I did not write this and will not expose the writer.... HERE IS WHAT HE WROTE!
For those that don't know, the tobacco settlement money is the end result of what started as a class action lawsuit against tobacco companies on behalf of people that were dead or dying from illnesses that were, at the time, believed to be smoking related. The settlement that was finally agreed upon was about 266 billion dollars to be payed in perpetuity, that is, payments would be made to the settlement basically forever since the tobacco companies couldn't pay it off in any reasonable amount of time without going bankrupt. After the payment plan was finalized, 46 State Attorneys General pulled off the sort of scam we've come to expect from our lawyers and politicians, essentially stealing whatever funds the case lawyers and courts hadn't already claimed, at first with the promise that the funds would be used to help offset healthcare costs for the treatment of smoking related illnesses and to fund smoking cessation programs.
However, since the payments are to be made in perpetuity the tobacco companies cannot be allowed to fail since that would stop those payments. So smoking cessation programs must be designed to fail since the TS income relies on keeping tobacco companies profitable. And smoking related illnesses somehow didn't decline with the falling rates of smoking among consumers. In fact, those illnesses have steadily increased and evidence grows day by day that smoking related illnesses are far fewer and less significant than we were told. Healthcare costs have risen steadily even as smoking has declined. meanwhile, just very recently, those same State Attorneys General that confiscated the settlement money from the families of the lawsuit plaintiffs with the full backing of the federal government and the medical industrial complex and financial cartels, wrote new laws allowing them to basically spend the money in whatever way they see fit as long as they at least pretend to use some small portion of it to finance anti tobacco programs. This is why you see bans on smoking from city councils, mayors and "public health advocacy" groups. because those people are being paid to enact those bans. The earliest bans indicated the greediest politicians and pundits, the ones that were all set to snatch at the first offer of cash. The later bans and those coming to a town near you are indicators of more savvy politicians and pundits that are holding out for bigger payments or that haven't yet figured out how to accept the bribes in a manner that won't look like they're accepting bribes.
This doesn't even touch on the "Sin Tax" scam we have here in the US where cigarettes are taxed at astonishingly high rates to the point where any given government body makes more money off of a consumers purchase of cigarettes than the tobacco company makes.
This is also not even touching the considerable cash flow through the insurance cartels (they charge smokers higher premiums) and the medical industrial complex that thrives on treating "smoking related illness" and "addiction" often convincing healthy people that they're sick just so they can sell their fake cures.
This is also not even touching on the power gained by authorities anytime they exert control over "public and private behavior models" by either over regulating a market until it is forced underground where it becomes profitable to the justice system or by criminalizing a market and gaining full authoritarian control over large segments of the population through fear and intimidation.
It's a tangled web and it's crawling with creatures that would give spiders bad dreams.
