The media haven't gotten around to telling us that one may
submit Public Comments, until Jan. 11, 2011, about the FDA's plan to require
disgusting graphics on packages of one specific consumer product---cigarettes. Many other products have escaped this
treatment. And, the most deadly parts of
typical cigarettes have evaded FDA attention.
It's interesting to note what the FDA ignores regarding the foods and drugs they ostensibly regulate.
The FDA has no plans to require label pictures of the following:
Victims of e-coli or salmonella-tainted food from under-regulated food producers.
Wildlife poisoned by the tons of pesticides dumped onto food crops, cotton, and tobacco.
People burned to death in fires caused by the still legal use of added burn accelerants in typical cigarettes.
Slaughtered pigs, cattle, sheep, chickens, turkeys, etc.
Faces of people killed by barely-tested or mis-prescribed and over-used pharmaceutical products---some from Pharms that also supply tobacco pesticides and non-tobacco cigarette additives.
Smiling pharmaceutical CEOs getting paid for, and avoiding responsibilities for, supplying pesticides and untested non-tobacco cigarette additives to the Cig industry.
Various media have already pointed out the hypocrisy of this plan---with cartoons about labels on high-sugar and high-fat products, and pics of mangled people on cars, etc. But this isn't much of a joke.
Mainstream media,
and even alternative media, have ignored other details of the FDA's "regulation"
of smoking products. Who is informed
that the FDA is forbidden by Congress from doing anything about the
Agricultural Parts of the cigarette industry?
That is, they will ignore the hundreds of tobacco pesticides, no matter how many deadly residues end up in typical cigarettes and in unwitting people's lungs. As a consequence of that, the FDA will astonishingly tolerate dioxins in cigarette smoke that come from the still-legal chlorine pesticides.
If that isn't bad enough, the FDA must also ignore the cancer-causing levels of radiation in typical cigarettes from the still-legal use of certain phosphate fertilizers. That agricultural stuff is to be left to the Department of Agriculture and the EPA which have allowed toxic and carcinogenic crop contaminants for decades. There will be no Rad Symbols required on radiation-contaminated cigarettes.
It's not clear in the law, but the FDA may also have to ignore more cancer-causing dioxins from the chlorine-bleached cigarette paper--- paper being from wood pulp; perhaps considered "agricultural".
The FDA is required to ignore the most deadly parts of typical cigarettes. The FDA addresses farm practices elsewhere, but not here. It's "the tobacco exemption". Mustn't inconvenience the pesticide-chlorine industries, and their insurers and investors, you see. Better to inconvenience unwitting, unprotected, secretly poisoned, uncompensated, Guinea-pigged smokers, they being "dirty", "sinful" and "non-compliant" and all.
It is highly unlikely that the sick and dead smokers that are to be depicted on cigarette labels got sick or dead from the use of tobacco. It is extremely likely, however, that they are victims of so-called "tobacco" that has been contaminated with a wider variety of toxic and carcinogenic non-tobacco substances than can be found in an average hazardous waste dump.
And it's likely that many victims received more, or even most, of their body burdens of toxic and carcinogenic industrial substances elsewhere---on the job, from contaminated soils, near industrial sites, etc. But, if they happened to smoke or live with smokers, they unwittingly become convenient scapegoats to take the heat off of the responsible industries.
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