OPEN LETTER

Dear Prime Minister Blair,

Aside from being World No Smoking Day, tomorrow will be like any
other. As usual, 7,000 people worldwide will die from tobacco-related
illness. Most will have become addicted as children, below the age of
informed consent.

How might you describe people whose activity knowingly and
indiscriminately kills so many people? In Northern Ireland, 3,000
people have died in 30 years. We call those responsible for such acts
terrorists and murderers. Their groups are banned, the 'oxygen of
publicity' is cut and billions are spent resisting their murderous
activities.

Just as someone who plants a bomb, knowing it will kill, but perhaps
unsure exactly who will die, so tobacco companies knowingly supply
tobacco, a lethal time bomb, aware that the most predictable outcome
of its sale will be the death of one in four of its addicts, even
those who follow the manufacturers' instructions.

Of health warnings, consider that if a bomber gives a warning, and no
one dies, he faces a life sentence. If someone dies, it is treated as
murder.

The evidence is damning. The industry coughs up 300 bodies daily in
the UK. It has a clear motive - profit - and opportunity is provided
by a legal market and weak voluntary agreements.

Prime Minister Blair, have you the compassion, foresight and political
will to put your stated concerns about cancer above the needs of your
Treasury and bring this premeditated carnage to an end, to ban the
manufacture and sale of tobacco?

Your government has already set the necessary precedent. A previously
legal product, beef on the bone, was banned on far less compelling
grounds in order to protect public health.

Why not tobacco?