Letters

The governments rush to protect those who produce a substance that has no
known benefit and kills millions of people all over the world every year
astonishes me ["Tobacco Growers Appeal for Protection," Sept. 19].

Yet President Clinton says that tobacco farmers are "good, hardworking,
taxpaying citizens and they have not caused this problem. . . . We cannot
let them, their families or their communities just be crippled or broken by
this." I am sorry that it will be painful, as Clinton noted for growers to
switch from their lucrative crop to something that pays far less.

But I cannot get out of my mind the sight of my mother's painful early
death from smoking, or of my beloved aunt's excruciating lung cancer
surgery, a result of breathing secondhand smoke, or of my 25yearold niece
who died in a fire from falling asleep with a cigarette in her hand. The
pain that tobacco caused them and the pain of those of us who loved them
and are left with only memories far exceeds the pain of switching to a less
lucrative crop, I believe.

What is different from a farmer who says "I was born to a tobacco farmer. I
do not like being condemned because I was not born to a rice farmer or
wheat grower" and one who says "I was born to a coca grower and I do not
like being condemned because I was not born to a tobacco farmer"?

Tobacco kills more people than cocaine, heroin, alcohol, murder, suicide,
fire, auto accidents and AIDS combined. It's illegal to produce coca or opium.

Shouldn't it also be illegal to produce tobacco, considering what we now
know about it? I will never understand how our government can warn us of
the dangers of smoking while still subsidizing and protecting the producers
of this deadly poison. After all, haven't the tobacco growers known for at
least three decades that they were killing millions of people with their
crop? Wasn't that enough time for them to find another, more ethical,
humane way to make a living? Wouldn't money from a tobacco settlement be
better spent caring for those who have been hurt by tobacco than those who
have produced it?

Perhaps I am naive but it seems to me that something is gravely wrong with
this picture.

MARY EMBREE
VENTURA