5 thoughts on “Joe Chemo”

1. Smoking is dangerous but it amazes me that people think that this can’t happen to them some people are in denile as the years goes by the Lung Cancer slowly creeps in I’m a daughter of a parent who died through Lung Cancer it’s nothing nice and the saddest of it all it wasn’t worth it and I had lost my best friend and mother!!!!

2. My dad too. I know.

   There’s moves underway to cut back on cigarette regulation, the same folks who want to slash Health Care, Wages, people’s right to live in general.

   At least their mask was pulled off them long ago. They’re not hard to find.
   Type in “tort reform” in your search engine, and look for online petitions for deregulating just about anything.

3. While I do not smoke and support all efforts aimed at decreasing smoking, I find these posters extremely offensive. Try to imagine yourself taking chemo and fighting to survive and seeing the battle you face portrayed this way. Already self-conscious about your appearance and uncomfortable among people who cannot begin to understand your frame of mind, you pass “Joe Chemo” on the walls of your high school. The twisted humor won’t be apparent as once again, you feel the cruel isolation of cancer.

4. Sharon, your comment highlights the extent to which our concern for cancer victims eclipses efforts aimed at prevention. “Supporting Breast Cancer” for example seems more about raising the spirits of survivors than uncovering the source of cancer or reducing our exposure.

   I’m not sure we have the luxury to limit anti-smoking campaigns to what doesn’t offend smoking victims. In a way, smokers are culpable as recruiters and enablers of their smoking peers. They’re certainly murderers in terms of secondhand smoke. So really I’d say they’re fair game.

5. Sharon, the Joe Chemo is a shadow of how offensive the Joe Camel ad campaign was in it’s effects on getting kids to smoke.
   Dad would go off his oxygen line to go outside and smoke a cig. He started smoking when he was 12. He stopped smoking really abruptly 30 years later. Guess how?

   OK, no guessing games, it was oat cell tumors on his left lung and involving the coronary arteries. Pressed against the corona until his big brave heart couldn’t pump blood to his brain anymore and thus saved him a couple months more pure pain.

   I can remember cigarette ads from the 60s like most of a half-century weren’t even in the way. “Come all the way up to marlboro country”,,, Winston tastes good… like a cigarette should…

   I’d rather fight (for air one painful breath at a wheezing time) than switch.(to a sane and smoke free life)
   They even make candy cigarettes, STILL.
   The kiddoes are supposed to pretend they’re smoking them. Isn’t that jolly fun? There was a Flintstones ad campaign for Winston cigarettes. Fred and Barney sneaking out of doing yard work and smoking Winstons.

   Monsanto was, 20 years ago, designing a tobacco plant that was resistant to their herbicides RoundUp, Paraquat and Agent Orange.
   Paraquat which the DEA snitched off the Army about, in 1978-79 when they were spraying it on Mexican marijuana fields. Gave a warning that a similar product, Agent Orange, was PROVEN by the Army to cause cancer, bleeding lungs, etc… when burned and the fumes inhaled.

   How do you like them apples errr Ciggies? Although they probably have resistant apples too.

   The Army and Monsanto and earlier Dow and DuPont and other chemical corporations denied that Agent Orange or any other herbicides containing a class of impurities called Dioxins could possibly harm humans. Just weed killers.

   But the DEA kind of snitched them off on it. Guess monsanto and the others don’t really want us to know much about the fact that it’s not the relative strengths of the weed killers but the amount of the Dioxins, not even the active ingredients… they sure aren’t publishing a bunch of warnings about it.

   Just like the Cigarette Corpations, their accomplices in so very many dastardly deeds, don’t want people to actually believe that they’re pushing deadly poisons on children. They used to encourage, with a little help from Uncle Sugar, aka the Military, and tax breaks for doing their “patriotic” duty and DONATING billions of cigarettes to the military which were placed in the “C” Rations until the end of the American involvement in VietNam. Get millions of drafted soldiers to smoke, knowing God-damn well it’s addictive. And deadly.

   And getting a tax break for their “generosity”. Jesus.

   One of their spokesfreaks is now running for president and is a frontrunner in the Republican primaries… Newt Gingrich. Talks about Jesus and serving Satan.

   Also opposes warnings about his Cigarette Corporation sponsors, what a surprise.

   Oh, and that bit about Monsanto and Big Tobacco breeding a franken-ciggie? It’s so they can spray their weed killer on the plants after they’re already sprouted without killing the plants.
   The lives of those tobacco plants are worth far more to Liggett Morris than the lives of their customers.

   That would be “the weedkillers the residues of which are known to be toxic and to cause cancer, especially when burned and the fumes thereof inhaled” sprayed directly onto a product which is intended to be burned and the fumes inhaled.

   But, yeah, worry about people not being seen as they’re at the end of life.

   Funny story about that, everybody I’ve known who punched his personal ticket outta here, with the assistance of Tobacco, wanted to make clear to everybody who didn’t already smoke that it’s a stupid fucking way to kill yourself and people around you.

   They all expressed the wish in their end-of-life dramas that some kid would see what happens and never smoke as a result.

   Even John Wayne and Yul Brynner made anti smoking commercials as they were on their way out.