The world has declared war against plastic. It is seen as our enemy and it seems that there is a massive campaign to remove it from our lives. It is blamed for the impending global warning doom for man kind. Convenience is an excuse and use of it is seen as shameful and we are morally guilty now. It is the new urgent.
We have always had to criminalise and marginalise. Humans have created all sorts of objects which are harmful. Rather than attack the source which is costing society ie. The corporations, we seek to influence consumer behaviour by making it more undesirable and acceptable both financially and socially.
Let's get real about cigarettes - they are harmful to everyone's health, both the smoker and everyone exposed to second hand smoke. They cost us all money as we first pay to help people quit then eventually pay for their problems later in life from cancer or whatever disease they might be punished with.
Second hand smoke affects especially the vulnerable - children, asthma sufferers and the pregnant. It seeps into homes from neighbours, pedestrians and outdoor areas of pubs / restaurants are affected, but it is a legal harmful addiction that has smokers angry they have nowhere to smoke and non-smokers unable to breathe clean air. Smoking too is bad for the environment. Discarded cigarettes pollute waterways.
However, smoking was enemy #1 for awhile but after making some inroads it has been surpassed by greater dangers. The ads are like horror movies. The facts about smoking are shocking. We forget about how important it is that we work to better the situation. Essentially cigarettes keep people poor. It is a form of enslavement and it becones a necessity for those consumers. How much time does it suck up? What is the true cost of it?
E-cigarettes are marketed as better and safer but they are just a new expensive fad disguising a horrible plague on humanity.
Tobacco is seen as a social experience, stress relief, an act of rebellion and any number of other excuses. We don't want to address the root causes and it is another bandaid quick fix which doesn't truly make individuals or society happier or better.
Poverty, feeling connected and a part of a community, powerlessness and a lack of work-life balance are put in the too-hard to fix bucket. That bucket is overflowing and manifests in the growing mental health crisis the world is facing. How does it continue to dumb us down, shorten our lives and numb us from reality instead of facing our problems. We see more homelessness on our streets and despair continues to grow in our youth as to the state of the world. The post war generation had hope for the future. In a period of opportunity and change, the prevailing feeling is of pessimism.
Fear is the growing trend. It feeds consumerism and economies. It is consuming and fueling greed.
We as a society haven't yet found a solution to live in harmony or the best way forward. Responsible corporations and positive capitalism is what we want. Just as there is a growing need for technology companies to have a duty of care to safeguard children's safety, corporations need to accept its part as a citizen of the world and be accountable for the harm it has done and that it is doing.
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The powerful tobacco industry makes billions of dollars in revenue every year. The salaries of management staff are millions of dollars. There have been news reports of bribery (BBC Panorama 2015), child labour and the impact of pesticides on workers (BBC 2014 Child Labour). The tobacco companies have maintained their stranglehold on us for decades despite all the findings about cancer.
Rich people own tobacco corporations. Rich people can escape bad air. Rich people can afford to treat health problems. My point is not to bash rich people. I don't want to play the blame game. It is that cigarettes are more harmful to our supposed vision of equality, distribution of income and overall welfare as a human race. It is about looking at what is really going on and what can we do about it.
Can certain industries be forced to invest in alternative businesses and finding ways of improving health? Or can they be globally taxed? Can we not find kinder and morally better ways to use our resources and make money? Can we find a way to discourage this bad behaviour? Can we hold ourselves all to a higher standard? Can we find a solution and create effective change?
Development and innovation is great for enhancing lives and human kind, but there is not enough early risk assessment and caution to prevent governments to have to deal with problems decades later. It's a case of let the next generation deal with the fallout and we can't predict these things. It's selfishness. It's a system which isn't working and no one is serious about fixing it.
Update 23 August 2022:
"Tobacco products made up around 15% of all the rubbish found on beaches, and more than a quarter of the unbranded litter was cigarette butts, polluting soil and beaches with single-use plastic and toxic chemicals, the charity said."
Find out more - UK's worst branded polluters accused of greenwashing and urged to do more to protect environment
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