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Rethink Afghanistan


On the anti-smoking movement being classist:

Joe Bageant starts by quoting (at length) another Joe...

And, in the employment section of the want ads, more and more businesses and government agencies declare that "users" of tobacco, in any form, need not apply: "Urine and blood samples will be taken when we accept your application."

Generally, this war is described as a battle against big tobacco, but, of course, it's actually a war on working people, their habits, their little idiot joys, their little mechanisms of coping.

Then he writes about his own struggle to quit, along with much commentary about folks on the left being way too judgmental of working class folks who they seem to see as beneath them...

Yes, I think the anti-smoking movement is becoming a mass social control program. But not in the ways I sense you see things. I don't believe any grand wizard or corporate cabal cooked it up behind the curtain (although they certainly capitalize on it). Not directly anyway. I believe it just came down the pike wearing opportunity's hat. In America one man's misery has always been another's opportunity to make a buck. We are not good at "the common good."

Personally, I hate cigarette smoke. But I know how hard it is to quit. I've watched a colleague try, over and over.