Smoke No Evil

By Bill Drake and Michael McFadden

This book offers a combination of new hard facts and solid (linked) peer-reviewed research to show why smoking-related sickness and death quite likely has little or nothing at all to do with tobacco itself and is perhaps largely preventable. A well-hidden cause of millions, and maybe tens of millions of smoking-related deaths over the past 50 years has been the indiscriminate and often criminal use of pesticides by the unregulated Tobacco Cartel companies.

​Tobacco companies have escaped any real accountability because most people a priori believe without question that tobacco kills people who smoke it, so prosecuting tobacco companies for “knowingly producing an unreasonably dangerous product” is undercut by the question – "What do you mean, unreasonably dangerous?” Everybody knows, or at least it's the accepted conventional wisdom, that smoking tobacco kills people – so what’s unreasonably dangerous about cigarettes? Up until now, nobody seeking accountability for these criminal corporations appears to have had a good answer to the carefully implanted conventional wisdom that tobacco itself is dangerous. This book questions what "everybody knows".

The solution, covered in detail in this evidence-based book, may be that it isn’t the tobacco that’s unreasonably dangerous, it’s the products these recklessly negligent and deceitful corporations manufacture that are unreasonably dangerous. That's two entirely different sets of facts and issues from every viewpoint – technical, legal, medical and scientific. I confidently believe that the leaf of the tobacco plant has nothing at all to do with what is killing millions of smokers of the Tobacco Cartel's products.

 “Smoke No Evil” uses new lab test results combined with peer-reviewed research studies to establish strong new links between the fungicide and insecticide contaminants in tobacco products and the diseases that they cause. 

If the slaughter of smokers is due even in part to the tobacco industry's exemption from pesticide regulation, then there is a simple regulatory fix to a monstrous problem. Existing pesticide regulations can be applied without modification to tobacco products, which are currently exempt from pesticide regulations that apply to every other consumer product. I believe that one simple step could dramatically reduce new smoking-related disease almost immediately.

My hope is that this book opens the door to such possibilities.

As the voices of people quoted throughout this book will tell you, while people may not know the whole story of the Tobacco Cartel and its crimes against humanity, they do know the truth. Now with this book, people will know the whole story too, and maybe then true accountability for those crimes and the millions of preventable deaths can begin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bill Drake
• Release date: Jul 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781692097851

Book preview

Introduction: Let Hard Data Speak

Hello and welcome. I hope that you’ll find what I’ve written here is useful and even helpful to you and to others who you care about. There are few families on Earth that have not been harmed terribly by the Tobacco Cartel and this book offers new hard evidence that the Cartel’s crimes against humanity are far worse than any of us ever knew.

I would like for you to know this about me. I founded the Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company with a few friends and a dream of a safe and even healthful alternative to the poisons being sold as tobacco products. People I loved and cared about had been sick and dying from smoking for years, and I had them in mind when I created American Spirit organic tobacco.

While it was successful from the beginning, I was a very foolish young man and lost the company during its very early days and have never since had any financial or other interests in American Spirit or Santa Fe Natural Tobacco or any other tobacco company. As far as I’m concerned, except for the single organic product Santa Fe Natural puts out in very limited amounts, the entire line of SFNT products is highly suspect. In fact as you’ll see, we tested one of the many American Spirit brands for this book.

You may also find it useful to know that I wrote the Cultivators Handbook of Marijuana in 1969 as a revolutionary act - the same reason I am offering you Smoke No Evil 50 years later. I believed then, as I believe now, that knowledge empowers people to create positive change.

Because some may say that I am simply a tout for a cigarette brand I helped create, I want to begin this book by letting you know where I’m coming from and why I care so much that the Tobacco Cartel continues to kill millions of people every year when the numbers could be so many fewer.

I don’t claim that smoking tobacco won’t cause disease; I do insist that inhaling a concealed cocktail of carcinogenic, neurotoxic, genotoxic fungicides & insecticides a hundred or more times a day, from whatever source, combusted or vaporized, every day, will definitely destroy your own health. New research evidence says inhaling some of the pesticides we identified in Cartel products can, depending on the exact pesticide and brand you inhale, also destroy the health of your children and their children as well. The hazard is trans-generational.

I would also like to show you why if you choose to smoke or vaporize organic tobacco, preferably an heirloom variety grown organically by local growers or yourself, neither you nor your family is likely to suffer any serious harm. Certainly not the harm that the Cartel’s cocktail of pesticides imposes on every smoker and their family every day. The Tobacco Cartel is an industry that should not be allowed to exist any longer. This book is about new, hard evidence that strongly suggests this is true, and I hope you will consider the evidence on its merits.

I want to put this hard evidence, this data right here up front and then I’ll dissect it as we go through the book. I’ll be showing you this data a number of times in different contexts because it is so dense - I hope this won’t be annoying. The data you see here is part of what I found in lab tests of popular tobacco brands in late 2018. You’ll have the full story in detail, but right now I simply ask you to notice the toxic cocktail of fungicides and insecticides we found in popular tobacco products manufactured by Tobacco Cartel companies that millions of people are smoking every day of their lives.

This book is about the critical difference between smoking tobacco and smoking the Tobacco Cartel’s products. That distinction is critically important, and it is masked by generations of sophisticated propaganda. Throughout the book I’ll offer you citations with links to scientific and medical research on the impact of chronic exposure to pesticides – although nobody has actually ever studied the health impact of inhaling these xenobiotic chemicals hundreds of times daily. And yet the Cartel scrambles continuously to conceal any trace of what they are doing to smokers.

The Tobacco Industry and Pesticide Regulations: Case Studies from Tobacco Industry Archives

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1314901/

If you browse this reference you’ll find numerous citations of long-concealed memos in which, for example, Cartel executives discuss how many millions they can save if they can get regulators in just one EU country to agree to a 0.3 ppm limit on a single pesticide on raw tobacco (never on tobacco products and never in the US) instead of the far more expensive 0.1 ppm limits being considered. There is also extensive discussion of the liabilities that setting voluntary pesticide limits would create for the Cartel:

"… the problem with the CECCM (Confederation of European Community Cigarette Manufacturers) document, even in its watered down version, is that is sets tolerances which would become ED wide and then worldwide, which we might have trouble complying with around the world.

Also, failure to comply with tolerances written by the tobacco industry which might come up during litigation would put the tobacco industry at a great disadvantage.

If we established and pledged compliance to the voluntary pesticide tolerances, we would have to commit to a multitiered, multicompany testing program of our finished product to be sure we are in compliance."

All the infrequent pesticide inhalation studies to date (2019) have focused on their inhalation as a byproduct of agricultural use or workplace/industrial accident. Inhaling these chemicals in the smoke from tobacco products is a whole different matter. I’ll offer numerous links to supporting research throughout this book.

In the act of smoking some of the pesticide residues on the tobacco materials used to make almost all Tobacco products are combusted, creating combustion by-products in the smoke that in some cases are more toxic than the original pesticide. There are also clouds of non-combusted, vaporized original-state pesticides in the smoke, along with other clouds of super-toxic compounds created by dry distillation of the pesticide chemicals by the advancing coal. None of these chemicals occur in nature or have anything to do with the smoke from the so-called tobacco in the Cartel product, which I will show you is rarely leaf tobacco but instead is manufactured from the most heavily contaminated parts of the tobacco – the roots and stems that are actually waste from the leaf tobacco harvest. All these man-made super-toxic compounds have been swirling around in the smoke of cigarettes, little cigars, and every other Tobacco Cartel product for over 50 years, and as far as I can tell – having looked carefully - not once has any US scientist, medical researcher, regulatory agency or anti-tobacco organization recorded that they thought to test tobacco product smoke for pesticides. Perhaps that’s because nobody has ever contemplated people actually doing this to other people – causing them and their families to inhale a cocktail of deadly pesticides dozens, even hundreds of times a day just because they are tobacco product smokers.

In a mild defense of independent tobacco researchers, how could you possibly set up a study of the health effects of people inhaling pesticides? Who would be in the experimental group? How long would it take for the ethics committee and the district attorney to shut it down?

But please take a look at that data table above and you tell me – isn’t this exactly what millions of smokers are inhaling every day? If they were smoking Tobacco without these pesticides, in other words if they were smoking organic tobacco, would the health impact be any different?

Many people think that organic tobacco really is a safer smoke, and I think they’re absolutely right. I think that when the dust settles people will finally realize that it has been the tobacco cartel and its exemption from pesticide regulation that has created this global genocide, not smoking tobacco.

That’s why throughout the book you’ll encounter the authentic voices of people I call American Spirits – those who have each found their own truth about organic, natural tobacco and who have given it voice in forums and chatrooms across the internet. I’ve watched and learned from the evolving collective voice of these American Spirits and am sharing many of them in this book.

I’ve been digging into the carefully hidden secrets and deliberately overlooked crimes of Tobacco Cartel for the past fifty years, and now with this book I hope I am making a compelling case for conspiracy, negligence, reckless disregard, conspiracy and mass murder against the Tobacco Cartel companies and the silent, wealthy, powerful interests and families behind them.

1. The Cartel Already Knew The truth

If you or anyone you care for are or were a smoker, or had a mother who was a smoker, and have breast cancer,

testicular cancer, diabetes, prostate cancer, liver cancer, childhood leukemia, Alzheimer’s, dementia, cognitive & developmental issues, atrophied testicles, gut diseases, compromised immunity, neurological disease, or have HIV/AIDS and your treatments are failing – this book is written for you and for them. This book will show you the direct peer-reviewed research linkages between exposure to specific pesticides in Cartel tobacco products and development of these smoking related diseases completely independent of what smoking tobacco itself may or may not cause.

I hope that this new data, and the new links this data creates between hard evidence from peer-reviewed science will open new effective approaches to getting justice for victims and bringing accountability to the Tobacco Cartel. My hope is that the evidence in this book can change our collective understanding of what the Cartel has done to human beings and to add another dimension to the legal, legislative, medical and moral models we use to deal with this criminal monstrosity.

Let’s start with this dissonant idea: I believe that the evidence I will present in this book demonstrates that it’s likely not tobacco alone, and maybe not tobacco at all that’s killing millions of smokers every year. I contend that it never has been tobacco. The meme that Tobacco kills is a deliberately constructed and maintained mass illusion. Tobacco products are unreasonably dangerous; Tobacco is not. This book will show how the magician performs his evil tricks and will offer new hard evidence that strongly suggests that it’s smoking Tobacco Cartel products rather than smoking actual tobacco that is killing millions of people every year. I’ll also offer you proof that all this suffering and death is purely incidental to enhancing profits and could be easily prevented by the Cartel itself even without regulation – perhaps just out of human decency. A sane person might think that 100 million preventable deaths in the last 50 years in pursuit of obscene profits is enough. Maybe time to change over to organic production? Evidently not.

2. Stay Slim & Fit Or Get Gross & Fat? Your Choice.

If you are or were ever a smoker, I’ve written this book for you. There’s very important information about your health here that nobody is telling you and it’s been very carefully hidden from you for many years. It’s what you need to know to be healthy regardless of whether you still smoke or not.

3. Most Cartel Tobacco Products Begin with This

If someone you love wants to stop smoking, and thinks that it’s nicotine addiction that’s preventing it, this book is for you and them. I’ll argue that it isn’t nicotine and it isn’t tobacco that makes quitting cigarettes as hard as quitting heroin. It’s addiction to toxic substances – specifically the fungicides and insecticides in Tobacco products – that is so powerful that so many smokers just can’t quit. I will show you that there are easy natural ways to quit Cartel tobacco products and they all involve organic tobacco.

If you’re already sick from smoking, or if someone you love has passed away because of smoking, this book is absolutely for you. You are the victim of concealed crimes that this book will document with hard evidence for you and, I hope, for your attorney. Smokers deserve justice – this book will give smokers and their families new evidence of crimes committed against you totally without your knowledge. You have been fatally deceived.

If you are a scientist or medical professional, or a regulator or public health person, or if you are concerned in any way with the integrity of research and evidence across the entire spectrum of smoking and health issues, this book is for you. The Tobacco Cartel has been laughing at your research for 50 years, and there’s a very good reason why. They have effectively subverted it and turned it to suit their ends. The bottom line is that any research on tobacco, smoking and health that involved the use of University of Kentucky Reference Cigarettes is likely to be fatally flawed, and I’ll document how that happened and why it matters.

If you hate tobacco and everything about it, this book is very much for you. Would you be open to considering that your hatred of tobacco and smoking is exactly how the Tobacco Cartel intends for you to feel? If you believe firmly that tobacco kills, and perhaps that people who smoke are fools, then this book is for you – if you have an open mind to one idea – what if it isn’t tobacco that is the lethal part of smoking? Just – what if? If true, would that be worth knowing?

4. This Is The Tobacco in Cartel Products

This book is for everyone who believes that they know everything they need to know about tobacco, smoking, health and the truth. There is much more to know, and I hope that some important parts of it is here for you to consider with fresh eyes.

My hope is that this book will contribute to the generations-long worldwide effort to figure out how to hold the Tobacco Cartel accountable for the millions of smoking deaths that I will demonstrate with hard evidence could have largely been prevented by reasonable regulations on pesticide residues in the Tobacco Cartel’s products.

Here’s that data again. There’s a lot here for the eye to grasp, but know that each contaminant you see here, on every line, is in itself capable of causing great harm if inhaled regularly and deeply, which is happening to millions of smokers every day, today.

*

Pictures do speak louder than words, and data can sometimes create an even more powerful picture than brush, pen or camera. Please take another look at the array of pesticides and fungicides that contaminate off-the-shelf products of the Tobacco Cartel.

These Cartel tobacco products were all randomly purchased by lab personnel, not by me, at Portland-area mini-marts and bodegas. These were privately-funded tests – no government agency or anti-smoking group has ever tested cigarettes or other Cartel products for these xenobiotic chemicals, even after 70 years of non-stop whining about the dangers of tobacco and spending billions to protect people.

5. No Regulation On Cartel Tobacco – Just On Cannabis

Fortunately for readers of this book, testing for pesticide residues has become increasingly available since the 1960’s and has gotten very sophisticated in recent years as states have imposed pesticide residue limits on legal Cannabis. Oregon has especially rigorous testing laws for Cannabis. There’s no testing of Cartel tobacco products, of course. No state does that, although they’re right there with their hand out when it comes to collecting taxes. But because of the Cannabis testing regulations there are a number of very good pesticide labs in Oregon. That’s why in late 2018 I was finally able to do what I have wanted to do for years – commission testing by a certified lab already familiar with testing tobacco substrate through a sister company in Germany, and get this hard evidence.

The data shown above and throughout the book, as well as other evidence I will present and link to, all begs two questions that I’ll ask you to please keep in mind:

Based on this data & evidence, is it likely to be just tobacco that’s killing smokers of Tobacco Cartel products and not the pesticides?

To the extent that it is not tobacco but pesticides contaminating tobacco products killing smokers, how many smoking deaths are preventable by reasonable regulation