Late Out Of The Gate

It's been at least fifty years that the medical community has been aware that smoking causes cancer. Granted, it's been a long uphill battle to convince government to sacrifice its tax dependence on cigarettes in the best interests of educating and protecting its citizens against the health hazards related to smoking. But we've had decades of mass education, of bringing the tobacco industry to heel, of persuading people that its in their own best interests to desist from using tobacco products.

And during those decades of the public slowly accepting that tobacco companies embarked on a deliberate course of enticing ever greater numbers of people to smoke, through glamorous advertising aimed directly at women and at young people, deliberately withholding scientific evidence that smoking is egregiously injurious to human health, people have slowly taken steps to withdraw from that habit, difficult as it has been for many.

Logically enough, the demand of tobacco leaf has plunged. Many tobacco farmers who once made a handsome living off the reliable sale of high-grade tobacco leaf have long since made the transition themselves, opting, gradually, to grow other, edible crops. Many no doubt saw a substantial drop in their income, but they had little other choice than to switch to growing soybeans, corn, wheat and oats.

Yet there have been stalwart holdouts - those farming communities that simply refused to believe that their crops, now non-essential, and indeed harmful to society - who kept on doing what their fathers had done before them, expecting to be able to continue living well through the process. Should they then be rescued for their own lack of vision, their singular inability to view reality and take necessary action?

Seems so, because the Ontario government has announced it is prepared to hand over funds in the range of $300-million to the province's tobacco farmers still addicted to growing tobacco and facing a predictable decline in their fortunes. The funding to come from the in-excess-of $1-billion fine the federal government has agreed to accept in settling a legal action against Imperial Tobacco and Rothman's Benson & Hedges.

It's not that government hasn't attempted to economically assist and encourage tobacco farmers in the past to withdraw from their own habitual dependence on tobacco, for they have. Seems too many tobacco farmers are slow learners, much slower than the general public which has, by and large in the majority, been fairly successful in weaning themselves away from tobacco dependency.