Global merchants of death
Tobacco has become a political issue in the 1996 presidential campaign.
First, Republican candidate Bob Dole, while speaking in a tobacco-growing state, said that many smokers never become addicted to nicotine. This is an obtuse and stupid lie. Many scientific studies show that nicotine is as addictive as cocaine and heroin, if not more so.
One recent study of the brain, for example, showed that nicotine, alcohol, cocaine, and heroin all stimulate the same area of the brain that produces sensations of pleasure, and that all create changes in the brain so that there is a need for the addictive substance in order not to feel depressed. The Clinton administration has ordered the Food and Drug Administration to issue guidelines saying that nicotine is addictive, and to prepare directives limiting tobacco advertising near schools.
So Clinton can appear on the "right" side of this debate.
But the whole issue goes far deeper than limiting advertising. (Also, the tobacco companies are preparing lawsuits against the FDA's proposed guidelines.)
The current issue of Scientific American is devoted to cancer. An article by three Harvard University specialists concludes, "More than half the cancer deaths in the U.S. — perhaps even 60 percent — can be attributed to tobacco smoke and diet. Smoking causes 30 percent of cancer deaths, making tobacco smoke the single most lethal carcinogen in the U.S."
The fact that the most prestigious popular science magazine in the United States can present these facts, yet the government can do so little to stop the epidemic, is a condemnation in and of itself of capitalist rule.
The great tobacco companies pour millions every year into the coffers of the two main capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans. (By the way, we should note that the names of both parties are a lie — neither is democratic or republican in the sense of representing the majority of the population, who work for a living.)
The articles in Scientific American also demonstrate that while smoking is declining in the US overall, it is increasing among women. Consequently, cancer rates are climbing among women.
Furthermore, US tobacco companies are freed from government restraints that apply in the US when exporting the cancer-causing substance. In fact, US government policy is to promote sales of US-produced cigarettes in other countries.
This is part and parcel of the "globalisation" of capital, which is really just a continuation and intensification of imperialism, where the biggest capitalists of the so-called advanced capitalist countries exploit the rest of the world.
An example is the company I work for, Union Oil of California. I work for its refinery in the San Francisco Bay Area. UNOCAL is trying to sell off its refineries, because they are less profitable than exploration and opening up of oilfields in the former republics of the defunct Soviet Union, or in the "Third World".
UNOCAL, for example is working hand in glove with the dictatorships in Burma and Indonesia to develop oilfields. In Burma, the dictatorship has used slave labour to build roads to UNOCAL drilling sites.
As this relates to the tobacco companies and the super-exploited countries, what it means is rising smoking rates and therefore rising cancer rates.