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One should eat to live, and not live to eat. Moliere aka Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, L’Avare, 1669
After a meal there’s nothing like a good cigar. The Good, The Bad & The Ugly [Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo] 1966 starring Clint Eastwood & Lee van Cleef & Eli Wallach & Aldo Giuffre & Al Mulock & Antonio Casas & John Bartha & Claudio Scarchillio & Sandro Scarchilli & Antonio Molion Rojo, director Sergio Leone, Blondie to Tuco
Quark: What’s that disgusting smell?
Nog: I think it’s called tobacco. It’s a deadly drug. When used frequently it destroys the internal organs.
Quark: If it’s so deadly then why do they use it?
Nog: It’s also highly addictive.
Rom: How do they get their hands on it?
Nog: They buy it in stores.
Quark: They buy it? If they’ll buy poison they’ll buy anything. I think I’m going to like it here. ibid.
Rule of Acquisition 203: new customers are like razor-tooth gree-worms. They can be succulent but sometimes they bite back. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine s4e8: Little Green Men
Within two years tobacco turns Jamestown from a starving hell-hole to America’s first boom town. America: The Story of the US: Rebels, History 2010
If you’re a smoker, you’ll have to visit after 1573. Dr Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England III: Brave New World, BBC 2012
But you can count the dead bodies from alcohol, tobacco, and legal pharmaceuticals by the millions. Jack Herer
Bernays set out to experiment with the minds of the popular classes. His most dramatic experiment was to persuade women to smoke. At that time there was a taboo against women smoking. And one of his early clients, George Hill, the president of the American tobacco corporation, asked Bernays to find a way of breaking it. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self I: Happiness Machines, BBC 2002
What Bernays had created was the idea that if a woman smoked, it made her more powerful and independent. An idea that still persists today. It made him [Bernays] realise that it was possible to persuade people to behave irrationally if you linked products to their emotional desires and feelings. The idea that smoking actually made women freer was completely irrational but it made them feel more independent. ibid.
Probably the two most devastating lies in the history of the world is that smoking doesn’t cause disease, and we don’t market to children. Matthew Myers, campaign for tobacco-free kids
Tobacco war at Constitutional Court. The Jakarta Post article
In the spring of 2010 a video of a smoking baby went viral and became an international sensation. When the laughter stopped the world moved on. But there’s much more to this story than one child’s cigarette addiction. If you thought the public health battle against tobacco was over, think again. This is the story of how smoking’s decline in the west has fuelled Big Tobacco’s hunt for new consumers in some of the poorest countries on Earth. Sex, Lies & Cigarettes, Vimeo 2012
We take to the streets to meet the small band of activists fighting for change in a country where the overwhelming message is loud and clear. ibid.
We found a global health crisis in the making. ibid.
It wasn’t so long ago that America was Marlboro country. ibid.
Doctors were endorsing cigarettes. ibid.
In the early sixties nearly half of all adults in America smoked. ibid.
One billion deaths. ibid.
The kind of marketing that has largely disappeared from the west now blankets Indonesia. ibid.
Indonesia is the new Marlboro country. ibid.
One in four boys here between the ages of thirteen and fifteen now smokes. ibid.
Philip Morris now spends more than two hundred million dollars a year on advertising in Indonesia. ibid.
In a developing country like Indonesia smoking not only damages the nation’s health it also contributes to poverty. ibid.
Videos of other smoking babies continue to surface. ibid.
Tobacco exports should be expanded aggressively because Americans are smoking less. Dan Quayle
I believe nicotine is not addictive – yes. William Campbell, CEO Chairman Philip Morris USA 14th April 1994
Cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic definitions of addiction. James Johnson, CEO Chairman R/R Tobacco
The Government’s Chief Adviser on Drug Policy has been sacked after insisting alcohol and cigarettes are more dangerous than cannabis and ecstasy. David Nutt, ex-chief government drugs tsar
Pernicious weed! whose scent the fair annoys,
Unfriendly to society’s chief joys. William Cowper, 1731-1800, Conversation, 1782
A branch of the sin of drunkenness, which is the root of all sins. James I, A Counterblast to Tobacco, 1604
A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless. ibid.
For thy sake, Tobacco, I
Would do any thing but die. Charles Lamb, A Farewell to Tobacco
This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realized. Charles Lamb, letter 26th December 1815
On the other hand, almost the first act of the New Labour government was to erase from its programme one of the few outright commitments in it – to ban tobacco advertising. Bernie Ecclestone, Formula One motor racing billionaire, objected to the ban for the very good reason that by far the biggest beneficiary of tobacco advertising was Formula One motor racing. Ecclestone was a Tory. Why should such a brash tycoon have any influence on a Labour government? Answer – he had given £1 million to the Labour Party. A meeting was held in Downing Street and the outcome was obvious. It was plainly grotesque to continue with a policy that would damage so bountiful a benefactor. The policy was ‘revised’. Tobacco advertising on Formula One cars was permitted. Then someone accused the prime minister of corruption, so the Labour Party gave the money back to the millionaire. Its policy had changed for nothing. Paul Foot, Corruption: Dirty Business
Enter one of Britain’s wealthiest tycoons: Bernie Ecclestone, the pint-sized ringmaster of Formula One. With Blair’s approval, Ecclestone had secretly given new Labour a £1,000,000 donation. Just before the election. So he needed no introduction one day in October 1997 when he went to ask the prime minister for a favour. Bernie Ecclestone had a big request: new Labour were about to ban tobacco advertising from all major sporting events. Ecclestone wanted Formula One exempted, and for a small guy he must have been pretty persuasive, because after just one meeting with the prime minister, Tony Blair asked his health minister to do a U-turn and exempt Formula One ... They tried to cover up the details of what had happened. Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain, BBC 2007
They’ll get me for this. Tony Blair
It makes them riotous and merry, and rather drowsy, just as if they were drunk, though the effect soon passes, and they use it so abundantly because of the pleasure it gives ... I am told the inside of one man’s veins after death was found to be covered in soot just like a chimney. Thomas Platter, journal entry 1599
A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers. Headline in US national newspapers to pump 1950s campaign