Attention tourists:
Fort Wayne's Repressive
Smoking Ordinance
If you smoke, don't come to Fort Wayne, the City Council and the Mayor see you as an unwanted and unwelcome health hazard to their city, except for your tourist dollars, of course.
Convention leaders:
Why would you want to bring a convention into a city that sticks its nose way too far into the affairs of private citizens? How can your smoking members feel comfortable and relaxed in a city that sees them as but disgusting people? Go somewhere else.
Human behavior experiments:
Fort Wayne is a world test market and has been so for many decades. But the test products now include social experiments, such as the current smoking ban, to condition people to give up their civil rights at the government's discretion.
Click below for the new smoking ordinance:
http://www.kekiongapress.info/CitySmoke.html
From reasonable to outrageous
In 1998, City Council passed their first smoking ordinance, which mandated that restaurants independently ventilate smoking areas-- and many establishments spent $50,000 or more to comply. Now in 2007, the city council says that this is not good enough and that they have wasted their money in compliance with the old ordinance! (Shouldn't the city be sued for their expenses?) Somehow secondhand smoke on other smokers is not tolerable now. Worse still, is that the new ordinance goes into private businesses and tells them that they cannot even have separated and ventilated smoking rooms for their employees!
Leadership or dictatorship?
The only fair way to enact such an ordinance is to let the citizens vote on it themselves, instead of special interest group representatives and stooges, such as the city council and the mayor. Otherwise, it is not democratic but dictatorial behavior.
"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government--lest it come to dominate our lives and interests."
Patrick Henry
Whenever possible, the people should be allowed to govern themselves.
Civil rights, not smoke, the real issue
Read below how a federal judge caught the EPA fixing the outcome of a secondhand smoke study and how suppressed research shows that children of smokers not only do not have an increased risk of getting cancer, but develop a sort of immunity to it and have less risk of getting cancer than children of nonsmokers. At the very least, the hazards of secondhand smoke have been deliberately overstated for nefarious reasons.
At some point, a person must take a stand against the infringement of civil rights, because sooner or later, it will concern your private interests.
Links:
http://www.kekiongapress.bravehost.com/EPA.html
If you have been fired, disciplined, charged higher insurance rates, discriminated against because of smoking, contact this law firm:
http://www.cmht.com/investigation_smokers.php
... AND THEY CALL THIS SCIENCE! Sections Columnists Researchers Archives and Research Materials Special Reports Awards PROLOGUE May 4 - ...And they call this "science" - Nearly ten years ago FORCES began denouncing the passive smoke fraud. During this time we accumulated and put on line a vast amount of evidence. The crowning of our efforts to date is this new compendium, which does not just explain the Great Fraud in simpler than ever terms, but also makes available ALL the studies ever conducted on passive smoke and lung cancer/cardiovascular disease. All the original studies are downloadable, one by one or all together in zipped files. Statistical significance, authors, financing; it is all there, a quarter century of research on passive smoke — to prove what? Nothing, other that it is impossible to demonstrate that passive smoke is harmful. The evidence we supply is now complete — and we can support it with epidemiological consulting by professional epidemiologists in any courtroom anywhere in the world. Yet there are still those on our side who question the validity of the scientific approach as the one tool that can really put an end to this war on public smoking with the victory of liberty and truth. Business associations, lawyers, politicians, media persons — even tobacco executives and pro-choice activists are still largely ignorant of this statistical fraud/false representation of (junk) science, and thus question its effectiveness as a legal and political tool. Rather, they bring forward trite and worthless arguments such as local or general economic issues, freedom of personal choice, constitutionality, “cool” lifestyles, endless analyses of motivations and even antismoking psychology. Hold on! Those are not worthless arguments — have we gone insane? Not at all, but we have to face reality. In today’s enmeshed social values, it is unarguable that “health” is paramount in society. Whether that health is real or presumed has become utterly irrelevant — perception is all that matters. Thus, as long as the public perceives passive smoke as a public health threat, it will be closed and deaf to any other argument, no matter how important and fundamental, no matter the consequences. It follows that only when the perception of threat is removed by demonstrating the false representation of evidence is it going to be possible to have any other argument considered. Given the endless propaganda against smoking and the ensuing hysteria, almost the only place where it is possible to establish that the dangers of passive smoke are a fraud is in courtrooms. Of all the political/legal/cultural arguments against smoking prohibition and antismoking campaigns, however, the passive smoke fraud is what has been used the least — in fact, wielding the categories above is a stubborn refusal to use the only thing that would succeed. Why is this? The list of speculations is endless, but one is worth mentioning: those angered by anti-tobacco coercion believe the lies disseminated from the authorities they fear: Somewhere down deep, they believe that smoking is bad, and passive smoking must be bad also — or, at least, the fraud and ensuing prohibition is what it takes "to make them quit" such a "bad habit". So, they refuse to educate themselves using the excuse that "fighting the science is not gonna work", forgetting that it is not science, but junk science. In that way they don’t have to challenge the health authorities and endanger the very structure that oppresses them, but that they believe in nevertheless. On the other hand they don’t like prohibition, thus they keep on fighting (and losing) with the same blunt weapons hoping that one day it will "go away". It will not, unless it is forcefully uprooted at the base, which once again is the junk science. Of course, antismokers wisely refuse to engage their adversaries on scientific grounds, as they know quite well that they would not stand a chance in a scientific debate, and they make sure that their opponents also believe that the scientific weapon is useless! So, here we have a war unilaterally declared — thus an aggression — where the attacked defend themselves with whine and blunt weapons, keep on missing the targets, and are afraid to win by using the only real weapon they have. How ironic. Welcome to Heartland's Smoker's Lounge! Welcome to the Smoker’s Lounge, the place to go for sound science, economics, and legal commentary on tobacco issues. This “issue suite” cuts through the propaganda and exaggeration of anti-smoking groups by giving you access to the best available research and commentary from scores of independent research organizations, publications, and government sources. This essay presents an overview of the controversy over tobacco control, with links to documents in HTML and PDF formats available from PolicyBot, the free electronic clearinghouse of free-market research and commentary that also resides on The Heartland Institute’s Web site. You can go directly to the “Smoking” topic in PolicyBot and search for documents without the assistance of this essay by clicking here. Everywhere you look, anti-smoking groups are campaigning against smokers. They claim smoking kills one third or even half of all smokers; that secondhand smoke is a major public health problem; that smokers impose enormous costs on the rest of society; and that for all these reasons, taxes on cigarettes should be raised. There are many reasons to be skeptical about what professional anti-smoking advocates say. They personally profit by exaggerating the health threats of smoking and winning passage of higher taxes and bans on smoking in public places. The anti-smoking movement is hardly a grassroots phenomenon: It is largely funded by taxpayers and a few major foundations with left-liberal agendas. A growing number of independent policy experts from a wide range of professions and differing political views are speaking out against the anti-smoking campaign. They defend smokers for several reasons: Cigarettes are already the most heavily taxed commodity in the U.S. The federal excise tax is $0.39 a pack and the national average state excise tax is about $0.60 per pack, for a total of $0.99 per pack. In addition, the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) increased the price of a pack of cigarettes by about $0.40 a pack. In a growing number of cities, a pack-a-day smoker pays more in cigarette taxes than he or she pays in state income taxes. Such high and discriminatory taxes on smokers are unfair. They are also an inefficient and unreliable way to raise funds for government. Excise taxes require regular rate increases to keep pace with inflation, whereas income, sales, and property taxes all rise with inflation or economic growth. Because of their narrow bases, excise taxes are unstable revenue generators. And excise taxes require relatively high rates to raise funds. These rates, in turn, create opportunities for evasion and the transfer of economic activity to states with lower taxes. Dramatic price hikes and extreme taxes on cigarettes are threatening to create a stampede of tax evasion, black-market transactions, counterfeiting, and even use of lethal violence against convenience store clerks and truck drivers. Tax hikes of $1.00 a pack or more, as have been adopted recently by New York, Cook County, Illinois, and elsewhere threaten to take us to a neoprohibitionist era, with all the crime, expenses, and loss of respect for law enforcement that accompanied Prohibition. Excise taxes are also regressive. People with low incomes not only pay a higher percentage of their incomes on cigarette taxes than do wealthier people, they even pay more in absolute terms. Persons earning less than $10,000 paid an average of $81 a year in tobacco taxes, versus $49 for those who make $50,000 or more. This was before recent massive tax hikes! Are high taxes on cigarettes justified by the social costs smokers impose on the rest of society? No.
About us
Straightening up Eaters Straightening up Drinkers Outcasting Smellers The Theatre of the Absurd The Disgusting Smoking bans Bookcase The WHO gang section Let's kill them- for their own good Humor At the service of the pharmaceutical industry
Norman Kjono James Leavey Judith Hatton Andy Ludlow Søren Højbjerg Gian Turci
John Luik Pierre Lemieux Martha Perske Wanda Hamilton Rosalind Marimont
News and Articles Archive Past Front Pages of FORCES International
(starting July 3, 2000) Historical Files - The milestones in the tobacco wars Prohibition, then and now Constitutional and Antitrust Violations of the Multistate Tobacco Settlement WHO SCANDAL The CD that says it all on political corruption and frauds on smoking
Pharmaceutical multinationals: buying governments, selling antismoking Big Drug's Nicotine War
Published In: Smoker's Lounge Issue Suite
Publication Date: April 20, 2007
Publisher: The Heartland Institute
