THE tobacco industry is being nailed right and left with lawsuits, but it's hard to feel much sympathy for them. Tobacco companies:
Smoke thisTobacco companies, after all, are the ones who came up with the dumb plan to market their product as healthy and fun. Who in their right mind would try to call a product that involves the sucking of smoke into one's body safe?
Common sense tells you that if the human body is designed to function by breathing a combination of gases -- chiefly oxygen and carbon dioxide -- then breathing air polluted with other substances, such as tar, nicotine and a host of harmful gases created by burning organic material, is not a good thing.
In fact, most smokers knew that cigarette smoke was probably as bad as smoking carpet fiber and kitty fur balls. And they knew this even before surgeon general warning began appearing on cigarette packs.
Even back when smoking was glamorized in black-and-white movies, smokers referred to cigarettes as "cancer sticks" and "coffin nails."
But the tobacco companies decided that instead of simply stating the obvious -- that cigarette smoking was dangerous -- they would hunker down and insist that smoking was safe and non-addictive.
This was fine before filing lawsuits became the national pastime. Smokers weren't sure why the tobacco companies would be silly enough to continue to argue that smoking was a healthy pastime, but, hey, that was their trip.
Now even state governments are suing tobacco companies. I think the tobacco companies should simply turn around and sue those big dumb public relations and marketing firms they've depended on for years.
What the tobacco companies should have been doing all these years is basically advising customers that cigarettes, like alcohol and fatty foods, are to be indulged in sparingly. They should have pointed out that the human body functions best when it receives nutritious food and liquids, clean air, plenty of sleep and exercise. But humans, being what they are, will occasionally do things such as overeat, overdrink, avoid exercise, ingest chemicals that make them feel better for the short run and inhale gaseous emissions from various types of burning plants. Smoking ain't good for the bod.
Marketers should have said, "If you insist on smoking a legal product, why not try ours." Then they should have listed the various ingredients, such as amount of tar, nicotine, etc.
Who could have argued with that? Anyone coming down with cancer -- after having been warned not to smoke by the people putting out the cigarettes -- would have been laughed out of the courtroom.
Why do you think companies like McDonald's list every vitamin, mineral and gram of fat in all of their products now? You can't go into a McDonald's without seeing a big hairy poster on the wall telling you what's in the food. Why do you think that even McDonald's doesn't suggest that people should subsist on Big Macs alone? Because McDonald's lawyers have probably told them that the same thing that is happening to tobacco companies today could happen to fast food companies in the future. ("McDonald's gave me heart disease, your honor. Boo, hoo, hoo. They got me addicted to Happy Meals. Whine. Whine. Whine. They used cute characters like Ronald McDonald and Joe Camel, I mean, Mayor McCheese, to suck me in from the time I was a kid. Make them give me lots of money, your honor.")
And the judge will toss the case out in a heartbeat. Because McDonald's is smart enough to say the human body wasn't designed to run exclusively on french fries and McNuggets.