Being that I had made mentioned the deceptive tactics by Pro Advocates against smokers in the above article, I will back up that statement here and now. Myself and people I knew started smoking as teen-agers in the early 1950's because it was a normal thing to do. The worst we heard about smoking was that smoking might stunt your growth. During the early 50's, smoking was quite common. People smoked in movies, most entertainers smoked and there were popular songs about smoking. Cigarette smoking was quite literally everywhere. Mother's who had smoked while they were pregnant their babies all turned out fine. I can remember all the kids I knew and played with, most of those kids parents, their fathers and mothers smoked, and thay all turned out to be fine with no adverse effects. But ever since the early 1970's when the Pro Advocates against smokers started to really crank up their Anti-Smoking campaign, most people who smoke said very little about it. Then the Anti-Smoking Advocates against smokers got the Canadian Government directly involved and it used that excuse to gouge people who smoke with very unfair tax hikes on tobacco products. When that had little effect, the Anti-Smoking Lobby got doctors and Health Canada to help their cause. Here is what Health Canada claims; "Tobacco use causes many different kinds of cancer. Second-hand smoke can cause lung cancer among non-smokers. A Canadian dies every 12 minutes of a tobacco related disease. Tobacco smoke kills over 37,000 people in Canada each year. That's more than the total of all murders, alcohol-related deaths, car accidents and suicides". These statements by Health Canada are worse than being outrageously exaggerated, these are deliberate lies! I got this bit of rubbish directly from their web site. Here on this pie chart, it shows the persentage of hospitalization for lung cancer in the year 2000-01 to be 0.7%. Compare that to all the other forms of hospitalization, it is relatively low. Health Canada also claims that; "More than 37,000 people will die this year in Canada due to smoking. Of those, more than 300 non-smokers will die of lung cancer and at least 700 non-smokers will die of coronary heart disease caused by exposure to second-hand smoke. It is estimated that there are more than 4,000 chemicals in tobacco smoke and at least 50 of them have been proven to cause cancer". Then Health Canada contradicts itself when they also claim that "Although the amount of chemicals in each cigarette is small, it is cumulative with each puff of a cigarette. Breathing in second-hand smoke causes at least 800 deaths in Canadian non-smokers from lung cancer and heart disease every year. Lung cancer is the leading cause of death due to cancer in Canada. Smoking tobacco is the single most cause of lung cancer, accounting for 85% of all new cases of lung cancer in Canada". As you will see, most all of their claims are totally exaggerated or are false! We will debunk most of these claims in this article. As far as I can remember from history, all this Anti-Smoking Lobby made its first strong appearance when Protestant Christians had lost the battle against drinking alcohol. The Temperance Movement was behind this driving force during the 19th and early 20th century. It was organized to encourage complete abstinence in the consumption of intoxicating liquors. They tried to used Christian moral suasion to address the problem. The movement's ranks were mostly filled by women and Protestant fundamentalist ministers who, with their children in tow, had lobbied against drinking. In fact, alcohol was blamed for many of society's demerits. When their attemps failed to bring about a compleat ban on the drinking of intoxicating liquors, they got on a new bandwagon. This time it was against smoking. They had claimed that all lung cancer was the direct result from smoking tobacco products. The average person bought into that false claim from the Anti-Smoking Lobby groups without checking out the facts. What is a myth? In this case, a myth is a fiction or a half-truth in which Christians are really good at perpetuating. They have two thousand years of practice to refine their level of deception. It is the result of fase beliefs that people have been holding for a long time. Smoking also has some popular myths which was spread by these various Anti-Smoking Lobby groups. Some of the myth they spread are; Smoking and exposure to second-hand smoke is responsible for one in five deaths. People who smoke costs taxpayers $171.3M in direct health expenditures. Cigarette smoking causes a variety of life-threatening diseases, including lung cancer, emphysema, heart disease and Erectile Dysfunction. Indirect costs to the economy were tallied at a further $526 million each year. Where they got that figure from, they won't say. The Anti-Smoking Lobby groups are quick to point out that the decline in smoking was the results of their implementation of a comprehensive tobacco control strategy. Their latest round of initiatives, included changes to the Smoke Free Places Act and Tobacco Access Act. "It's not about how much money we spend on these Anti-Smoking campaigns, it's about the anti-smoking rules that we have already in place and the further plans we have to deal with smoking" stated Maureen Summers, who is the executive director of the Canadian Cancer Society's Nova Scotia chapter. She also said that her organization was recommending a doubling of the budget for the province's tobacco control strategy to about $4.7 million, a $5-per- capita tax increase. "Maybe we need to look at further tobacco tax increases, further interventions and further effective funding". It seems that it is her organization that is costing taxpayers a lot of money! Here are some other Smoking Myths; The news media have long portrayed the tobacco controversy as a struggle between greedy merchants of death and selfless defenders of the public health. The capitulation by the tobacco industry left the ground for debate narrower than ever, excluding anyone who thinks smoking is a matter of individual choice in which the government has no business in meddling. All the arguments about the nationwide settlement agreement with the capitulation by the tobacco industry went far enough helped conceal the true nature of the anti-smoking movement, which is an attempt by one group of people to impose their tastes and preferences on another. Tobacco's opponents try to hide their paternalism with a series of familiar myths that the tobacco industry's concessions reinforced:

Myth No1. The tobacco companies hid the truth about the hazards of cigarettes from the American public. Anti-smoking double-talk and warnings about the health risks of smoking go back hundreds of years. James I, in his 1604 Counterblaste to Tobacco, called smoking "a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the brain, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomlesse". (He was referring to the Christian belief of Hell). Persuasive half-baked, so-called scientific evidence of tobacco's hazards began to emerge in the early 1930s, done by non-smokers has received widespread attention since the '50s.

Myth No2. The tobacco companies concealed the addictiveness of cigarettes. The difficulty of giving up the tobacco habit has been common knowledge for centuries. James I's lord chancellor, Sir Francis Bacon, observed, "In our times the use of tobacco is growing greatly and conquers men with a certain secret pleasure, so that those who have once become accustomed thereto can later hardly be restrained therefrom." The 17th-century polemicist Johann Michael Moscherosch called smokers "thralls to the tobacco fiend," while Cotton Mather dubbed them "Slaves to the Pipe." Fagon, Louis XIV's court physician, described the tobacco habit as "a fatal, insatiable necessity -- permanent epilepsy."

Myth No3. People smoke because of advertising. There is remarkably little evidence that advertising plays an important role in getting people to smoke, as opposed to getting them to smoke a particular brand. The 1989 surgeon general's report conceded that "there is no scientifically rigorous study available to the public that provides a definitive answer to the basic question of whether advertising and promotion increase the level of tobacco consumption." Given the complexity of the issue, none is likely to be forthcoming in the forseeable future. The 1994 report, which focused on underage smoking, also acknowledged the "lack of definitive literature." None of the widely publicized studies that have appeared in recent years, including the much-hyped research on Joe Camel, actually measured the impact of advertising on a teenager's propensity to smoke.

Myth No4. Smoking imposes costs on society. Because Anti-smokers claim that smokers tend to die earlier than nonsmokers. If that were true, then the short-term costs of treating tobacco- related illness would be balanced, and probably would outweighed the cost, by savings on Social Security, nursing home stays and medical care in old age. In reality, early death is caused by wars, automobile accidents, water and air pollution and industrial accidents. Every analysis that takes such long-term savings into account concludes that their false claim on "social cost" cannot justify raising cigarette taxes . It is a well know fact that Health Canada, along with these Anti-smoking Lobby groups, tend to exaggerate, fudge and manipulate the data, the true facts, in order to support their false claims about smoking. How can anybody believe or trust what Health Canada and these Anti-smoking Lobby groups claim when they have been found to have deliberately lied to people?

Myth No5. Provincial Governments have a right to demand compensation from tobacco companies for the costs of treating smoking-related diseases under Medicare. This claim ignores the fact that non-smokers use the services of Medicare far greater than smokers. The exobatant Tobacco taxes already pay and cover any costs they supposedly impose upon themselves or others. And by that same logic, governments should sue the manufacturer of any product associated with disease or injury, including every kind of fatty foods, candy, firearms, swimming pools, trampolines, bathtubs, skateboards, bicycles, motorcycles and automobiles to name a few. The makers and consumers of such products should not be blamed because politicians decided to have Medicare, which was paid for by taxpayers' money. Who were at that time, the majority were smokers, when all this Medicare came into existance here in Canada. Non-smokers tend to forget that little bit of reality.

Myth No6. Secondhand smoke poses a grave threat to bystanders. The evidence concerning the health effects of secondhand smoke is less conclusive as any kind of evidence concerning the health effects of smoking. Research from non-smokers suggests that people who live with smokers for decades may face a slightly higher risk of lung cancer. According to one estimate, that is being put out, a nonsmoking woman who lives with a smoker faces an additional lung cancer risk of 6.5 in 10,000, which would raise her lifetime risk from about 0.34 percent to about 0.41 percent. Studies of ETS and heart disease, including the recently published results from the Harvard Nurses Study, report there is no evidence that casual exposure to secondhand smoke has any impact on your life expectancy. If secondhand smoke is really dangerous, smoking would have been banned everywhere a long time ago. But those claims were once again proven to be false. Almost all of the epidemiological claims made now about the health effects of second hand smoke relates to long-term exposure in the home. So they now attack smokers in their car or home when children are involved. They use childern to trample upon the invation of privet property rights. Yet business owners have property rights, too. Those property owners who are smokers should be allowed to have bars, nightclubs, restaurants, ect, for smokers only if they want to. Employees in these places would be smokers themselves. If the government respected people rights as expressed in the Constitution, property owners, potential employees and customers could patronize businesses which cater spicificly to smokers or non-smokers establishments. That would be the fairest thing to do, instead of imposing the will of one segment of soceity upon another. Secondhand smoke is merely a nuisance to non-smokers, and such a voluntary system is the most appropriate way to deal with the conflicting demands of smokers and nonsmokers. It allows for diversity and competition, rather than simply imposing the will of non-smokers on the majority who are smokers.

Myth No7. The tobacco companies have been secretly manipulating the nicotine in cigarettes to keep smokers hooked. Nicotine control was never a secret. Several brands of denicotined cigarettes were introduced as early as the 1920s. Claims of reduced tar and nicotine have been conspicuous since the 1950s, and the yields of each brand have been advertised since 1971. The very idea of a consistent nicotine yield for a given brand implies control, which cigarette manufacturers achieve through a variety of methods that have long been discussed in trade journals, books, and government reports.

Myth No8. Smoking is "a pediatric disease." Although most smokers start as teenagers, the vast majority are, in fact, adults. Smoking itself is a behavior "something people choose to do", it is not a disease. As then-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop noted in his 1984 speech calling for "a smoke-free society," smoking is a voluntary act: one does not have to smoke if one does not want to.

Myth No9. Once people have started smoking, nicotine addiction prevents them from stopping. This is so contrary to everyday experience that it's amazing politicians and anti-smoking activists can say it with a straight face. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are about as many former smokers in this country as there are smokers, and almost all gave up the habit on their own, without formal treatment -- usually by quitting cold turkey. Even while helping to perpetuate these myths, the tobacco companies only acknowledged the opinions of "public health authorities" and agreed to new warning labels (saying, among other things), that "Cigarettes are addictive" and "smoking can kill you". No one really believed them, anyway. Being that's the case, it's hard to see how there was any merit to the multitude of lawsuits that was brought upon the tobacco industry to the bargaining table in the first place.

Myth No10. A common myth about smoking assert that the lungs of smokers become brown or even black from years of accumulation of tars and goo. Not true, according to Wray Kephart. Mr. Kephart presently works as an engineer but he previously worked in a hospital, performing autopsies, most of which were paid for by insurance companies, seeking to determine whether the deceased committed suicide, or died from "natural causes". Kephart tells me that he's done approximately 1560 autopsies, and he's seen some strange things, such as the lungs of auto painters, which were "effectively sealed with catalyzed lacquers". Kephart insists, however, that it is normally impossible to tell, from autopsy, whether the deceased was or was not a smoker. Upon resection, the lungs are always clear, unless the deceased lived in a large city where there was significant industrial pollution. In that event, carbon deposits may be found, but these are unrelated to smoking. So the "brown lungs" myth is exactly that: a myth. Recently, a question was posed to Ed Uthman, M.D., a pathologist practicing in Dallas, TX. The question was whether a surgeon, at autopsy, could determine from an examination of the deceased's lungs, whether the deceased was or was not a smoker. Here is Dr. Uthman's response: I don't think one can tell if the deceased were a tobacco smoker or not by the appearance of the lungs. The absence of any black pigment suggests that the person was either a nonsmoker or a very light smoker. Heavy black pigmentation suggests that the person could have been a heavy smoker, or lived in a city with heavy particulate air pollution, or was a coal miner, or some combination of the three. The black pigment in question is elemental carbon, which most investigators believe to be inert in its effects on the lungs (although in the extremely heavy doses that coal miners usualy get, it do have a direct role in coal-workers lung disease). When I point these things out to anti-smokers, they frequently say, "But I've seen photographs of smoker's lungs that were shown to me in grade school, and they looked simply horrible." I've seen these photographs also, but they are phonies. A popular Internet web site features side by side photographs of two lungs. One is labeled "Smoker's lung - dead at 50". The other is labeled "Non-smoker’s lungs, alive at 70". The problem is simply that the photograph of the smoker's lung is a photograph of a lung ravaged by lung cancer; it is not a photograph of the lung of some smoker who died from some other disease. Therefore, even if the cancerous lung is from somebody who smoked, and the "healthy" lung is from somebody who did not, the photographs prove nothing except that cancerous lungs look different from non-cancerous lungs. Of course, both photographs are photographs of dead people's lungs, because it's not possible to take a photograph of the lung of a living person. Also, rather obviously, the photographs show the outside surface of the lungs. The outside surfaces of lungs are not exposed to either air or smoke; therefore, it would be impossible for smoke to stain those surfaces. Another myth, propagated by the anti-smoking crowd, is the notion that women who smoke while pregnant, or are subjected to "second hand" smoke, their babies will have drastic medical problems