Marlboro Cigarettes Celebrate 50 Years Of Injury And Death To The Public

As a result of tobacco lawsuits, Philip Morris has been backed into a reluctant educational campaign to inform the public of the wide swarth of injury and death that their products create. Now this campaign is being put on a back burner with a highly organized "celebration" of Marlboro's 50th anniversary as a brand of cigarettes. Very regretably, many top musicians such as John Mellencamp, Lenny Kravitz, Marc Anthony and other top acts will provide Marlboro concerts in New York, Chicago, Louisville and Miami.

This is completely outrageous and unacceptable. It only encourages young people to smoke and to enter the cycle of nicotine addiction and either cause injury and death to themselves, or to others. 50 million Americans still smoke. They injure themselves or others with secondhand smoke.

According to an official release from Philip Morris USA: "Public health officials have concluded that secondhand smoke from cigarettes causes disease, including lung cancer and heart disease, in non-smoking adults, as well as causes conditions in children such as asthma, respiratory infections, cough, wheeze, otitis media(middle ear infection) and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In addition, public health officials have concluded that secondhand smoke can exacerbate adult asthma and cause eye, throat or nasal irritation".

Is 50 years of any product that causes injury or death to both users or nonusers any cause for celebration? My own mother is a lifelong nonsmoker. Her allergy problems were made into asthma and then emphysema all caused by secondhand smoke. She has breathing difficulties and has to spend $300 many weeks on medications to remain alive. Smokers have complelely destroyed her life and will be her eventual cause of death. Whether riding the bus to work or having to avoid backroom smokers at her work, she has faced serious injury and suffering so smokers could smoke for many years. Now her retirement is spent on huge medical bills and difficulty breathing as a reward for what smokers did to her while waiting for a bus to or from work, or eating lunch at work.

I have serious genetic disorder autoimmune health problems. I have a blood disorder which weakens my heart and lungs and can cause death by this weakening. Halloween day I was unwillingly subjected to secondhand smoke 5 times that day. Once while just walking outside to walk the dogs a few feet around my home. A few minutes later going to the hardware store. A couple minutes late again buyng gas at the gas station. Then twice Halloween night as a neighbor decided he must smoke in front of children "trick or treating" and that blew accross the street to me. I was so sick Halloween evening I nearly needed to be hospitalized. The secondhand smoke creating painful burning sensation all through my ears and sinuses that in turn created serious respiratory problems by morning. Cigarette poisoning is a serious issue that destroys my entire quality of life.

I'm not allowed walk through grocery store parking lots without holding breath or breathing through papertowels because of so much parking lot secondhand smoke. I have to be careful with my car defroster not to suck cigarette air from outside into my car. On a day when it is 90 or even 100 degrees, I have to drive with my windows rolled up with no air conditioning because secondhand smoke from traffic can go right into my car.

In Istanbul, Turkey 7 out of 10 children in a major hospital for ear surgery due to chronic ear infections were found to have a chemical that indicated nicotine in their urine from secondhand smoke that was thought to have caused their very painful and expensive health problems. And as noted above, SIDS has a strong connection to secondhand cigarette smoke. A small baby cannot tolerate the 4,000 poisons and heavy metals in cigarette smoke and exposure to secondhand smoke cause an overdose of poisons and kills many babies each year by cigarette poisoning.

It is absolutely outrageous that Philip Morris celebrates 50 years of marketing a product that has ruined the lives of numerous nonsmokers, limited their ability to even walk outside their home, or to walk into a store to buy a few groceries. Philip Morris deserves a tidal wave of lawsuits from nonsmokers who have had their lives destroyed by having secondhand smoke forced on them when they already have significant breathing problems to deal with. Cigarette smoking is a great moral evil that harms user and nonuser alike. All public smokng should be banned, and any smoking in the presense of children should be prosecuted as child abuse. Surely Philip Morris can find another business to profit from. Dealing in creating nicotine drug abuse in 50 million Americans, creating big health bills and injures or deaths to nonsmokers are hardly any grounds for celebration by Philip Morris. And celebrations of this 50 year legacy of a public health crisis created by a greedy profit driven company are absolutely unacceptable and immoral. Tobacco executive should face one public trial after another for their criminal conspiracy to create a public drug addiction and expensive life-destructive health crisis in America solely to profit.