Okay, follow me here.
A whole bunch of states sued Big Tobacco. Reason for the suit? The extraordinary costs of smoking-related illnesses, as paid for by the taxpayers for folks on Medicare and Medicaid programs.
So, Big Tobacco reaches a huge settlement with the states. Big Tobacco promises to modify its advertising, and also to pay the states vast sums of money to help offset those huge medical costs. You remember, the costs that justified the suits in the first place.
Politicians, meet Money. Money, meet Politicians. Have a good time, kids, and be back by Midnight …
So how many Anti-Smoking Programs and Health Care Initiatives were paid for with all this ongoing money? I don’t know, but what I do know is a lot of states just used it as a windfall to pay for other stuff.
Some of that stuff is good stuff, mind you. LA Unified is going to spend $100MM to provide preschool to all county children. A worthy cause, definitely — but not, I point out, what the money was ostensibly for.
And then you get other states, like North Carolina, which is using the money to pay for …
… well, among other things, to lend farmers assistance. Which farmers? Why tobacco farmers, of course. Modernizing their farms. Building new tobacco auction houses. Helping fund a tobacco museum.
And they’re not the worse …
Mind you, I have no objections to socking it to Big Tobacco. They are evil, evil people, who only in the last decade have been forced, through exposure of their own internal documents, to admit that tobacco is harmful, and that they knew it, and suppressed whatever evidence came their way, decades ago.
And, of course, while the smile and play nice for domestic audiences, they have no problems shilling their products with even more vigor overseas.
No, the problem is, anyone who simply hands money to the state with no requirement as to how it should be spent, and no oversight as to same, is simply asking for it to be spent willy-nilly. Throw in a recession, and, hoo-boy, you’ve got hilarity.
Like New York buying a sprikler system for a public golf course. Like Alabama using it to lure industry into the state. Like Nevada paying for converting its public TV stations to be able to broadcast digital TV.
Indeed, a National Conference of State Legislatures report says that only 5 percent of the $21 billion the tobacco industry paid out between 2000 and 2002 went toward anti-smoking efforts.
Nice going, folks.
I so hate politics, politicians, and the whole go ’round.
Tell me again why I vote?
Because the bastards voted in by the folks who would vote regardless will almost certainly be worse than the ones who at least feel some pressure to pander to the public?
So it seems that the real winners here are……..the lawyers!! Was it ever disclosed on what percentage of the award would go to the trial team? Even if it was only one percent, those money grubbing whores are set for life. What ever happened to personal responsibility? Why is it “okay” for a person to blame someone or something (ie a corporation) else for their own lack of discipline? As we’ve seen, tobacco and firearm prodcuers are only the begining. Fast food is now in the spotlight. Automakers will surely be next. And the consumer ends up taking it up the tailpipe to pay for it.
Certainly there were lawyers clamoring for their share of the take — in some cases to outrageous percentages. On the other hand, given the degree to which this all dragged on, certainly there were zillions of hours expended by law firms, which does not make them money-grubbing whores per se.
To my mind, where Big Tobacco made itself a legitimate target was by broadly and insistently denying (if not suppressing) the ill effects of cigarettes. If you say, “This product we are selling is not proven to cause cancer, that’s all just scare tactics,” when you know, and have documented, that it does, then by God you deserve to have the snot sued out of you (if not get thrown in the clink for the rest of your days). Especially if you are taking active measures to make the product more addictive.
That’s not downplaying the personal responsibility of folks who smoked. It’s enforcing the responsibility of the firms that made it possible.
How long have cigarette packs carried the surgeon generals warning about using tobacco? I believe it’s been for at least the past 10 years. The warning is fairly stern and written in failry plain language, so as long as the user could read english, he or she knew of the risks. The responsibility should be with the user. Blaiming the enabler, be they tobacco, fast food, gun makers, is like blaming your mom for your (read my) being overweight. She used to many blueberries and to much sugar in her cobblers, making them irresitible to me, hence my overeating.
The SG warning dates back to the 60s, actually.
In general, I agree with you, except when the Tobacco Industry basically tried to counter the “alarmist” SG warnings, maintaining until only a few years ago that there was no confirmed link between cigarettes and cancer (etc.), even when they knew there was. All the while increasing nicotine dosage in their products to increase chemical (not just “gee, I like it a lot”) dependency.
I agree that folks who have had their health ruined, or were killed, by cigarettes bear a portion of the blame, since you’re correct that folks who wanted to know that ciggies really were “coffin nails” could easily discover that. In general, I’d say their proportion of the blame is encompassed in the obvious ill effects they’ve suffered. But Big Tobacco also shares in that blame, SG warning or not.
That having been said, anyone who takes up smoking today is on their own. Except, of course, we all still end up paying for it.
All too true. We’ve seen that the states cannot be counted on to “do the right thing” so, we the taxpayer, will continue to bear the cost of peoples lack of discipline.
And the cost of “the evil men do.”