Allen Shore’s Closing Statement during a lawsuit again tobacco industry.

Because the tobacco industry is like a nest of cockroaches, they will always find a way to survive. They still go after kids with one strategy after another. They put up brightly colored ads at kids’ eye level in convenience stores. They hire gorgeous twenty-somethings to frequent popular venues and seduce young adults into attending lavish corporate-sponsored parties. Cockroaches will always find a way. They can’t advertise on TV but they’ve hired PR agencies to hook them up with the film industry. And it’s working! Researchers estimate that smoking in movies delivers nearly four hundred thousand new adolescent smokers every year. Every time you try to kill the cockroach it finds another way. It has to! Because when you make a product that kills off your consumers you have to find a way to recruit new customers. They’ve now got a new feminized version of the macho Camel brand using slogans like Lite & Luscious with hot pink packaging. Virginia Slims advertise their thin cigarette. Velour magazine did a whole spread on the cigarette diet. They use social, psychological profiling targeting potential smokers by gender, ethnicity, sexual preferences, socio-economic groups. Cockroaches don’t discriminate! Their CEO comes into this courtroom gloating over their anti-smoking campaign which is designed to get kids to smoke! In 2005 they spent fifteen billion on advertising and promotion. That’s a 225% increase from 1998 and they have the audacity to declare they’re trying to discourage smoking. This is not how corporations with a conscience behave! How in God’s name are cigarettes even legal? Can anybody tell me that? They are a deadly concoction of carcinogens that damage every single organ in your body. Why do we not ban them? Because it’s a free country, because freedom of choice is an American ideal worth somebody dying every six seconds? How can any company, especially one with such a conscience, no less, knowingly manufacture a product that poisons its users! And make that product look cool and hip and sexy and fun so they can get children. How can any attorney defend a company that would do such a thing?
How can any society tolerate it? But we do! There is no conscience at Big Tobacco. There is no conscience in Washington which has been bought and paid for by this industry. Conscience has to come from you, the jury. If real regulation is to happen, it has to come from you! People are smoking day after day after day. And dying and dying and dying and the tobacco companies keep getting richer and richer. Last year alone they made twelve billion dollars in profits. How can that be? How can that be?
And the following is my reply:
It certainly CAN be.
Mr. Shore, like the rest ones of the anti-smoking campain, do think we, the addicted smokers, do not know how exactly do the nicotine and tar inside every single cigarette damage every single cell in every single organ in every single body of us. He’s wrong.
We DO know about the damages, very clearly, since we can feel it every second, but we also know what smoking means to us, what tobacco can help us relax, focus, and move on. Some extreme cases, like 3-4 packages a day, break the balance between smoking and leading a normal life, so we will NOT accross the line so that we can keep the balance.
Maybe the death toll increases every 6 seconds because of smoking, but I wonder the same number in car crashes, street fights, wars or some god-damned accidents happen every day in our lives, what do we do? Closing GE and Fort or even TOYOTA? Killing every human being on this planet so that they won’t be killed? You quick smoking because you want to live longer? Imagine the minute you quick smoking and the next you die of a car crash, wouldn’t that be so ironic to Mr. Shore’s campain?
Mr. Shore I’m afraid you are a communist, and you’ve betrayed your own religion, since you want to cover the truth to "help" your country in your fancy way. Smoking is a common behavior in our social lives, esp. in the last century, I don’t want to lose the spectacular TV serie like MAD MEN because of your mean communism.