THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, July 4, 1996 TAG: 9607030031
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A16 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: 38 lines
In your editorial ``AWOL conservatives'' (June 17), you have the temerity to state ``more Colombians die from American cigarettes than Americans die from Colombian cocaine.'' Your statistic appears to be dubious at the very least.
Furthermore, I am at a loss trying to understand how Central American post-mortem exams can differentiate American from Colombian, or Lithuanian, or Turkish or Thai nicotine. Could it be that just prior to expiration, the Colombian expiree must `fess up the number of American cigarettes he/she smoked per day?
So just how do American cigarettes end up being the culprit in Colombia? Probably because Colombians have phenomenally sophisticated post-mortem technology bought with blood-money received from the Colombian drug cartels' ill-gotten gains.
Where do these funds come from?
They are received from our dead cocaine addicts and their dead crime victims (Americans who don't use drugs; family members of addicts and/or victims' families; or just-for-fun, kill-you-dead drug-gang violence, etc.).
Is it possible that your erstwhile statistical wizards were able to uncover how many dead Colombian crime victims these dead Colombian cigarette smokers can account for?
To cavalierly compare a U.S. drug problem that is taking lives, killing our youths' spirit, incapacitating groups of people, sapping our nation's resources and taxing our legal system for trivial possession crimes to cigarette-smoking Colombians, whose lifestyle, healthcare services, cultural underpinnings and larger per-capita consumption of alcohol (a frequent, collateral smoking post-mortem finding) is vastly different from ours, clearly offers a significant lack of reality checking.
DON SHEARER JR.
Virginia Beach, June 17, 1996 by CNB