‘Their Product Killed My Mother’
Lately, I have seen many television commercials sponsored by “the people at Philip Morris.” They are warm, friendly commercials that tout the many wonderful things brought to us by Philip Morris. I am outraged by these commercials as they attempt to take America’s eye off of their company cash cow: the production and sale of cigarettes throughout the world.
Theirs is an industry of death by government sanction. My outrage with these commercials turned into disgust last month when my mother, MaryAnn Bauer, died at age 55 after a 2 1/2-year battle with lung cancer. In this battle, she underwent almost constant radiation and chemotherapy treatments. Despite her aggressive fight, the cancer spread to her liver and then her brain. In her last weeks, she was unable to walk. She lost most motor ability and had to be fed, bathed, dressed and taken to the bathroom by a family member. She could no longer speak to us because the cancer took the part of the brain necessary to speak and put sentences together. My mother smoked for 30 years. Small cell lung cancer, almost always fatal, is a direct result of smoking cigarettes.
My mother most surely got this disease from smoking cigarettes. She became addicted to cigarettes in the 1960s when much less was known about the grave health risks associated with smoking. Much of the research was buried by the tobacco companies deliberately. Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds, Brown & Williamson and Lorillard all have Web sites that tell you about their companies. They defend what they do and claim that they are protecting the consumers’ right to smoke and refer to smoking as a “personal matter of choice.”
My mother leaves behind a loving husband who cared for her up until her last day, seven devoted children, five grandchildren, eight siblings, a heartbroken mother and scores of nieces, nephews, cousins and friends. Her death has forever changed our world. It has become a darker, colder place for all of us.
The continued ability of the tobacco companies to produce and sell cigarettes will kill many more thousands and darken many more worlds. I hold these companies responsible for my mother’s death. Their product, their lies and deliberate deception and their lobbyists have killed my mother and many others like her. More continue to die every day. When will it end? How many more people have to die such horrific, senseless deaths before someone puts an end to it?
If I were to put rat poison in a person’s food to deliberately cause his or her death, I would be charged with murder. Yet the tobacco companies are held blameless as they create and sell a product that contains dozens more poisons than rat poison.
My family and I will live with the anguish of our mother’s death for the rest of our lives. Smoking killed her as surely as a gun would have, albeit much slower. We regulate guns and other weapons of death. We punish those who shoot people or sell drugs to children; yet the sale of cigarettes remains legal and a “matter of personal choice,” according to the tobacco companies.
The matter of choice is not so much a choice as a chemical addiction created and marketed by the tobacco companies for profit. What will it take? How many more deaths are necessary to get the real message across, not the one that Philip Morris would like you to believe?
