Newt Finds Some Drug Cartels Off-Limits
Old Newt Gingrich tried mighty hard to spin the needle on the goofy meter several weeks ago. The speaker of the House and sort-of presidential candidate told an audience in Athens, Ga., that he favors mass executions for those who supply illegal drugs to America’s children. Gingrich defended his somewhat draconian ideas about penal reform by saying he wants to send a message to those who “get rich at the expense of our children: … you are signing your own death warrant.”
I was impressed by Gingrich’s newfound verve for defending our shores from drug-dispensing lowlifes, but found myself a bit puzzled as to why the Georgia Republican confined his lethal intentions only to those arriving from distant lands to poison our youth.
Gingrich does not have to hang around airports to find those who peddle lethal drugs to kids. All he has to do is pay a visit to those parts of his state and others nearby where tobacco is being grown and made into cigarettes, snuff and chewing tobacco. There he can find the members of the biggest, best-organized and most-lucrative drug dealing gang in the entire world.
Last year 4,000 Americans died due to heroin use, while 400,000 died due to tobacco use. The vast majority of those people started using tobacco when they were minors.
As I look out my window right now I can see a group of 14- and 15-year-old girls smoking cigarettes. I am not sure where they bought them, but I am certain who made them. The girls are smoking a brand made by Philip Morris Cos., the world’s largest cigarette manufacturer, which has mounted a media barrage to persuade us that its tobacco products are just dandy. Philip Morris executives would have us believe that they have never done anything in an attempt to hook smokers, and that they do all in their power to make sure that only competent adults smoke their cigarettes.
Has there ever been such an effusion of moral blarney? Would Newt, you or I take seriously the same claims if made by the Cali cartel or the Sicilian mob?
Yet newspapers, radio airwaves and television screens are filled with caterwauling flacks for the tobacco companies, bleating about their concern for the health of children.
Attorneys in fancy suits spew pap about free choice, and tobacco farmers invoke terms such as “family values” and “cultural heritage” to defend the sale of a product that has already killed hundreds of millions of people at a cost of untold trillions of dollars.
Children are too gullible to fend off the patent nonsense that Philip Morris and other tobacco companies throw at them in the form of slick billboards, sports promotions and magazine ads.
Gingrich and his pals in Congress are not as gullible, but the tobacco lobby is powerful and votes from tobacco states might well determine the outcome of the next presidential race. Thus, some politicians find it easier to rant about foreign drug smugglers than to protect children from getting hooked on cigarettes.
Given the level of misery and harm tobacco causes, it ought be viewed with even more alarm than heroin and opium.
Let’s flush those tobacco company CEOs right out of their executive washrooms and round up their lobbyists, and have them spend a few weeks on death row with their other drug-dealing buddies. Tell them if we find any more children smoking, the speaker of the House will hand out the blindfolds. And no one gets a final smoke before Newt tells the firing squad to do its duty.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Art Caplan King Features Syndicate