This is absurd. Your own ruling class went to war with China to promote opium use, whose government had criminalized opium. It was the only way that they could exploit China. Attitudes toward drugs are not what interest me, as I already made clear. The US ruling class promoted cigarette consumption for 400 years. The reason it has taken action lately is not because of anti-working class snobbery, but because it is a public health hazard. Insurance companies, who have enormous power in the state apparatus, will use their influence to cut down on tobacco use, obesity and alcohol because they don't want to pay premiums to the families of unhealthy people. You make it sound as if the issues are something like whether to support the war in Vietnam or the right of black people to vote in the 1950s. Should we organize mass demonstrations to allow people to smoke in restaurants? I feel almost foolish in asking this, because you folks have organized protests in favor of the right to hunt foxes.
What interests me is the impact of the coffee, tea, tobacco, sugar, coca, cocoa and tobacco trade on third-world countries. The plantation system was put in place to enrich the mother country at the expense of the subjugated colony. The British East India company is the object of my analysis, not the vicissitudes of bourgeois society with respect to what is taboo and what is not.
Jim, I have the distinct sense that you have gone your entire life without reading the sort of literature that Monthly Review puts out on the exploitation of the third world, from Eric Williams to Andre Gunder Frank. You have an innocence about you when it comes to subjects like Nigerian oil, or "development" in the Amazon rainforest that is quite striking for someone with your generally impressive erudition. I think it is because the reality of what you might find in this literature will shake up your notions of a "developing" third world. I know that you want to rescue the third world from groups like Greenpeace who want to keep indoor plumbing and fast cars out of hands of Nigerians and Ecuadorians, but this does not address the historic reality.
You will find the reality in works such as these:
Goodman, Jordan, Tobacco in history : the cultures of dependence; Routledge.
Graaff, J. de., The economics of coffee; in the series Economics of crops in developing countries.
Dunn, Richard, Sugar and slaves; the rise of the planter class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713, by Richard S. Dunn; Univ. of North Carolina.
----
Doug wrote:
>This is really not all that relevant to the issue of why people smoke in
>1998. Geoffrey Bible and evil geniuses of Philip Morris weren't around in
>the 17th century, were they?
The tobacco trade is analogous to the oil trade. It is a form of colonial domination. That has not changed over the centuries. Prime land in Honduras is used to grow tobacco for cigars, while peasants are pushed into the margins. Beef, oil, tobacco, sugar, etc. are commodities that make first world countries rich at third world countries' expense.
>Is it mere
>coincidence that the most anti-smoking president the U.S. has ever had is
>also the one who signed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act
>and the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act? And who wants
>to put a snoop chip in every cell phone and a V-chip in every TV?
Of course it is mere coincidence. You have to stop taking politicians at their word, especially lawyers like "anti-smoking" politicians like Clinton and Gore.
Sacramento Bee
August 30, 1996, METRO FINAL
SECTION: MAIN NEWS; Pg. A30
GORE'S TOBACCO ADMISSION
A day after emotionally telling the nation about his sister's painful death to lung cancer, Vice President Al Gore found himself sheepishly explaining to reporters Thursday how he accepted campaign contributions from the tobacco industry after her death in 1984.
Records show Gore accepted $9,990 from political action committees that represented tobacco interests while he was a Tennessee senator. That money was given between 1985 and 1990.
"I was continuing to grow into a new way of understanding the issue," Gore said Thursday. "That's just the fact."
During his prime-time speech that moved many delegates to tears at the Democratic National Convention, Gore told about the death of his sister, Nancy, who started smoking at age 13, had a lung removed at 45 and then eventually died in the hospital with her family around her.
Asked about the enormous sum of money that Philip Morris is spending to help sponsor the Democratic National Convention, Gore said: "I think that (policy) ought to be reviewed."
He said the Clinton-Gore campaign is not accepting tobacco contributions.
Reporters also asked Gore about a statement he made to North Carolina tobacco farmers in 1988 -- four years after his sister's death -- during his race for the Democratic presidential nomination. He said then: "Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco."
He said that he continued to receive an annual lease payment from his tobacco property for a few years after his sister's death until he eventually surrendered the payment.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)