Unconscionable.
Unethical.
Immoral.
These are the words to describe tobacco companies and their marketing schemes to attract new cancer patients.
These executives can sleep better at night knowing that younger victims have fallen prey to their flavoured tobacco products that provinces are banning.
Making their addictive nicotine products taste like chocolate, bubblegum and strawberry was a great idea to reel in younger users. That idea will definitely help pay for more Jamaican holidays and company perks.
We don’t know who’s worse – a tobacco firm CEO or a lawyer who just got a killer off on a technicality. But both sleep just fine at night.
We hope more provinces jump on the bandwagon to ban these flavoured nicotine products.
If we had our way, all tobacco products would be prohibited for sale to anyone under the age of 100.
Targeting young people with flavoured cigarillos is so unscrupulous that is defies all human decency. Let’s get more youth addicted because our long-time customers are dying off.
These products are cleverly packaged to make them enticing to the younger generation, and parents often don’t realize what their children are using. Is that a coloured marker or a piece of candy?
The government needs to grow some you-know-what and take more responsibility in protecting our youth against these hazardous products and deceptive tactics.
Companies should not be legally permitted to sell known carcinogens to the public. Yet the government continues to allow this abhorrent practice. Like smokers who have become addicted, the government has become hooked on the revenue associated with tobacco tax.
It’s a vicious circle of greed that will never stop.
If tobacco products weren’t so damn addictive, a boycott might work. Or perhaps we should send photographs of cancer sufferers to company executives and local MPs. Putting a gaunt face to all of this madness might rattle someone’s conscience for at least a day.
Lyonel Doherty
Editor
