Weeding Out The Truth - cause of cancer - Brief Article

Sometimes, what you don't do sticks in people's minds more than what you do do. Two years on from 'Are the Experts Lying?', The Ecologist's 80-page indictment of what we called the cancer industry, the fact that we did not mention the role of tobacco is still the cause of regular correspondence. Why, people still ask, did we avoid what is in most peoples' minds the single greatest cause of cancer? One commentator has even suggested we were in the pay of the tobacco industry.

Smoking undoubtedly causes lung cancer. The link is long established, and only the tobacco industry itself would still deny the obvious. But because the link between smoking and lung cancer is so well established, it has become convenient for other industries to blame virtually every form of cancer on smoking. Sir Richard Doll for instance has said that cancer increases of late 'can be accounted for in all industrialised countries by the spread of cigarette smoking'. But of the dramatic rise in cancer incidences since 1950, 75 per cent have been in sites other than the lung. And among non-smokers, the incidence of lung cancer has more than doubled in the past few decades. What's more, studies have shown that Chinese smokers are less likely to contract lung cancer than their American counterparts. It is simply not true that smoking is solely responsible for the current cancer epidemic. In other words something else, on top of smoking is causing cancer of the lung. Yet the cancer establishment appears intent o n avoiding an examination of those 'hidden' causes, instead flogging and flogging again the same old horse.

According to Dr Chris Busby of Green Audit, 'lung cancer correlates with air pollution generally. In a recent study of 104 wards around Hinkley Point nuclear power station the highest relative risks for lung cancer followed the tidal rivers, indicating that there's a strong component of radiation exposure from inhaled particles in the aetiology. These particles are looking more and more likely to be the culprits.'

What characterises modern society more than almost anything else is the level of contaminants surrounding us. There are more than 100,000 man-made chemicals in use today, of which barely a fraction have been tested, and not properly by any means. We surround ourselves with nuclear plants whose radioactive emissions are carcinogenic, despite claims by the industry to the contrary, and we persist in sending plutonium-powered satellites into space that, if an accident were to happen, would spray radioactive particles of Plutonium-238, hundreds of times more radioactive than plutonium used in atomic weapons, over the entire planet.

The cancer epidemic is caused by numerous factors. Smoking plays a very major role, but cannot account for all cases. In a sense, tobacco has become a scapegoat for all the other cancer-causing industries. It is a sacrificial lamb, but because of the nature of the industry it will not die. We all know smoking causes cancer, yet we continue to smoke. They are hopelessly addicted to nicotine, and the tobacco market is somewhat assured in the Western world (not to mention the Third World where markets are only now being prised open). The same however does not apply to producers of DDT, Dioxin, BGH and other known carcinogens. If the establishment finger were to point at them, all hell would break loose. People are neither addicted to them, nor do they benefit from their use. An honest campaign against such influences, at even half the level of the anti-smoking campaign, would trigger almighty ripples through fundamental modern sectors, not least the chemical, pharmaceutical, nuclear and plastic industries. In s hort, it would not pay for the establishment to play such a game.

Finally, campaigners have failed to distinguish between tobacco and the industry behind the plant. Yes, smoking causes cancer. But a quick look at some of the ingredients in a modern cigarette reveals some unpleasant truths. One organic tobacco company in New Mexico for instance provides a comparison between their own tobacco, whose ingredients include tobacco leaves and nothing else, and that tobacco marketed by the tobacco giants which commonly contains up to 600 different additives. Could it be that the latter varieties greatly increase the risk of smoking? Judging by the ingredient list, too long to include here, it seems more than likely.

In which case, the villain of the story may not be tobacco per se, but rather the monsters that have come to dominate the tobacco market. It is they who have corrupted the plant with countless additives, pesticides, and other man-made chemicals, not to mention their biotechnology plans.

And the result is that among the long list of the tobacco victims, we must include the traditional cultivators who have with great skill and difficulty maintained small tobacco patches on the same land for generations without depleting the soils and the smokers, who are not only poisoned needlessly by increasingly squalid tobacco, but whose personal freedom to smoke is undermined by a backlash that is unable to discriminate between good and bad.

COPYRIGHT 2001 MIT Press Journals
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group