HomeMy WebLinkAboutCOM 0746.017 2000-2002 Frances C. Harriman
PO Box 1223
Mountain View HI 96771
Tel. 808-968-7414
I received notice of this hearing 4 hours before it was to begin, unfortunately from
proponents of this bill, who offered to forward a-mail, but as an opponant, I prefer
make sure my views are presented.
1. A recent study of the World Health Organization determined that second-hand
smoke was not detrimental, in fact there was a slight indication that it might
provide a slight form of immunity to lung cancer. This was released in England
some months ago, but never reached the United States.
2. According to the anti-smoking contingent, after smoking for 20 years or so, most
smokers will have some sort of serious lung disease. The figures on deaths by
smoking, I believe, have been fudged.....my mother, who died at age 83, died of
congestive heart failure, due to smoking for 60-plus years. Excuse me? She was
the longest-lived member of her~family, mostly non-smokers. The only relative
that died of lung-cancer was a bachelor uncle in the late 1930s.
3. Anti-smokers claim women began smoking during WW2. Sorry, they are wrong.
Women smoked, but not in public, prior to WW2. Why is the Flapper always
portrayed with a cigarette? Because she flaunted her smoking, and that was
against society's dictates. Prior to cigarettes, women smoked pipes. Look at old
tintypes or pictures from the 1800s. My mother was always telling me not to
smoke in public when I started at age 14 (1945), because it "didn't look nice".
She only smoked at home or with friends.
4. No one seems to make any connection between the A-bomb testing and the rising
incidence of lung cancer. Are you aware that the only States on the Mainland that
did NOT receive any degree of fallout was Northwest CA, WA & OR? And the
State with the highest incidence of cancer is/was Utah, a primarily Mormon State?
Are you aware of how the prejudice of those days extended to Mormons, as well
as Mexicans, Indians, Irish, French, Blacks, Catholics, and Jews? Are any of you
old enough to recall how they found Strontium-90 in cow's milk in, I think,
Wisconsin? Does anyone recall how the scientists were warning that above-
ground testing would cause an epidemic of lung cancer in the 20-40 years
following its cessation? That one atom of plutonium lodged in the lungs or
intestinal tract would eventually result in cancer? And has anyone questioned .
why, within 2 years, the Government released a report of smoking being the cause
of lung-cancer? Or why, after 40+ years, I hear the rate of lung cancer is finally
decreasing? Hawaii was not immune, either, unless you have forgotten the So.
Pacific tests conducted by the United States. I did radiation monitoring for Civil
Defense in Maine during the 1950s and early 1960s, and on 2 occasions, the
Geiger counter went into the second scale. Are you aware that, contrary to the
Govt's reassurance that no radiation from Chernobyl would fall in the U.S, that
the University of Maine recorded fallout in Portland ME?
Comm, Noa
File ImTo.
Ref.
Ref. I~te.
5. No one seems to connect pollution with lung cancer....aninti-smoking
commercial of a veteran NYC police officer claimed the cause of his cancer death
would be the pack of cigarettes in his pocket. Have you. been to NYC? What
about the exhaust fumes from unleaded gas, now banned in metropolitan areas of
the Mainland?
6. Are you also aware that our Government approved the spreading of uranium
tailings on tobacco fields in the late 1930s because tobacco farmers found that it
acted as an insecticide? Was that permit ever revoked? And h®w many years
would it be before those tailings would lose their radioactive properties? Or did
the Government find a likely scapegoat for it's damage to it's citizens, once it
learned the consequences of radiation? They already knew the dangers of radium,
so it shouldn't have taken much intelligence to connect the two, and forbid the use
of those fields for any produce.
There is one benef t to being over 70 years of age...you remember history as it happened,
not as someone tells you it did. You're inclined to recognize omissions and revisions.
"History is written by the victors, not the losers." Or those with a row to hoe. A healthy
sense of mistrust is NOT a liability. Deference the butter/margerine, eggs, mono-,poly-
and saturated fat flip-flops over the past decades. 'How many off' you in this room blindly
followed those recommendations, without question? Needless to say, I didn't.
I have smoked for roughly 60 years. I have smoked the lowest tar/nicotine cigarettes
since the 1970s, up to t~iree packs a day at times, depending on stress level. I have no
lung-disease. I take no medications. I rest my case.
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