All We Are Is Rust in the Wind

By M. Stephanie Murray
Arizona Summer Wildcat
August 11, 1997

Hey, I've got some big news for you: You're going to die.

In fact, we all are, every last one of us, at some point in the near future, or at least within the next 80 or so years. Not a lot you can do to stop it either; put it off, maybe, but not stop it.

And that's the thing I don't understand about this whole tobacco brouhaha, especially the one state case that's going to court in Florida. Florida's Medicaid program is suing tobacco companies because Medicaid is paying for treatment of smokers who happen to live in Florida.

If you start thinking about the implications of this basic premise, you may (like me) begin to notice some very strange possibilities. First of all, due to Florida's Medicaid Third Party Liability Act, all the state must do is prove that the cigarettes pr oduced by the companies were dangerous and harmful. Well, duh. Are there any smokers anywhere who are unaware of the hazards of smoking? Even before the warning labels, this was considered common knowledge. Why on Earth do you think cigarettes were called "coffin nails" in the very smoking-fashionable fifties?

Secondly, the precedent this lawsuit could establish could easily be stretched into the realm of the truly bizarre. If a state health system does not want to pay for sick people, what the hell is it there for? Last time I checked, Florida was full of old people. Old people often get sick, with or without lung cancer caused by cigarettes. Therefore (stick with me here), Florida's Medicaid is going to wind up paying a lot of money for sick people.

Also, how does the state go about deciding which tobacco companies to sue?

Once upon a time the state of Florida itself made cigarettes, to be distributed to prison inmates. Suppose one of those prison inmates got hooked on those state-made cigarettes during his (or her) wild youth, and was, tragically, doomed to a lifetime pack -a-day habit. Now said inmate is suffering from horrible lung diseases, the treatment for which is being paid for by Medicaid. Who is responsible for this one person's illness? The cigarettes he/she started on or the ones smoked every day? Where, exactly, did the illness start?

On a similar note, according to an Associated Press report, Florida has dropped a suit against U.S. Tobacco Co., not because they settled, but because the company stopped making cigarettes over a decade ago. So, one would think, this case only pertains to Medicaid patients who got sick from smoking between 1984 and now, since the state and U.S. Tobacco are not in trouble here. Hmmm .

And why stop at cigarettes? Alcohol contributes to liver disease, which I'm sure costs a bundle to treat: those liver transplants ain't cheap. And cars, of course, which could be made safer than they are currently, except it would cost the manufacturers a lot of money. So if people are injured in cheap American cars when expensive luxury-car safety features would have saved them, why not sue for costs? Florida has lots of horse farms as well, and we've all seen what happened to Christopher Reeve.

The thing is, everything can hurt you. In fact, the thing that hurts you the most, the thing that starts the inevitable breakdown of flesh at the moment you are born, is the thing you need the most. Oxygen.

Oxygen does to your body what it does to iron (rust) or sliced apples left on the counter (icky brown stuff) or leftovers in the fridge (don't even ask). It breaks things down. That's why there's all the fuss lately about antioxidants, which try to protect the body against oxidation (like Rust-Oleum). But you can only take so many vitamins and eat so much fruit; there's plenty of oxygen out there. Eventually that sneaky gas will win. And you'll die. (I knew those Save-the-Rainforest people were up to no good. The Amazon basin is the biggest oxygen manufacturer around, and they don't even include warning labels on the product.)

That's what everyone seems to be missing. Yes, there are relatively good and bad ways to die and there are definitely cheap and expensive ways to die. But it's gonna happen either way. And no lawsuit is going to change that.

What are you going to do, sue God? I hear He has some damned good lawyers.

M. Stephanie Murray is a junior majoring in English literature