Lawsuit’s Cost to Smokers Ignored

What the government and the news media fail to consider in the debate over the multibillion-dollar federal lawsuit against the tobacco industry is the punishing cost to 50 million smokers who have been virtually eliminated from having a voice in the endless tobacco issue (“Shift in Tobacco Suit Is Assailed,” June 9).

Anti-smoking zealots, including the media and the government, have been so blindly obsessed with holding smokers up to public hatred and ridicule, treating them as social outcasts and demonizing the tobacco industry, that they have buried the plight of beleaguered smokers under the hanging tree.

It can’t be only smokers who know that the tobacco industry hasn’t paid the billions of dollars in settlement costs to the states because it immediately passes those costs along to smokers before the money is paid.

It doesn’t matter that most smokers make $30,000 or less a year and can least afford the ever-increasing cost of cigarettes, that anti-smoking forces lie about secondhand smoke and that the media fall for deeply flawed fear statistics such as: Smoking-related illnesses kill 400,000 people each year. And it doesn’t matter whether smokers pay much more for health and life insurance or that some are losing jobs because of it.

No one stands up for smokers, not even the American Civil Liberties Union, simply because it’s the social engineering way, and it’s not popular among the elites.

Daniel B. Jeffs

Apple Valley

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Despite having murdered more Americans than the combined acts of all terrorists against this nation, the tobacco industry is coddled once again by the Bush administration as its Justice Department drastically scales back its demand for an industry-funded smoking-cessation program as part of the government’s tobacco industry racketeering case (“U.S. Eases Demands on Tobacco Companies,” June 8).

This so-called culture-of-life Bush administration shows its true, deep, cynical colors by surprisingly cutting $120 billion from its now not-so-sincere demands for a lifesaving program.

Donald A. Bentley

La Puente