Nancy Pelosi: Drug Kingpin, Extortionist

House Democrat Leader Nancy Pelosi published an op-ed in Thursday's San Francisco Chronicle, calling on the Bush administration to take a tough line against American companies who sell tobacco to willing customers in other countries

While we face many challenges to our security at home and abroad, the United States must not miss opportunities to demonstrate leadership in important global affairs. Our country's participation in these negotiations should demonstrate that we value the health of people around the world.

On the other hand, Pelosi doesn't seem terribly worried about the deleterious health effects caused by Saddam Hussein, a product that has fewer willing takers than tobacco has.

According to the World Health Organization, by the year 2025, 10 million people will die annually from tobacco, and seven out of 10 of these deaths will occur in developing countries.

Nobody knows what's going to happen in 2025, but according to the same WHO, the actual number of tobacco-related deaths was only 4 million in 2000, most of whom were in the developed world.

U.S. tobacco companies play a major role in spreading this death.

Only in the sense that a very large number of people are going to smoke anyway, and many of them happen to prefer American products over the competition

The United States is the world's number one exporter of cigarettes ... The Bush Administration must not impose the agenda of Big Tobacco on these negotiations, and should instead advocate strong provisions on marketing, labeling and taxation of tobacco products.

Translation: (a) Pelosi is an imperialist who wants to impose American public health standards on foreign countries. (b) Pelosi believes the purpose of government is to punish American shareholders and to throw American workers out of work because their companies sell a product that consumers in other countries want to buy.

But wait. There's more! Is Pelosi campaigning against tobacco because of a deep sense of virtue to save people from their bad habits? Probably not. The WHO reports [pdf] that

Alcohol causes as much death and disability as measles and malaria, and far more years of life lost to death and disability than tobacco or illegal drugs.

But Pelosi is a bit of an alcohol kingpin. According to her 2001 financial disclosure statement [pdf, 1.1MB], she owns multi-million dollar interests in at least two Napa Valley vineyards. She has also accepted tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the alcohol industry over the years. The Democratic party has taken millions of dollars more from the beer, wine and liquor people.

In fact, if you look at the campaign contributions from the Alcohol industry vs. the Tobacco industry, the breakdown looks like this:

	Democratic Recipients	Republican Recipients
Alcohol	$25.6 million	$31.5 million
Tobacco	$11.8 million	$36.5 million

(contributions since 1990. source: Center for Responsive Politics)

Pelosi appears to be less of a saint than a shakedown artist. If I had to guess, I'd say that this crusade against the Marlboro Man is really about getting the Tobacco boys to cough up [so to speak] their "fair share" to the DNC.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at February 28, 2003 07:07 AM