12 from 17 and a full-time employee he’s had on staff for 10 years has been cut back to three shifts a week
DOMESTIC
TERRORISM
–Paid for by the victims and condoned by our government
- Action On Smoking And Health (ASH) promotes a book, Gasp! A Novel of Revenge, on its web site which contains a tested and proven way to tamper with cigarette packages to insert cyanide.
- Four incidents of tobacco product tampering in Virginia, including the use of explosive devices, was reported by the Washington Post.
- Miami–A man attacked a woman for smoking inside a building. America Mena, 30, was standing at the north side exit door on the third floor of the building smoking a cigarette when a man in his 50s came up to her and started screaming at her about smoking. He then pushed her outside of the exit door and attempted to close it while her hand was in the doorway.
- Cancer specialist Dr. Bill Evans believes many Canadian doctors think it’s a waste of time to treat lung cancer. “In many situations, physicians have decided that lung cancer, being a self-induced disease, is not worthy of the kind of effort that one applies to many other health issues,” Evans says.
- Some doctors have refused to perform transplants and other lifesaving operations on smokers on “moral” grounds. At least one person, a 56-year-old man, has died as a result.
- A 60-year-old New York City restaurant patron was set upon by five waiters, kicked, punched, and thrown out into the street for the crime of smoking. He has remained in a coma since the attack. His attackers were not charged.
- A woman who was eight months pregnant was assaulted because she was smoking at an Illinois shopping mall
- A Head Start instructor in Modesto, California, tortured and physically abused her own daughter because she had tobacco products in her possession
- A local radio talk show host in Seattle advocated that persons who smoke outside sports arenas be assaulted and battered
- Three police academy instructors in Huntington Beach, California, lost their jobs after ordering two cadets to eat cigarette sandwiches as punishment for smoking. The cadets vomited. One collapsed and was taken unconscious to a hospital.
- An unopened pack of cigarettes and an unused pack of matches was reason enough for Carnival Cruise Lines to throw four people off the Paradise in a foreign port and fine them $250. It cost them thousands of dollars to return home.
- After lighting a cigarette 20 feet from the nearest spectator at a Little League game, a Los Angeles father was detained by authorities and his son beaten up by the rest of the home team, then permanently kicked out of the League
- In Canada a reformed smoker attacked his wife of 30 years, with a 12-inch kitchen knife, repeatedly stabbing her in the neck after finding out that she had broken her promise to give up smoking.
- In Texas a high school student who went searching for her cat in her own yard was stopped by a police officer who said he saw her smoking. He told her to empty her pockets, which she did. Finding nothing, he got down on his hands and knees, and he dug around on the grass with a flashlight. Still finding nothing he told the girl she was a minor in possession of tobacco and gave her a ticket.
- At an engineering company in Indiana, a secretary was fired for failing a “drug test.” Her crime? Smoking six cigarettes the weekend prior to the test
- A 78-year-old Canadian senior who stepped outside on the balcony of her seniors’ complex to have a smoke froze to death when the door locked behind her and she couldn’t get back in.
- A 15-year-old Iowa boy caught with cigarettes in his possession during a school trip to Texas was put on a bus alone for a 31-hour trip back to his home. During the first of the six stops and layovers, his wallet was stolen, leaving him with no money to buy food for the rest of the trip.
- In Wisconsin a 14-year-old girl, a grade A and B student who was active in athletics and cheerleading and the choir, committed suicide rather than tell her parents she had been caught with one cigarette in her backpack at school
QUOTES
FROM THE CRUSADE AGAINST SMOKERS
–No doubt many among the paid professional anti-smokers agree with these verbal assaults since many have said similar things.
- In October of 1991 Secretary of Health and Human Services, Dr. Louis P. Sullivan, labeled smokers and smoking “Public Enemy No. 1.”
- Minnesota’s 1984 PLAN FOR NON SMOKING: “Any means necessary must be used to de-socialize smokers, smoking must be equated with drugs sex and violence, the smoker must be isolated from the rest of society.”
- The “outside group of smokers is a great isolator and identifier of the selected-to-be-loathed smoker.” Kathleen Harty, former leader of the Minnesota Department of Health’s anti smoking division, now an employee of the US FDA.
- “Round up all the smokers in California and truck them to a fenced in area in Utah.”
- “Place a bounty on anyone seen in a Joe Camel or Marlboro T-shirt, baseball cap, etc. They may be shot on sight and a $1,000 reward will be given when delivered to the state Capitol lawn in Sacramento.”
- “The state should require bar owners to furnish cellular phones and Polaroid cameras to nonsmokers so that scofflaws can be reported, identified and executed.”
- “When smokers buy a pack of cigarettes, one will have an explosive in it–so the smoker will be afraid to light up, fearing a facial laceration.”
- “If smokers are so eager to die, then the answer must be to capture and exterminate them. The only solution is to remove the problem; smokers.”
- “You greedy bastards deserve the lung cancer, emphysema, immune system deficiencies, cardio-vascular and stroke problems you bring on everybody.”
- Nothing makes me happier than to intubate a pathetic smoker with an FEV-1 of less than 800 cc. Don’t expect any morphine to relieve your sensation of dyspnea, either.”
- “Your bodies are a means of production, as such they belong to society, and the state holds them in trust. You don’t have the right to engage in any behavior that could reduce the productivity of your body.”
- “We have to treat them like human beings, I suppose.”
- “You filth. I’ll rejoice the day the doctor sticks a traech tube in your throat and you scream from the pain and agony of chemo!! Burn in hell.”
- “I vote to kill all smokers…perhaps then, and only then, will the putridness of their disgusting habits be truly understood.”
- “if Democracy allows poeple (sic) to throw away their lives (or at least considerably lower the quality of their lives) by smoking then democracy isn’t a good thing.”
- “So, not only justifiably taking their children away from them, we could treat all smokers and defenders of addictive nicotine as slave labor and legalize paying them wages of two packs a day.until the remaining tobacco products are used up and there are no more!”
- “You should see the segregated small glass rooms that the Addicted Smoker Losers must sequester themselves into, by law, to fix their wretched addiction. Like dirty monkeys in a cage on display, their faces sullen and depressed with the pathos of their junkie addiction.”
- “May I see the day when those kids get over their forced addictions and when grown look back at the parents, when the parents themselves are on deaths door and in pain, may they laugh in your face and tell you that you have
gotten what you deserved and then tell you to go to hell and walk out on you and leave you to pathetically die in your bed. “ - “Nice restaurant you got here. Hate to see anything bad happen to it.” (Head of anti-smoker group ASH, John Banzhaf)
Thanks to Spinner
