Word: tobacco
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Besides courting its friends, the tobacco industry is also coming down hard on its foes. Philip Morris has filed a $10 billion lawsuit against ABC for its Day One reports charging that the tobacco industry "artificially adds nicotine to cigarettes to keep people smoking and boost profits." Says Herbert M. Wachtell, the attorney representing Philip Morris in the suit: "The basic allegation of the programs -- that the company spikes its tobacco with additional nicotine during the manufacturing process -- is just fundamentally and flatly untrue." The network says it stands by its reporting. (A Day One source says Philip Morris refused...
...tobacco industry is becoming more aggressive on the political front as well. In California, for example, where more than half the nation's estimated 600 local antismoking ordinances have been enacted, the tobacco industry is trying a pre-emptive strike. According to antismoking activists in the state, cigarette companies are behind a "citizens' group" supporting an initiative that would institute statewide restrictions against smoking. The catch is that the measure is milder than the many local ordinances it would override...
...more than just tobacco-industry executives and die-hard smokers are raising questions about the current antismoking frenzy. Has the crusade turned into a witch-hunt? Will the campaign to ban smoking simply make the forbidden weed another rebellious turn-on for kids? What sort of policy sense does it make to try to legislate smoking out of existence at the same time that the government is becoming increasingly dependent on tobacco as a source of tax revenue? And for all the new efforts to enact tough restrictions on smoking, how widely does the American public support them...
...Mark Pertschuk, executive director of the national organization Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights, based in Berkeley, California, thinks another historical paradigm is more apt. Around the turn of the century, chewing tobacco was popular, and spittoons were commonplace in bars and restaurants. When an epidemic of tuberculosis broke out and the disease was linked to spittoons, a doctors' group that eventually became the American Lung Association campaigned to have them removed. "At the time, it was considered to be outrageous and anti-American to get rid of spittoons," says Pertschuk. "When historians look back on this ((smoking)) controversy in 25 years...
...usual, everything comes full circle. Baseball fans can no longer light up while cheering on their team at many stadiums. And about the only place left where one sees chewing tobacco anymore is at the ballpark...