The smoking gun - Australia/Health/Drugs
Phillip Adams; 22/3/08
Can the world give up this filthy habit? In particular can the US, the world’s most addicted nation, give up its 80 a day? Puff puff puffing away, from every smokestack and exhaust pipe, giving the planet lung cancer? It’s setting such a bad example to teenage economies. My blurring of cigarettes with climate change is deliberate and pessimistic. Despite decades of evidence that smoking kills – that cigarettes are weapons of mass destruction – the lighting of fags still causes damn near as much fatal disease as malaria and AIDS combined. And despite certain knowledge that fossil fuels are ruining the world’s respiratory system, the addicts are unrepentant. No ifs, no butts. If we continue to ignore the health warnings on coalmines and keep exhaling great clouds of CO2 we’ll all go up the chimney. Yet governments are still opening mines as often as smokers open their packets of cancer sticks. Last year the NSW Government approved another monster near Mudgee. The coal from this one mine alone will be responsible for the same amount of climate-changing pollution as is generated by Australia in one year. Yet the Premier, Morris Iemma, puffs out his chest and says “the green groups want us to switch the lights off … we’re not going to do that”. And it’s the same with the Marlboro men in the Bush Administration.