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Clark Hansbargar told them to put wet cloths over their mouths, check the wind direction , and walk crosswind. Residents pointed out that heading crosswind if the wind was blowing in its prevailing eastward direction would mean swimming the Kanawha River or climbing a mountain. A Charleston Gazette telephone poll of Kanawha County residents, taken after Bhopal, found that 62 percent believed that a comparable disaster could occur in West Virginia. But only 15 percent of the respondents said they had no conWdence in the safety of the Valley’s chemical plants, while 40 percent professed to be “very conWdent ” and the rest “somewhat conWdent.” Don Wilson, who lives one mile east of the Institute plant, says his lungs were burned in 1975 by a gas emission from Carbide. He placed a three-line newspaper ad to hear from others who had been injured by toxic air, and received more than twentyWve calls. “Most of them had had similar experiences; some of them had cancer,” Wilson recalls. “But they had relatives who worked for the chemical industry and they were reluctant to get involved. . . . You will not Wnd people who work for the chemical industry saying anything bad about the chemical industry. “We will have to have a Bhopal here,” he told me. “We will have to have a hundred to a thousand people die here. The chemical industry will be allowed to monitor itself until there is a disaster.” —Jane Slaughter works for Labor Notes in Detroit. Tobacco Roads Delivering Death to the Third World Morton Mintz may 1991 In 1989, the World Health Organization asked a special group of consultants to make the Wrst-ever calculation of how many people now living will be killed by tobaccocaused diseases if current smoking patterns persist. They reported in April 1989 that nearly one-tenth of the world’s population is doomed—500 million babies, children, and adults. Many of those will be in the less-developed nations where, thanks in good part to U.S. exports, cigarette consumption is increasing sharply. For Asia and the Third World, there are enormous health implications in U.S. Government promotion of cigarette exports. The United States is the leading cigarette exporter . In 1989, despite a 3 percent decline in cigarette production, U.S. manufacturers 40 p a r t 2 combating corporate power sent 100 billion cigarettes abroad, more than twice as many as in 1983. And, to supply a growing export market in the Wrst half of 1990, production rose about 2 percent. While tobacco smoking has become less popular here, U.S. cigarette companies have tried to expand their sales to Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand. These countries imposed trade restrictions that substantially barred cigarette imports, thus protecting their own domestic tobacco monopolies. Except for Japan’s, these monopolies were, for the most part, lethargic, tame enterprises . They did, or were permitted to do, very little advertising and promotion, particularly to women and children. As sowers of addiction and death, they were minor leaguers; to become major leaguers, they would require the prod of the aggressive, sophisticated transnational cigarette companies. This, to be sure, is not how U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Carla Hills views it. “I don’t see how health concerns can enter the picture if the people are smoking their own cigarettes,” she told a news conference in January of last year. The U.S. transnationals’ initial export e¤orts generally failed, leading them to seek help from tobacco-state legislators led by Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina , from such power brokers as Michael Deaver, Ronald Reagan’s friend and former White House chief of sta¤, and, decisively, from the Reagan Administration itself. The tobacco companies’ clout came from Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. If a nation refuses to remove “discriminatory” or “unfair” trade barriers to U.S. products, Section 301 empowers the Government to retaliate, principally by raising tari¤s against that nation’s exports to painful, even unbearable levels. The pivotal and most recent Section 301 action in behalf of the cigarette industry was initiated by the Bush Administration against Thailand, following Reagan Administration actions against Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Thailand has long banned the import and sale of foreign cigarettes, but by 1989 smuggled cigarettes—an estimated eighty-Wve million packs—accounted for 5 to 8 percent of domestic sales. By resolution in April 1988, the Royal Thai Government cabinet , as part of a comprehensive anti-smoking campaign, forbade all...

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