(Or maybe this is a good time to employ their beloved scare quotes: make that the conservative "mind".)Over at that bastion of bigotry and brain damage known as FD, a poster bitching about lawsuits stemming from mistreatment of natives ponders: "Should White People sue the Indians for Tobacco Cancers?"
When natives offered our marauding European ancestors a hit off the old peace pipe and a free sample to take back home, I doubt if their shamans had amassed all the medical evidence that tobacco smoke was harmful. And though the natural tobacco the natives smoked would have contained tar, it didn't contain the odious chemicals that drive someone to light up 20 times a day. It was only when profit-mongering Europeans figured out how to make this pleasant ritual addictive by adding nicotine, and more accessible by rolling it in paper, and smoother-tasting and more evenly-burning by adding to it a toxic soup of chemical shit, that tobacco became really deadly.
It would be redundant to point out that in the process of teaching white people how to smoke, natives didn't take over their homes, force them to give up their language and traditions, torture them in residential schools, systematically slaughter them by introducing diseases to which they had no immunity, etc etc and so on and so on. But just based on the tobacco issue alone, if anything, natives who get tobacco-related cancers should be the ones suing white people for fucking up their relatively harmless tobacco-smoking tradition and turning it into a virulent addiction.
Put that in your pipe...
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