An anti-smoking activist named Joe Cherner sends around happy e-mails about the latest towns in the nation (even non-existent ones such as "Whitehorse, Alaska") to go "smoke free". (See www.smokefree.org )

A recent message is typical: "Last week, Bridgewater and Dedham (MA) joined more than 80 other Massachusetts jurisdictions in requiring a safe, healthy, smokefree workplace for ALL workers, including bar and restaurant workers." Cherner invariably emphasizes "ALL", to convince people that he is a swell guy, a regular Mother Jones, who opposes workplace discrimination. He rises even to righteous defense of bartenders or pool hall clerks who will be "protected," unwillingly, from their own cigs.

This is all presented as the most wholesome of endeavors, as if Greenpeace and the Wobblies united in opposition to the evil cigarette cartel to demand "clean air" and "safe work conditions". (Use of this progressive-sounding rhetoric, incidentally, indicates that there may be more public support for environmental protections and workers' health than mainstream media let on.)

However, a peek behind this "healthy," "concerned," "anti-discrimination" curtain reveals so many troubling issues and questions that one can only conclude that the entire "anti-smoking" crusade is a fraud; a massive liability dodge created for the benefit not of smokers, secondhand smokers or workers but for the broad cigarette cartel itself.

We are offered the fake crumb of having "fresh air" (if you don't consider industrial chemical and heavy metal toxins, etc.) in indoor places but we lose honest science, medicine, governing and law in the deal. This would not be the first time that US laws were created, using "for our protection" excuses, for the benefit of private industry, to the detriment of the public.

It is surprising that so many accept this "protect the workers" stuff. We are in a time where work safety regulations are being cut or ignored, workers' health care is cut or eliminated, workers' privacy is invaded, and overtime pay is becoming a thing of the past. Yet we are to believe that the same government officials who tolerate and cause all this are now "concerned" about workers' health in bars and bowling alleys.

It is important to note the language. Take this Cherner line, for example: "Tobacco smoke causes disease." We assume that as a given...only because the statement has been made 90 billion times in the commercial media and by corporate-linked officials and corporate-linked medical professionals. Who asks if he means plain tobacco smoke or smoke from highly adulterated cigarettes? Who asks what diseases does plain tobacco smoke cause? Who asks even for a bit of evidence? The trouble is...no documentation about the harms of tobacco has yet to be introduced in any court or legislature. What has been introduced, instead, is a heap of incomplete information from compromised scientific and medical sources about something quite different...namely, highly-processed, multi-ingredient, pesticide-contaminated, chlorine-contaminated, dioxin-delivering, radioactive (from certain tobacco fertilizers), addiction-enhanced, burn-accelerant-containing smoking concoctions that, in some cases, may contain no tobacco at all. At this point, a typical cigarette is far less "tobacco" than the New York Times is a Pine Tree...though newsprint may indeed be made from tree pulp.

It is the cigarette industry that, for marketing and liability-dodging reasons, wants it to be called "tobacco", as if it's just the natural plant that has been used in the Americas for the last ten thousand years. Far, far from it. No valid opponent of this industry would let them get away with this lie.

Are there any risks from using even the purest organic tobacco? Probably...but, the risks of uncontaminated tobacco are barely, if at all, studied in order to validate any public interest prohibitionary law. Doubtlessly, if there were studies of tobacco (itself) to compare to the studies of typical cigarettes, they would expose the scope of reckless mass endangerment caused by the spiked products peddled by cig makers.

Despite lack of evidence, despite "studies" of cigarettes that do not even so much as define or analyze the products being studied, despite the fact that some cigarette adulterants (primarially chlorine) are already known to cause diseases identical to what are called "smoking related" diseases...we are told to convict tobacco...in All-American fashion, without a trial. All the many hundreds of non-tobacco adulterants are to be ignored, no matter how indisputably dangerous and deadly.

Cigarette makers benefit by this approach. It keeps any criticism, or prosecution or liabilities to an absolute minimum. They are no worse than Sitting Bull, perhaps, passing a pipe around the campfire circle. They are not charged with adding untested, often known toxic and carcinogenic substances, usually in top-secret, to the products.

Cigarettes contain many pesticide residues, some chlorine chemicals that when burned produce dioxin, a known human carcinogen and cause of a host of diseases. It's the stuff of Agent Orange. It's only from man-made (Dow-developed) chlorine, not possible from tobacco or any plant. The US even signed a treaty to globally phase-out dioxin and 11 other of the worst industrial pollutants. That's how bad it is.

There's roughly 1000 different non-tobacco ingredients from which cigarette makers select their secret recipes. Not one ingredient or combination of ingredients has been tested for safety in this use. Some are known to be toxic or cancer-causing or to become so when burned. No matter...it's all legal...and no warnings are provided.

To make matters worse, addiction-enhancing substances are added to increase smoking, sales, and regressive sales-taxes. For the same reason, burn-accelerants are included so that the products will burn up faster and won't self-extinguish. To attract the kids, a virtual candy-store of sweet, flavorful and aromatic additives is included. Soothing things are also added to short-circuit one's natural defenses against irritation.

We are not just talking about "big tobacco" or cigarette makers here. This is about big oil and pharmaceuticals who supply the tobacco pesticides. It's about pharmaceuticals that also supply unlabeled ingredients such as artificial sweeteners, preservatives, extracts, aromas, and all sorts of things. This is about the paper industry, including pulp and logging. It's about the huge chlorine cartel, chemical-intensive agribusiness, adhesives (for the paper and filters), the fertilizer mining industry, big sugar (Marlboros contain 12.3% sugar [Wall St. Journal]) and even the candy industry...with all the added chocolate, cocoa and licorice, etc. And...it's about all of their insurers and investors...noting that the insurance industry is the top investment entity on Wall Street.

Instead of ordering about five or six CEOs of the top cigarette firms to cease and desist contaminating products with any non-tobacco substances, government officials go the expense and trouble of creating a massive enforcement system to focus on the millions of smokers in the country. Insane. It's like swatting each and every fly, but leaving the garbage.

Workers and public health activists must consider that diseases that may be caused by toxins or carcinogens on the job (or around homes) are all too easily blamed on "smoking", if the victim happens to smoke or live with smokers. Thus, evidence of management work safety violations and other industrial pollution crimes can be erased. If smoking is prohibited for workers, even off-duty (as is happening here and there), what will the agents of the corporatocracy blame next? Perhaps "bad diet" or "bad genes". They won't blame themselves.

To borrow Cherner's rhetoric, we need to protect ALL workers, including those in bars, pool halls, and restaurants, from ALL toxic/carcinogenic industrial substances whether they are in cigarettes or any other product or process. And, we need to protect the rights of ALL workers to know what they are eating, drinking, breathing, or smoking...and to protect the rights of ALL workers to compensation for reckless or knowing industrial harms.