By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

This week, with a gasp of relief, I'm happy to move on from the excretory to the exhausted exhilarating exhalations of exasperation with exfoliates. And stuff. This week marks the 32nd Great American Smokeout, as if anyone was paying attention, since such a commemoration is likely to be just about as successful as a plea to, say, politicians to repent and start being honest and responsive to their voting constituents instead of just their rich and powerful friends—namely Corporate America.

Getting people to give up smoking, especially given that it is driven by one of the most powerful addictive substances in the world, is of course not an easy task. But I'll take a shot at it, because smoking killed my father, and he wasn't even a smoker. He worked for 40 years at AT&T, a then-progressive company that provided numerous benefits to its employees, none of which, unfortunately, included a smoke-free environment. Not even, in my father's case, in your own office, because he was a mid- level executive with a private secretary: one who, unfortunately, smoked. I guess it never occurred to Dad to replace her with one who didn't smoke, or ask her to do it elsewhere. Those notions had just not come into fruition yet. Years later, I was heavily involved in the struggle and campaign, first with airlines, then later (against much heavier resistance) with restaurants and retail spaces, for the right to breathe clean (or relatively clean) air not contaminated by somebody else's pollution. We started in New York, then Los Angeles and the Bay Area in California, and thanks to the Surgeon General's warning way back in the 60s, it began to work. As for Big Tobacco, it became increasingly difficult to deny, let alone gloss over, the fact that half a million Americans were dying from smoking every year, and that was just those who actually smoked and didn't include those who got emphysema and pneumonia from constant exposure to often thick clouds of so-called “sidestream” smoke everywhere they went. Like my father.

So now we have smoke free zones and that's great. But it hasn't stopped the huge nicotine cartel from continuing to expand their stranglehold on the world's health, legally hook addicts for life, and then slowly killing them, if not so many of their friends, relatives and associates. The World Health Organization reports at latest count 1 billion smokers in the world, or about 20% of the population. That's a lot of smokers, and a lot of profit, and a lot of poison, and a lot of death: all very profitable industries overall. The tobacco industry is thriving despite efforts to regulate it. And while I don't expect any increasingly defensive and hardcore smokers to suddenly find Jesus this week, there are some new, or at least newer things to consider:

The tobacco industry is a major cause of environmental destruction, using some 25 million pounds of pesticides a year. This means over 2 million pounds of pesticides continue to pollute our air. As much as ten percent of the pesticide applied to the tobacco crop can appear in the sidestream smoke that person next to you is emitting, and which killed my father. As with all big agribusinesses, pesticide and fertilizer runoff contaminate our nation's water supplies including rivers, streams, lakes, groundwater, and adjacent seas. As if that wasn't bad enough, the curing of tobacco leaf with wood fuel leads to massive deforestation. An oft-cited, in-depth study shows that an estimated 200,000 hectares (about 772 square miles) of forest/woodland is lost to tobacco farming each year.

While you might not be sympathetic any more than I am, any more than to the opium growers in Afghanistan there are substantial health risks for tobacco farmers themselves. From inhalation of pesticides and tobacco dust to a fungal disease called "Green Tobacco Sickness" caused by handling the plant's wet leaves. Unfortunately, whether or not we love them dearly, we end up picking up, or at least subsidizing the tab for their much greater healthcare needs than most of ours.

Other profiteers thrive from this product as well, including a huge global criminal industry. Cigarettes are the world’s most widely smuggled legal consumer product. In 2006, about 600 billion smuggled cigarettes were sold worldwide. Also, tobacco companies get a huge quid pro quo by funding university and lab research into ways to maintain and control nicotine, including the effects of everything from tobacco advertising to cancer drugs. No doubt we can all rest easy with corporate assurances that all this money will have “no influence whatsoever” on the outcomes of this research. I can't wait to be told (again) that there is no proven connection between tobacco and any disease, and that was a big fat lying myth over the past forty years of liberal misinformation, and nicotine is actually good for you, and so is meth, and by the way, there is no such thing as global warming, so feel free to light up!

Next comes the human exploitation angle, another issue that was hardly a blip on the radar three decades ago: it's called “product placement.” Did you ever notice how movie producers always seem to slip slick, glamorous (and expensive) products into their productions? This is just another form of baksheesh, of course (also known as bribery). But the real kicker is the way all these marketers and advertisers use Hollywood movies to target children and youth around the world to glamorize smoking. Here's a petition to take action: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/870523336.

Next is the exploitation of women issue. Ever since Virginia Slims (crediting themselves for the numerous accomplishments of women athletes worldwide), women, like children, are being targeted by cigarette marketers. Especially in China. According to Thomas Glynn (MD) of the American Cancer Society in an interview with Voice of America, 4 to 6 percent of women in China presently use tobacco. He added this: "In places like Shanghai where tobacco companies are focusing, we are starting to see figures like 20 or 25 percent."

Finally, there's the food supply issue, which is not a dissimilar counterpart to the way McDonald’s and pals are gutting forests to make room for huge beef ranches in Brazil and elsewhere. Big Tobacco displaces potential food production on almost 4 million hectares of the world’s agricultural land, equal to the world’s entire crop of orange groves or banana plantations.

Welcome to Marlboro Country. It never went away.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sources: WHO The Tobacco Institute American Cancer Society Killer Crop: Tobacco Facts To Inspire Quitting for a Healthier World, Nancy R., Care2.com.

Gene Ayres is a career writer, author and freelance journalist. His latest book is A Billion to One: An American Insider in the New China. He can be found at: www.geneayres.org.