Political Quotes

“tobacco use kills 430,000 people a year. That's more than the number who die from murder, suicide, AIDS, alcohol and all illegal drugs combined. The number of people suffering from tobacco-related illnesses today is in the millions. A great many of these deaths are attributable to deliberate congressional action over the years of subsidizing tobacco companies financially through farming, marketing and export. The Congress gave support and credibility to the public statements of tobacco companies that smoking tobacco wasn't harmful. And perhaps the most culpable congressional act was to include cigarettes in the package of sea rations and authorized supplies that we provided our soldiers, sailors and airmen. We encouraged our brave, strong, patriotic servicemen to smoke cigarettes. We instructed them to ``light 'em if you had 'em''--and of course because we supplied them, most of them had 'em. And now those very same soldiers are now paying the price of that official policy. They're suffering from emphysema, cancer of the lungs, and the larynx, and the mouth and the throat. Well, the decades of deliberate deceit by the tobacco companies has finally been exposed. But they've already made their millions selling cigarettes to the military, they've made their billions selling to the American public and they're still making billions marketing an instrument of death and suffering to the rest of the world.”