Each year about 420,000 Americans die from smoking cigarettes yet there has yet to be a single recorded death from smoking Marijuana (e.g., Cannabis). In addition I have written extensively about how Re-Legalizing Marijuana, under the MERP Model, would achieve four goals that Obama’s hidden agenda to “tax and regulate” Marijuana can never achieve:
* Destroy the Drug Cartels
* Provide free medicine to the sick and the poor
* Stop the police from invading your home
* Provide a counterbalance to the liberties lost in the wake of 911 (09/11/2001)
And as you will discover in this article there is even evidence to suggest that tobacco smokers, who also smoke Marijuana, may have a reduced incidence of lung cancer.
Yet despite all of these benefits Obama insists that he won’t legalize Marijuana and will also support a ban on Electronic Cigarettes (e.g., e-cigarettes) which would drastically reduce the number of tobacco related deaths as well as relieving millions of smokers of their addiction to tobacco. Let me explain . . .
Smoking Cigarettes Vs. Smoking Marijuana
Anyone with an IQ over 40 knows that smoking cigarettes is bad for your health. Here is a good summary of the health consequences:
Tobacco use contributes to more than 440,000 deaths in the United States annually, many of which are from cancer. From lung cancer to cancer of the mouth, larynx, esophagus, and pancreas, tobacco can play a part in all of them. Cigarette smoking is responsible for 87 percent of all lung cancer cases annually in the United States.
Yet, due to the fact that cigarette smoking is more addictive than heroin, nearly 20% of the adult population continues to smoke and in the next 10 years another 5 million Americans will die from lung cancer and other cigarette-related ailments (e.g., emphysema, COPD, bone cancer etc.). So, many Americans applauded Obama when he began his first term by adding a 62 cent federal tax on cigarettes and then later placed tobacco under the control of the FDA.
Of course this does levy a very regressive tax on the poor and also places tobacco under the control of an agency which can best be described as a cheer leader for the pharmaceutical industry. But this ceding to the pharmaceutical industry — and breaking his promise not to tax those with incomes under $250,000 per year — only begins to describe the betrayal on the part of President Obama.
First I need to share a fact with you that has been purposely kept from the public by the Mainstream Corporate Media. And if you get all “wee weed” up over it let me just say that I share your anger. Consider the following:
The fact is, although insoluble tars are a contributing factor to the lung cancer danger present in today’s cigarettes, the real danger is radioactivity. According to U.S. Surgeon General C. Everette Koop (on national television, 1990) radioactivity, not tar, accounts for at least 90% of all smoking related lung cancer.
Tobacco crops grown in the United States are fertilized by law with phosphates rich in radium 226. In addition, many soils have a natural radium 226 content. Radium 226 breaks down into two long lived ‘daughter’ elements — lead 210 and polonium 210. These radioactive particles become airborne, and attach themselves to the fine hairs on tobacco leaves.
Studies have shown that lead 210 and polonium 210 deposits accumulate in the bodies of people exposed to cigarette smoke. Data collected in the late 1970’s shows that smokers have three times as much of these elements in their lower lungs as non smokers. Smokers also show a greater accumulation of lead 210 and polonium 210 in their skeletons, though no studies have been conducted to link these deposits with bone cancer. Polonium 210 is the only component of cigarette smoke which has produced tumors by itself in inhalation experiments with animals.
http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_health2.shtml
According to this same article, the carcinogenic effects of Polonium 210, in tobacco, were known as early as the mid-70’s. Furthermore there were phosphate fertilizers available that would have minimize or eliminated the inclusion of Polonium 210. But the tobacco industry felt it would be too expensive. So both they and your Congressional representatives suppressed the information from the media and continued to needlessly murder about a half a million Americans each and every year. And of course it is a well known fact that each tobacco related death actually is cheaper for the government in the long run. That is because of all the savings realized through less payout in Social Security and Medicare due to the earlier demise of the cigarette smoking population.
Is it any wonder that our trust in these scumbags is now at an all time low. I’m sure that many people that have lost loved one’s from tobacco related illnesses are ready to polish up the guillotines upon understanding what this benign neglect has caused.
Marijuana on the other hand has none of the added “benefits” that radio-active tobacco has to offer. Consider the following excerpt from the same article:
Many people think smoking marijuana is just as harmful as smoking tobacco, but this is not true. Those who hold that marijuana is equivalent to tobacco are misinformed. Due to the efforts of various federal agencies to discourage use of marijuana in the 1970’s the government, in a fit of “reefer madness,” conducted several biased studies designed to return results that would equate marijuana smoking with tobacco smoking, or worse.
For example the Berkeley carcinogenic tar studies of the late 1970’s concluded that “marijuana is one-and-a-half times as carcinogenic as tobacco.” This finding was based solely on the tar content of cannabis leaves compared to that of tobacco, and did not take radioactivity into consideration. (Cannabis tars do not contain radioactive materials.) In addition, it was notconsidered that:
1) Most marijuana smokers smoke the bud, not the leaf, of the plant. The bud contains only 33% as much tar as tobacco.
2) Marijuana smokers do not smoke anywhere near as much as tobacco smokers, due to the psychoactive effects of cannabis.
3) Not one case of lung cancer has ever been successfully linked to marijuana use.
4) Cannabis, unlike tobacco, does not cause any narrowing of the small air passageways in the lungs.
In fact, marijuana has been shown to be an expectorant and actually dilates the air channels it comes in contact with. This is why many asthma sufferers look to marijuana to provide relief. Doctors have postulated that marijuana may, in this respect, be more effective than all of the prescription drugs on the market.
Studies even show that due to marijuana’s ability to clear the lungs of smog, pollutants, and cigarette smoke, it may actually reduce your risk of emphysema, bronchitis, and lung cancer. Smokers of cannabis have been shown to outlive non-smokers in some areas by up to two years. Medium to heavy tobacco smokers will live seven to ten years longer if they also smoke marijuana.
Let me further illustrate the difference between smoking Marijuana and Cigarettes. When I “used” to smoke Marijuana I would only smoke the best grades with the highest THC content (e.g., probably around 10% THC). Because this was so expensive I “used” to weigh out a mere tenth of a gram to achieve a mild euphoria. I also have succumbed to the tobacco addiction for about 2 years, where I was smoking about a single pack each day. There are about 14 grams of tobacco in a pack of 100 millimeter cigarettes. So I was inhaling about 70 to 140 times as much tobacco smoke into my lungs each day, compared with my near-dally allotment of marijuana smoke. And even medical patients such as Angel Raich, rarely consume more than 7 grams of Marijuana each day.
Now, that is another comparison you won’t hear honestly portrayed by the DEA, eh? I’m sure you’re real surprised.
It would be unfair to single out Obama for not getting the Polonium 210 out of the tobacco as literal generations of your Congressmen deserve the blame for that one. But here is what we can blame Obama for: undermining public health by protecting cigarette manufacturers against competition from less deadly tobacco products.
Yesterday, Obama signed into law a deceptive FDA “tobacco regulation” bill that will undermine public health in the long run by protecting cigarette manufacturers against competition from less deadly tobacco products (which is why the nation’s largest cigarette maker supported the bill). As Bill Godshall of Smoke Free Pennsylvania notes, the bill “protects the most hazardous tobacco product (cigarettes) from market competition by the least hazardous (smokefree) tobacco products, as it:
* bans all new and recently introduced smokefree products, while keeping cigarettes on the market.
* deceives consumers to believe that smokefree tobacco products are just as hazardous as cigarettes
* prohibits industry from telling smokers that smokefree products are less hazardous than cigarettes
“Cigarettes are 100 times deadlier than smokefree tobacco products, but 85% of smokers incorrectly believe that smokefree tobacco products are just as hazardous as cigarettes. By switching to smokefree tobacco/nicotine products, smokers reduce their health risks by nearly as much as by quitting all tobacco/nicotine, and millions have already done so.”
So does this mean that Obama is also “carrying water” for the Pharmaceutical Industry? I think the answer must be yes. And this is just the beginning of the proof for Obama’s ascendency to “Pharmaceutical Whore-dom.”
Recently one of my favorite drug reform activists, Krystle Cole, “turned me on” to a new alternative to smoking cigarettes known as Electronic Cigarettes, or “E-Cigarettes.” You basically put a nicotine containing solution in the chamber and a small battery atomizes the nicotine into a vapor which you then inhale. As a result you inhale no tars, no nicotine and most importantly no Polonium 210 into your lungs. And the vapor that is exhaled is water vapor and not carboxylated organic matter, as in the case of real cigarettes. Many experts have noted that this device has also enabled many smokers to quit the habit. Yet as you will read, below, Obama has signed onto legislation that may very well ban the devices.
The FDA is now moving towards banning a smoking alternative that could save many lives. Every year, millions of smokers like my wife try and fail to quit, because they are nicotine addicts. Many later die of smoking-related illnesses, which are caused by the smoke, not the nicotine. The obvious solution is to give smokers access to less hazardous products that provide the nicotine they crave without the deadly smoke, like chewing tobacco, or, better yet, electronic cigarettes or snus. (Electronic cigarettes, also known as e-cigarettes, deliver nicotine in a vapor instead of much more harmful tobacco smoke).
The FDA is now moving towards banning e-cigarettes, reports syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum. Cigarettes, which contain lots of toxins and cancer-causing agents, aren’t banned, but the FDA wants to ban e-cigarettes, which contain infinitely-smaller amounts of carcinogens, complaining that e-cigarettes contain “detectable levels of known carcinogens and toxic chemicals to which users could potentially be exposed” (emphasis added).”
As public-health expert, and tobacco-industry critic, Michael Siegel notes, this is terrible reasoning by the FDA, since all tobacco replacement products now on the market contain small but “detectable” amounts of known carcinogens. The FDA used to be more reluctant to block smoking alternatives that have small or imaginary risks, but that seems to be changing over the last year.
A bill supported by the nation’s largest cigarette maker that was signed into law earlier this year by Obama will keep producers of smokeless tobacco from truthfully telling smokers about the fact that smoking is more dangerous to their health than smokeless tobacco. That will harm public health, as advocates like Bill Godshall of Smoke Free Pennsylvania have noted.
So if this has gotten you all “wee weed” up then I feel as if this article has served it’s purpose. If it hasn’t gotten you “wee weed” up then you are either “mentally challenged” or you simply don’t give a damn about maximizing the public health.
And the truth is it is even worse than I have portrayed it. Marijuana consumers could easily minimize their susceptibility to inhaling tars and carbon monoxide by using water pipes and vaporizers. Vaporizers are like glorified electric cigarette lighters with a built in thermostat. They heat the herb just enough to liberate the THC thereby eliminating any of the tar containing smoke associated with smoking a joint or a pipe.
But the real smoking gun is the fact that Obama would criminalize a plant as safe as Marijuana while promoting one of the most dangerous plants known to man. Of course this is mainly because the government and the tobacco industry allow tobacco to be infested with cancer causing Polonium 210. And to make things even worse he secretly promotes the most harmful method for consuming nicotine: smoking cigarettes.
If Obama really gave a damn about the American people he would be doing the following things immediately, concerning Tobacco and Marijuana:
(1) Promote the use of safer methods for consuming nicotine and THC, such as vaporizers and E-Cigarettes.
(2) Immediately ban the use of Polonium containing Phosphate fertilizers in the farming of tobacco.
(3) Revoke the 62 cent Federal Tax on cigarettes which he signed into law in early 2009. This constitutes an unfair and regressive tax upon the poor: a group he was supposedly concerned about before he won the election.
But as more and more Americans are discovering with each passing day, Obama doesn’t really give a damn about the American People. He has shown us that reality through his handling of the economy, the unemployed and just about every other issue I can think of. Why would his handling of Tobacco and Marijuana be any different.
The sad truth is that Obama really did have a chance to push forward “change” that average Americans could believe in. Unfortunately he decided to push forward the interests of the Global Elitists instead. All I can say is that it is not too late for him to change course. And should he not change course, it is also not to late for us to rise up and take this country back from the transnational elitists that put him in office in the first place.. And from the raised voices, at the local town hall meetings, I have a feeling that is already in the works.
Finally, a word to all of the cigarette smokers out there. Don’t become one of the 420,000 smoking deaths each year by continuing to smoke cigarettes. Consider smoking E-Cigarettes instead. Plus by doing this you will be robbing the cigarette industry which has historically opposed Marijuana Re-Legalization through support of “Anti-Marijuana” groups such as DARE and Partnership for a Drug Free America.
By Bruce Cain
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