The tobacco industry turned out to be a nice target for trial lawyers looking to get rich and politicians looking for a soft target on which to make their names.

So, the destruction of a legal industry became a sort of societal goal; free speech was violated in all sorts of ways by forcing the tobacco companies to pay for advertisements against their products.

Now for the chemical industry, many service industries, the energy industry, all sorts of resource extraction industries...?

This would not be a just or meritorious goal, it would not truly benefit society even if it reduced cancer rates - people will never live forever, as far as we can tell; they will die of something, and increasing longevity with quality of life is a fine and noble goal, but at a certain point it ends up being a trade-off of protecting rich old people at the cost of everybody else.

What might we benefit from most? A fight against diseases of the young; exposure to things that causes early onset leukemia, or diabetes. Environmental chemicals that encourage ADD/ADHD, depression, and birth defects.

Cancer is in there. But the goal should be finding ways to reduce exposure, not punish companies for entirely legal and legitimate past practices. Only the lawyers and activists really want that.

BenK:

This would not be a just or meritorious goal, it would not truly benefit society even if it reduced cancer rates - people will never live forever, as far as we can tell; they will die of something, and increasing longevity with quality of life is a fine and noble goal, but at a certain point it ends up being a trade-off of protecting rich old people at the cost of everybody else.

I agree with you here, as a nation we spend way to much time and money extending the lifespans of the old, generally at the expense of the young. This has resulted in an aging of the population which has created all sorts of problems in society.

On the other hand, your assertion that since the chemical and tobacco industries are not breaking any laws, what they do is morally ok seems way off base. In many cases industries allow chemicals which they know to be harmful to enter the environment and/or to be consumed by people. This harms young and old alike and needs to be stopped.

I think we agree on some points; my main contention is that if someone is doing something lawful, we must first declare it unlawful and then punish them if they continue. We should not, cannot justly, punish them retrospectively for something done under the aegis of legality. This is my main issue with the tobacco crusade; if they had decided to make tobacco illegal (ala prohibition) it would have been, perhaps, an over-reaction - but then, punishing the producers would have been justified. However, to punish them for producing a legal (and regulated) product is simply dirty pool.

We stop something by changing the law; then we enforce the new law.