Big Drug's Nicotine Warhttp://www.forces.org/evidence/pharma/conclusions.htmXI
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Saving lives or Pushing Drugs and Agendas?
By Wanda
Hamilton - Publication date: August 31, 2001
"The pharmacrats'
agenda, based on the new coercive-therapeutic concept of
disease, differs
radically from the medical scientist's agenda, based on
the old
noncoercive-pathological concept of disease. To advance their
agenda, the
pharmacrats shift the focus - their own and the public's - from
phenomenon
to tactic, from objectively demonstrable disease to dramatically
advertised
prevention and treatment."
"The medical doctor treats cancer of the lung.
The political doctor treats
smoking, preventable by legislation, litigation,
and taxation, and curable
with nicotine administered by any route other than
inhalation. Sanctimony
and hypocrisy replace honesty and self-discipline."
Dr. Thomas Szasz, "The
Therapeutic State: The Tyranny of Pharmacracy," The
Independent Review,
5(4), Spring 2001, p. 510.
Internationally
renowned psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Szasz has written
extensively on the
medicalization of America and the rise of the
therapeutic state. In the
therapeutic state, individual choice and
responsibility are subverted in the
name of health. What were once matters
of private health, important only to
individuals, become matters of
collective health, important to the state.
The public health focus is not
on treating physiological disease, but on
preventing behaviors which could
lead to disease. Ultimately the state
defines these behaviors themselves as
diseases to be treated. This is
precisely what has happened in the global
war against smokers.
A
quarter of a century ago, smoking was considered to be a habit hurting
only
those who chose to indulge in it. As habits go, smoking was not viewed
particularly negatively. Everyone knew smoking was not good for those who
over-indulged in it, and about a tenth of those who did so eventually
contracted lung cancer. The public health establishment-rightly-warned
people repeatedly about the health risks of smoking. Those who took up the
habit did so knowing of the risks, but apparently feeling that the pleasure
and benefits of smoking outweighed its long-term risks. Or, if they
eventually concluded the pleasure and benefits were not worth the risks,
they stopped smoking. In fact, something like 50 million U.S. smokers have
quit, almost all of them on their own without "treatment" of any
kind.
In the 1980s, after pharmacological smoking "treatments" began to
emerge,
the health warnings about smoking changed focus. The public health
establishment began putting forth the notion that smokers were not just
hurting themselves but were hurting society at large. They claimed that
second-hand smoke was not only annoying to non-smokers, but could harm them
as well. Further, they said that society as a whole was harmed financially
because of excess health care costs of treating "smoking-related"
diseases.
Then, with the publication of the 1988 Surgeon General's
report, tobacco
use officially became a disease, an "addiction" needing
"treatment." Of
course, by then the pharmaceutical industry was ready with
drugs to treat
this new "disease," the physicians and addiction therapists
were eager to
prescribe the drugs, and the public health establishment was
delighted to
marshal its considerable influence and resources to attack the
"epidemic"
of tobacco use and push drugs, litigation and legislation to
"treat"
it. "Today, when scientific medicine is a robust adult,
physicians
routinely effect near-miraculous cures; politicians and their
lackeys, led
by Surgeons General, define disease; the state shows intense
interest in
the concept of disease; and the term treatment is often used in
lieu of the
term coercion." Szasz, "The Therapeutic State," p.
487.
By the mid-1990s the nicotine war was fully engaged. Smoking--a
legal,
voluntary adult behavior-- was declared to be a global "pandemic,"
the
"number one cause of premature death," and FDA head David Kessler even
went
so far as to deem it "a pediatric disease," though no children die from
smoking. Ambient tobacco smoke became a deadly toxin, killing thousands of
innocent babies and adults, and smokers were ghettoized as social
undesirables who could be redeemed only with "treatment."
An April
1999 World Health Organization "Fact Sheet" illustrates perfectly
the
pharmacrats' use of language to stigmatize and medicalize smoking.
Entitled
"Tobacco Dependence," the three-page publication uses the word
"treatment"
no fewer than thirty-six times. The WHO tract also refers to
smoking as "a
paediatric epidemic" and implies that it kills millions of
children and
adolescents: "This epidemic is predicted to kill 250 million
children and
adolescents who are alive today, a third of whom live in
developing
countries." And it reinforces the notion that smokers cannot
help themselves
because they are in thrall to their addiction: "â?¦quitting
is not simply a
matter of choice for the majority of tobacco users.
Instead, it involves a
struggle to overcome an addiction."
This propaganda was, no doubt, funded
by the pharmaceutical companies
marketing the "treatment," but in an effort
to legitimize such outrageous
claims the WHO notes that the "fact" sheet was
"based upon the best
available scientific information" and "was written by a
group of experts
from developed and developing countries." The "experts'"
names are not
given, but there is little doubt that at least some of them
were paid
consultants to the drug companies in partnership with the WHO,
possibly
even the same consultants who wrote the U.S. clinical guidelines on
treating tobacco "dependence."
The astonishing transformation of a
relatively innocuous-albeit
individually risky-personal habit to a global
disease pandemic in fewer
than twenty years could not have happened without
the active complicity of
the governmental and private members of the public
health establishment,
the American Medical Association, powerful "health"
organizations such as
the American Cancer Society, the World Health
Organization, and the
pharmaceutical industry. And each of these profited
handsomely from their
partnership in the pharmacratic nicotine
war.
Unfortunately, in this war, as in all wars, there have been
casualties.
Among them are honest science, truth, individual freedom, and
the millions
of real children and adults in developing countries who are
suffering from
actual, not manufactured, diseases. While the WHO and wealthy
countries
such as the U.S. devote billions of dollars to wipe out adults'
choice to
use a legal product, in just one year at least 5 million babies
born in
developing countries die in their first month of life, 17 million
people
worldwide die from infectious or parasitic diseases, and millions of
South
Africans contract HIV. Apparently the pharmacrats have been more
interested
in lining their pockets, solidifying their political power and
controlling
behavior of citizens in affluent countries than they have been
in treating
actual preventable disease in developing countries.
Even
more dangerous than the misplaced priorities of the WHO and their
American
anti-tobacco partners are the political ramifications of their
focus on
"health" as appropriate behavior. Not since Nazi Germany has the
world seen
such emphasis on the medicalization of private behavior as a
means to
achieve public health. "The truth is that the Nazi health ideology
closely
resembles the American health ideology. Each rests on the same
premises -
that the individual is incompetent to protect himself from
himself and needs
the protection of the paternalistic state, thus turning
private health into
public health." Szasz, p. 505.
In fact, the anti-tobacco movement
could well have borrowed many of its
tactics directly from the Third Reich.
Like the National Socialists, the
U.S. and the WHO have developed and funded
agencies for the sole purpose of
eliminating tobacco use, agencies which
have created vast propaganda
campaigns against smoking. Hitler's Germany
severely restricted tobacco
advertising and enacted public smoking bans, two
of the major goals of the
WHO and U.S. anti-tobacco movements. During the
Third Reich, children were
subjected to anti-tobacco education in school,
youth clubs were enlisted to
pass out anti-tobacco literature, and smoking
was banned in public places
for anyone under 18. All these are key parts of
the youth anti-tobacco
campaigns in the United States today.
It is
understandable that the pharmaceutical corporations would fund
efforts to
demonize tobacco use, prohibit tobacco advertising, enact
smoking bans, and
push smoking "treatment." All these measures increase
sales of their smoking
cessation products, especially when the public
health establishment,
including government agencies, pushes these products
relentlessly, coercing
even children to use them. The only agenda for any
corporation is to make
money, and the means of making that money is of
little concern so long as
they increase profits. The nicotine war benefits
the drug companies in many
ways: increasing profits, opening new lines of
drugs to market, and
promoting further development of the therapeutic
state, which will ensure
increased future profits.
What is less obvious is why legislators, public
health officials, doctors
and scientific researchers would allow themselves
to become drug pushers
and facilitators for anti-tobacco programs like those
developed by the
Nazis of the Third Reich. Many of the current anti-tobacco
tactics go far
beyond those in the Third Reich. Even the Nazis did not
prohibit smoking
outdoors or set up "snitch" lines for "good" citizens to
report errant
smokers, as some locations in California and Canada have done.
Even the
Nazis did not conduct studies to "prove" that smokers are ill
educated,
poor, and mentally disturbed, though numerous "studies" like these
are
publicly funded and conducted in the United States today. Even the Nazis
did not call smokers "child abusers," though this epithet is being used
more and more frequently by anti-tobacco workers in the United
States.
It should not be forgotten that many doctors, scientists and
public health
workers condoned genocide as "hygiene" and atrocities as
scientific
experiments in the Third Reich, and they did so because at least
some of
them believed they were improving the health of the society and
saving
lives. Many of the modern anti-tobacco workers also believe they are
improving health and saving lives and that extreme measures are necessary
to prevent people from harming themselves by using tobacco. These are the
True Believers for whom safety and health are revered above all else. "It
was not fascism, which was not genocidal, but medical Puritanism that
motivated the Nazis to wage therapeutic wars against cancer and Jews. This
is a crucial point. Once we begin to worship health as an all-pervasive
good - a moral value that trumps all others, especially liberty - it
becomes sanctified as a kind of secular holiness," Szasz, p.
505.
However, the power wielders in the anti-tobacco movement are
more cynical
and self-interested. They know that tobacco use isn't the
greatest of
society's ills and that preventing people from smoking won't
make any
appreciable difference in mortality rates. After all, if people
don't die
from "smoking-related" diseases, they will die from something
else, but the
anti-tobacco movement is a moneymaker and a career maker for
them. The drug
companies pay well for anti-tobacco work and for anti-tobacco
and nicotine
research, as does the federal government.
Only the most
highly trained biomedical scientists can get grants for
trying to find a
cure for cancer, but even mechanical engineers and
attorneys can easily get
health-related, million-dollar government grants
for studies in tobacco
prevention and control.
Non-governmental organizations such as the
American Cancer Society and the
American Medical Association increase their
income substantially with
grants and contracts from drug companies and from
the Centers for Disease
Control and other agencies in the Public Health
Service. They also increase
their influence on public policy by sitting on
governmental tobacco control
committees and panels.
State and federal
agencies also benefit financially from tobacco control.
Because these public
agencies and their anti-tobacco "partners" have made
tobacco a hot-button
political issue, legislators are persuaded to increase
funding for their
anti-tobacco programs. Legislators who support
anti-tobacco are rewarded,
while those who do not are said to have "sold
out" to Big Tobacco because of
campaign donations and/or they are
excoriated in newspaper ads as being "for
Big Tobacco and against children."
Everybody makes out well riding the
anti-tobacco horse.
In the long-term view, organizations, government
agencies and researchers
involved in the anti-tobacco movement are not at
all averse to medicalizing
America because they will thrive financially and
accrue enormous power in a
therapeutic state. Though such a state is
undoubtedly tyrannical, they have
no reason to fear it, because they will be
among its powerful elite.
It is the rest of us who have much to fear,
because the Nicotine War is
about far more than mere nicotine, and it has
nothing to do with saving
lives. "Formerly, people rushed to embrace
totalitarian states. Now they
rush to embrace the therapeutic state. By the
time they discover that the
therapeutic state is about tyranny, not therapy,
it will be too late,"
Szasz, p. 516.