Word: tobacco
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Does big, bad Big Tobacco put a price on human life? It certainly looked that way last week, when a study sponsored by Philip Morris found that the Czech Republic actually saves money when one of its citizens smokes - $1,227 in reduced health care, pensions and housing costs, on average, every time a smoker dies...
...Antismoking activists quickly pounced, taking out ads in several major U.S. newspapers denouncing the study. But it's not Big Tobacco that's putting a price on human life. It's governments worldwide, including the U.S., and they collect on both ends: Through excise taxes that penalize smokers for the social costs they supposedly impose on society, and through those savings that come because smokers tend to die earlier (and thus cost governments less) than nonsmokers...
...smokers, and this isn't even counting the savings from shorter life spans. And this is one of the most regressive of taxes; those who pay are for the most part people on the lower end of the economic spectrum who can least afford it. Although states have sued tobacco under the theory that smokers impose huge Medicare costs, in the end, as the Philip Morris study suggests, the government may be soaking smokers to pay for a phantom expense...
BUTT OUT All smokers are not created equal. One in four has a common gene abnormality that nearly triples the risk of coronary heart disease. The gene is associated with reduced antioxidant protection, which may allow tobacco to do more damage...
...boats during his visits - I meet Ma'ruf. At 27, married at 15 to a 13-year-old girl, he still has a boyish face and a loose-limbed manner. He was born and raised on Madura but, unemployed, unmoved by the prospect of spending his life in the tobacco fields, he left for Sampit in Borneo several years ago and found work as a driver. Last February, long simmering tensions between the Madurese and the native Dayaks erupted. The Dayaks, in hand-to-hand, town-to-town combat, embarked on a rampage intent on exterminating all things Madurese...