A Detailed Dissertation on Tobacco Perception and Proliferation

Tobacco Power Theory

• Process
• Process assessment
• Campaign
• Tobacco and the media
• Tobacco, sport and art-sponsoring
• Tobacco and political systems
• Conclusion and recommended solutions
• Professional and statistical information resources

One: Process

Smoking pandemic is the most common danger for humanity. Objectively, smoking causes the death of every fifth person who dies in Europe. In the 20th century, this childhood disease caused more people in Europe to die than all war conflicts together, that means 100 million people. In the 21st century the number of victims will have reached 1 billion. In 1999 tobacco killed apparently about 4 million people.

The age when one smokes his or her first cigarette is between 8-15. The average age for children to start smoking was 12 years in 1993, and 11,8 in 1998 (Czech Republic). The majority of all smokers, that means 8 out of 9, starts smoking when they are younger than 18. Children are also the target group of tobacco advertising. The estimated life value of a 12 years-old-child who becomes addicted to smoking is 66 000 USD, that is the money that a smoker generates for tobacco the industry in the course of his or her life.

Even without any information about smoking available, more than 70% of adult smokers in Europe are willing to give up smoking, but they are not able to manage to quit without any asistence and without the existence of an anti-smoking social climate. As a result, there has been an increasing number of child smokers who have become the basic and conditional factor of the pandemy.

Two: Process Assesment

Smoking is undoubtedly the most significant individual (but when taking a simple preventative action a problem to be easily solved) cause of death on the planet. Cigarettes are the only consumption product that, when used following the instructions, causes serious health damage and death for every other smoker without having any single social or individua benefit. A smoker spends a month salary a year on cigarettes. Running this business is contradictory to anything that a democratic society claims, and there is an unconditional need to block free information flow television, radio, newspapers, magazines.

Three: Campaign

Having in mind that only a minimum of smokers start smoking in adulthood, tobacco advertising is targeted at young, child smokers. It is said to be the childhood disease, having diagnosis number F 17.2,3 ( CR), because smoking is functional and effective through child smokers entirely. It is presumed that only a child is not able to evaluate this disease with all its consequences and only a child starts smoking to become ill in adulthood not because of his or her choice, but due to heavy addiction to tobacco.

Smoking, that means per oral absorption, or inhaling the drug guides to other experiments. Only an insignificant number of hard drug addicts are non-smokers. It is generally known that a person who does not smoke will not accept a marijuana cigarette. Similarly, aggressive tobacco advertising and blocking tobacco information cause a neglecting social climate, in which young people neglect reality and fail to stop self-damaging. The neglecting approach is applied later to their sexual life and their own internal process of structuring their hierarchy of values.

Four: Tobacco and the Media

Tobacco advertising and promoting strategies are obviously at a sophisticated level of any top secret information agency featuring all necessary atributes. Tobacco is historically the best censor of all times. It effects all state systems, though it has been known as the most disastrous drug in the world since the 1950s. Tobacco causes more degenerative harm to the press community and all free resources than any totalitarian system ever has.

Simply said: It must be a kind of art to let tobacco prosper in a society that claims to be based on principles respecting human life. Though tobacco kills every fifth person, the journalists create an impression of caring for people. It is absurd to see television crews and reporters investigate and chase any kind of unfairness, while tobacco as a main source of world diseases and as the major killer in human society is being totally neglected.

The current situation is not the outcome of tobacco non-existence, it is rather the outcome of the absence of any objective reflection on tobacco phenomenon in the media. Due to income generated from tobacco resources all the media except the internet, which is used to promote tobacco in totalitarian systems, too, have been sterilized entirely.

Tobacco features all attributes of any demagogical religion sect, which regresses human society because of a huge, accumulated capital. If anybody runs a business by killing people through misleading advertising campaigns and through sponsoring every fifth person in the world, it is obvious that one needs to manipulate the media as well as the public, that one needs to develop a thoughtful and functional manipulative strategy.

That is why tobacco producers love funding different sorts of charities. They sponsor Chritmas concerts inviting popular actors and talk-show speakers. They fund theatre performances using a targeted strategy at those who create public opinion in a society while eliminating any possible disobedience. The methods used are the same as the ones used by nazis and communists. People are allowed to say anything except the truth that they are controlled by a totalitarian society the society under a tobacco control. The fact that people are not aware of being controlled and that they even are not willing to change the society through the law enforcement, which is one of their civil rights, is the outcome of an alarming situation. Such a social change should imply a veracious evaluation of a consumption genocide targeted entirely at children.

Tobacco likes any totalitarian system, in which it can be a parasite on the state censorship and where it does not face any risk of being judged or spending much on sponsoring. An ideal society for tobacco industry is a society where free information sources are denied. Tobacco industry with its dominant social and political influx is ineterested in neither democratic developments in the world nor friendship among nations.

Five: Tobacco, Sport and Art

Smoking is an irrational habit, exclusively based on advertising aimed at children who copy a model. Throughout years the habit becomes a difficult physical and psychosocial addiction to cigarettes. It is a rite that changes a cigarette into a smokers's partner in many years of degeneration. That is also a brilliant tobacco strategy. We can observe advocating a tyrant by a victim, a phenomenon seen in totalitarian systems and fanatical religious sects. When a smoker refers any warning against child smoking to himself and that is considered as a personal attack or as another anti-smoking campaign the syndrome is seen as the outcome of a sterile media environment and a lack of any information. This is a way that tobacco pretends to not be a childhood disease. A very common answer heard from politicians when being asked why they do not stop child smoking is the following sentence: I don"t like being limited, and whatsmore I myself quit.

Eventually, the evidence is being turned upside down. If smoking had been an outcome of a free choice, why would 80% of smokers themselves later have considered their own choice as a wrong one That fact does not seem to be proof of a free choice; it is proof of tobacco s child abuse. That fact proves chidren s immaturity, seeking security and their own self.

Tobacco and Film

The film industry is the main tool promoting smoking and it is the most dangerous one. The tobacco industry funds film making in two ways. It sponsors the entire projects through its own or its daughter's firms, including the agency strategies.

A smoking actor or actress is paid without the producer revealing that the film may cause tragic and absurd situations. In order to pass a personal and artistic message film makers (without being aware of consequences) promote smoking among hundred thousands of young people. It has been proven that just one internationally successful film has made several thousand children smoke. There is serious concern that the real figure has been several times higher.

A film helps people dream about their success. It brings out emotions and feelings of harmony. A film helps people pursue their dreams and it helps people relax in their hard everyday life. Very often viewers see a brilliant film and the main hero ( he or she is always a positive character even when he or she acts in a negative way) smokes. Children will later stop admiring negative heroes, but they will not be able to change their smoking habits.

Children leave the cinema with a feeling of wanting to do something good and with the intentions to copy what they have seen. That is often very difficult to do in a real life and as a result children identify themselves with the heroes through smoking. Combining film and television promotion of smoking with targeted tobacco campaigns is undoubtedly causing deaths, including all health issues and social aspects of death. Tobacco abuses TV in a similar way. In young, post-communist European countries in many TV productions smoking is presented as an admirable habit. Their main role is to promote smoking among young children. In TV tobacco has its own fans who are paid to reason why TV does not broadcast TV shots on tobacco harm or who are paid for showing popular politicians with cigarettes in TV news. There is no better way to advertise tobaccco. One does not need to own his or her TV channel, and whatsmore one cannot even own a state. There is an obvious presumption that tobacco has its own channels in all media and it affects the key media positions.

Key Positions

Every betting agency knows that any football match can be lost by one player who plays in a team, that means by one eleventh of the team the same way the tobacco industry knows that its influence at key positions in TV productions or magazine editorials help promote tobacco through hidden advertising, to advertise non-reflection, that means to slow down the information flow. Based on a lot of analyses, free tobacco information flow would lead to people giving up their smoking entirely within a life span. Tobacco campaigns show their own absurdity.

One can imagine a good-quality magazine for both men and women. Most reporters working there will be honest and open people who will present social life with a high reflection of reality. However, there is one person, or two people who work in the marketing. As a result the magazine will end up with blocking free information about tobacco, very often without letting the editor know about their marketing strategies. Thus a reliable and respectful magazine, a big promoter of good moral principles, speeds up social deterioration by tobacco. Such a model is frequent and dangerous. That is why the tobacco industry avoids legal advertising. If you are forced to buy goodwill, your censors will become your enemies at the very moment when you stop paying.

Six: Tobacco and Political Systems

The tobacco industry has been so far the most dangerous known form of terror. The tobacco industry has known for fifty years that tobacco causes every other person's death accompanied with unimaginable suffering. In spite of that the advertising system makes people, especially children believe that tobacco is their good friend and tobacco industry funds various sport and social activities.

A special attention is paid to automobile races and its linkage with tobacco. The strategy is ingenious. Tobacco money is invested in the most meticulous racing cars ever made. Formula one racers are worshipped absolutely by young people. However, the worshipped racers are used to cover up the most disastrous genocide in human history killing by tobacco.

Children admire fast cars and the racers. But, unfortunately, through car racing tobacco products are offered to children, because tobacco symbolizes their identification with their heroes. Children would not believe that their heroes who raced fast cars and who were symbols of fairness if they knew that the same heroes recruited millions of new tobacco victims. However, that is very true.

Bernie Eccleston faced a difficult situation in the British Parliament when well-prepared law makers asked him a simple question: "What does tobacco industry buy from Formula One for 200- 300k GBP per year?" We think that it buys its victims, children who are attracted to tobacco through a perfectly thought-out campaign with Formula One.

The advertising is so meticulous, that even democratic politicians often meet tobacco tycoons and discuss the taxes with them. They try to prevent them from addressing children in their campaign.

We can see a paradox in a situation when, if a judge had been meeting a sadist murderer out of jail and if the judge had been consulting the measures taken against the murderer and what punishment the murderer should have been sentenced to or what target group the murderer should have been focused on. Or if a judge had been begging the murderer to leave out children or avoid addressing them.

There are contradictory views about whether the powerful tobacco lobby pushes post-communist countries to accelerate the EU accession, because it may think that there will be less risk of some EU member disobedience through central EU beaurocracy. It will also lower the advertising and marketing costs.

I personally consider tobacco as a uniting element for the EU. The EU legislative procedures do not pass any bills to stop childhood smoking. Instead the legislature proposes various compromising bills which will more or less tolerate tobacco in the futur and which do not lead to solutions to health problems caused by tobacco.

Surprisingly, they seek ways for poorer people to be able to buy tobacco products. If the EU does not expressively decry tobacco pandemic it will be considered as absolutely untrustworthy. The hectic integration of the EU may be believed as being sponsored by powerful tobacco lobbyists. They personally intervene in the tobacco issue and that is why this work will land on EU beaurocrats desks.

Any integration in order to enhance the national security and the economic development is desirable. However, if the EU does not take a firm attitude to the tobacco business and to the quick solution of the fast expanding pandemic, it is unlikely to become a trustworthy institution. The EU might unknowingly help the tobacco industry through additional legislative actions which would apply to all members and thus the countries would not be able to cope with the anomaly individually.

It is important to say that tobacco business is in most countries absolutely illegal on the grounds of their own legislatures. If in any country a Minister of the Health Department just sends a message to tobacco consumers saying: smoking kills he or she should be charged with a crime! If such a person has evidence available, and in this case such evidence is available otherwise the tobacco industry would have sued the minister for damaging its business through the above mentioned message- then, on the grounds of the civil obligations as well as on the grounds of his or her political responsibilitie, the minister shall take a legal action against such a business, and consequently ban the goods distribution and provide distribution of the medicine for ill people.

The tobacco disease issue can be solved by one team at the Health Departments within several months, including redisdtribution of tobacco as medicinal treatment to current smokers. Only tobacco propapaganda has made us believe throughout long years of brainwashing that there is no solution. There is a very effective one.

At the moment when Health Departments solve tobacco disease, huge material resources will be released as 30-40% of hospital beds patients are tobacco victims and the treatment costs represent the same percentage. It is estimated that doctors' salaries and hospital staff salaries may rise three times in the course of five years after the disease is eradicated and that will be only costs saved on medical drugs. The number of doctors will not drop necessarily, and what will be improved, are the material and social conditions for both patients and doctors. That is how the health systems will save financial funds dramatically! In a long term period (30 years) every third hospital bed will not be needed. Treatment for tobacco patients employs 30% of all pharmaceutical and medical facilities in the world at minimum!

There are many reason to believe that the Tobacco Japan concern's strategy is to ensure exclusive rights in their contracts in the future in order to sell vaccines to heal lung cancer through biotechnological companies. (Lung cancer is one of fatal diseases caused, almost entirely, by smoking, because statistically 90 % of lung cancer is caused by smoking and what's more, every third tumor, not only in smokers bodies, is caused by childhood disease - smoking). Helen Wallace from the British foundation GeneWatch says: To provide a tobacco company with the exclusive rights to sell lung cancer vaccines would be the same as if Count Dracula were appointed director of the blood bank.

It is likely that the tobacco industry has invested in many health and pharmaceutical programmes. The tobacco industry that has killed several decade innocent victims while you are reading this paper is aware of the medical treatment price. To combine the practice of making money on killing people by tobacco and and cudiny tobacco patients would have a more disastrous effect for the mankind than a nuclear conflict. The basic conditions for tobacco companies managers at all levels involves ability not to judge. If anybody uses his or her creativity to carry out consumers genocide such a person cannot be considered a sensible human being oriented to self-assessment and to self-reflection. We cannot excuse those people as acting not knowingly. The tobacco industry has its own laboratories and research teams that can be compared to nazi laboratoriem. Even worse. The Nazi regime did not fund charity concerts and children were not its targe group. The tobacco industry seeks how to make money on killing consumers and it creates such a social environment only to keep the anomaly function and to invest in curing programmes without being ashamed and without any self-reflection. In case of war we would be talking about the most serious crime. And there is a war.

While a free, democratic society teaches people how to work with 21st century technologies and how to act responsibly with the respect to life and with a strong awareness of what is good and what is bad, applying independent judgemental skills, the toabcco industry is interested in the opposite. It is aimed at teaching people not to identify basic dangers, while teaching them how to use modern technologies. This discrepancy is evident in the entertainment industry and, unfortunately, in the school systems. It has a harmful impact on children and the youth bacause the family life has been replaced by the educational and entertainment media. The more attractive ones are totally under the influence of tobacco concerns.

The tobacco philosophy claims: Enjoy your life and smoke cigarettes that will ruin your life day by day, and that will kill you eventually. Pretend there is not any contradiction there. Such a contradictory attitude has been being applied to social and governing systems for decades. The tobacco industry strategie prevent the society from healthy developments and it replaces true matters by the faked world that teaches people not to be responsible for themselves. It leads people and the youth towards emotional insusceptibilty and it raises the generation of smart idiots.

There is a Langer that, consequently, there will be a group of people who use their brains to run technologies, but who do not distinguish what is right and what is wrong, acting without any reponsibilities for their actions. However, those people will have a frustrating impact on differently thinking groups in the society. Those are not willing to give up their moral standards. It is almost impossible for non-smoking communities to break down the well-thought information barriers in the society as those barriers are built up being funded by enormous tobacco capital.

There is a hypothesis that assumes that banning tobacco advertising and opening smoking issues to debate will open new information channels and communities resources. Not only will this lead to huge budget savings in national health systems, but it will remove information censorship of tobacco. Generally said, opening the tobacco issue debate will help compensate the deepest psychological complex of human beings.

Tobacco annomaly cannot be legally accepted any longer and its distributors cannot use their common manipulating strategy implying the impossibility to ban smoking. The strategy uses an old paradigma making people believe that as smoking has existed in human society for such a long time it cannot be removed. People have known since the 1950s that tobacco kills and that 30% of people are smokers. Do we assume that smokers are willing to commit suicide through tobacco? We believe that that is not true. We know that the tobacco industry abuses hidden strengths and has been developin its well thought demagogy. The tactics that has been used for a long time was introduced at the time when people were not aware of consequences coming out of smoking habit and the tobacco industry was excused for implementing consumers genocide. The more the tobacco strategy realizes its defeat, including strict legal punishment in the tobacco businesses the more aggressive tobacco advertising becomes.

The Tobacco Industry Makes Mistakes

If the tobacco industry had invested billions made on consumers genocide in the 1950's it could have left the business world and it could have stayed extremely powerful. Nevertheless, the tobacco businesses went on and knowingly harmed people and lied to their own consumers, because smoking is not only physically, but psychologically harming. The tobacco industry made people all over the world believe that the ultimate world danger is understimated and it has even been legalized. The tobacco industry managed to prevent people from sensible assessing how the tobacco effects the society.

Hovewer, the tobacco industry initiated a domino effect. We can expect that broken information barriers will force the tobacco industry to retreat. In three five years tobacco distributors are likely to be charged with crime. The trials will resemble the war crime tribunals, even though we believe that tobacco genocide is much worse because tobacco has killed more people than wars and local conflicts have.

Seven: Conclusion

Any tolerance to the tobacco distribution and the tobacco businesses targeted at minors will ruin totally both stable and unstable political and economic systems resulting in the destruction of the social and civic society.

The target group of the tobacco industry are not only victims, smokers and-non smokers who share the same environment that is remarkably affected by tobacco. This work does not only deal with the health issues in the tobacco matter, it reminds us that non-smokers die due to smoking, too. Tobacco have caused more childhood deaths than all accidents put together have. In this paper I have not focused on what has been known, that means on the fact that tobacco has been the most damaging drug in history. I have focused on the context of tobacco and smoking. The tobacco industry has three enemies and all of them meet legal and social requirements. I have listed the following precautions to stop spreading tobacco pandemic:

1. Enforce law on banning minors from smoking. Currently the law bans minors from buying tobacco only.
2. Ultimate and immediate actions to ban tobacco advertising and tobacco sponsoring. Immediate legal actions against smoking in public. Do not wait for tobacco industry and its contracts to empire. If an immediate action is not taken now the tobacco industry will attract more children to smoking. Who has made up that the tobacco industry should have expiration time to stop advertising? Such a condition is perverted. Had been tobacco products healthy goods it would have been advertised legally.
   However, we knot that tobacco is a drug that cause consumers deaths and that is why tobacco advertising is illegal. How is it possible that in some countries TV commercials on tobacco are legal, while in others they are illegal? The tobacco industry does not want to advertise on the TV because a TV station may reveal the tobacco industry intentions which may result in open discussion on the tobacco issue. That would cause another domino affect. The tobacco industry will collapse in a similar way as communism did as it has limited its existence in an environment that is not able to confront the reality any longer. The domino fall of the tobacco empire is inenvitable, though the tobacco industry is trying to excuse its existence as the tobacco drug is needed for medical puposes.
3. Actions taken against the tobacco industry on the grounds of legal procedures.

It would be useful to have statistical figures about the time being spent on discussions about tobacco addiction in the media. It is absolutely necessary to remove taboo from the tobacco issues in the media in a legal way. If a state media is a registered by a company, the company shall reflect the danger number one, that means the pandemic of smoking on the legal grounds.

If the law abides the media to reflect the tobacco issues by ie. two hours weekly it surely will bring up its positive contribution. In the course of several months the tobacco issue will have been opened in the media, which will happen anyway, and that will lead to the world renaissance of the society.

If people manage to open public discussions about the tobacco industry they undoubtedly will experience the renaissance period as unstable and depressing environment is a subconscious issue. If all known media do not reflect the tobacco issue, it is clearly seen in the atmosphere of the society. To settle the tobacco issue means to stabilize positive peoples values. The biggest censor of all times will disappear and that will be reflected not only on the tobacco phenomenon.

Sources/Bibliography

Bila Kniha Kourení – Koalice proti tabaku CR, Bertollini R.: Health consequences. European Conference Smoke Free Workplaces, May 10-11, 2001, Berlin
Commision of European Communities: Cigarette taxes and price components of retail prices in EU members states at January 1999 for cigarettes of the most popular price category (EURO per 20 cigarettes)
Direktiva Evropské •nie 98/43 EC, Kralikovᬅ., Kozak,J., Nesnidal,P., Lichtenbergovᬊ.: Doctors and tobacco in the Czech Republic, 11th World Conference on Tobacco or Health, 2000
Peto R., Lopez A.D., Boreham J., Thun M., Heath C., Jr.: Mortality from smoking in developed countries 1950-2000
Smoking kills. A White Paper on Tobacco, The Stationary Office, 1998
Towsend J.L.: The role of taxation policy in tobacco control. In: Abedian I.,van der Merwe R., Wilkins N., Jha P.: The Economics of tobacco control. Towards an optimal policy mix. Univ.of Cape Town, 1998: s. 366

Martin Skapik is a journalist who has been studying and analyzing the phenomenon of tobacco production, management and promotion for over 15 years and writes independently on the effects of smoking on children.

Quit Smoking Now!