Tobacco giant sponsors work on DNA repair
Has Philip Morris broken its promise not to fund medical research?
In a move that seems to break its own promise not to fund medical research, the Philip Morris Foundation has awarded €25,000 (US$31,000) to a chemist at the University of Munich who works on DNA repair.
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Comments
This article supports the notion that anti tobacco extremists are so against smoking, that they would gladly sacrifice advances in medical technology, to prevent a cure for smoking related diseases.
Many former smokers quit, not because of distaste for tobacco products, but because they feared they would contract a smoking related disease. They are obviously aware that anti tobacco sentiments would evaporate, if smoking related illnesses were cured or became easily treated.
Jonathan Pinard, Executive Director
New York Coalition of Social Smokers
Posted by: Jonathan Pinard | January 26, 2006 04:20 AM
As with the World Health Organization's refusal to advance research plainly aimed at curing the diseases smokers are prone to, opposition to the grants to which this article refers reflects an appaling willingness to see smokers dead if their demise advances the cause of abolishing tobacco.
Appealing as this moral calculus may be to the authoritarian mind, the fact remains that neoprohibitionists bent on banning smoking are not just oblivious to epidemiological reality, but so immersed in an alternative belief system that they are oblivious to the quantitatively obvious- that research on reducing the effective dose of carcinogens in products smokers voluntarily buy and consume can save smoker's lives, as can focused efforts on tobacco oncology- a parallel exists between the prohibitionist’s denial and the views of fundamentalists that seek to deny funding to AIDS research while criminalizing the behavior with which the syndrome is associated.
Many of the arguments about second hand smoke public ally adduced by antismoking activists are statistically under whelming, but if they indeed believe them, they should embrace the proposition that as first hand stakeholders, smokers, not they, should dictate smoking research policy. If their liberty to direct the research they solely subsidize is respected, there is no doubt that they should wish to reverse the perverse terms of the legal settlements that have scientifically disenfranchised them.
Posted by: Russell Seitz | January 26, 2006 09:40 AM
Why can Island ban tobacco and the rest of the world is unable ? Then somebody would loose a lot of money right ? is this all about money... it just makes me sick :(
Posted by: residential drug treatment center | September 5, 2007 06:09 PM