Please remove Tobacco CEO from the University of Florida Alumni Board

This is a petition of love for the health of all humanity and
for ethical living.

Tobacco is by far the leading cause of preventable death, disease
disability, and property damage in the world. Nicotine is one of the
most addictive substances on the planet. People typically "decide"
to start using it when they are teenagers who are unaware of the true
consequences.

Tobacco executives like Susan Ivey know this and make their living by
what they benignly call "marketing," which is really just convincing
vulnerable people to make a decision that, once made, is extremely
difficult to reverse, and will eventually kill or seriously disable
more than half of them. What Susan Ivey celebrates as "success" means
that she is very adept at providing false rationalizations to those
who might otherwise fight their addiction before it kills or disables
them. When Susan Ivey and others like her "succeed," measures that
would prevent addiction, help addicts achieve freedom, and protect
those the addicts would otherwise drag down with them and the property
they would destroy are delayed and more lives are permanently destroyed.

Tobacco may be a legal product, but at other times in history so were
slavery, child labor, wife-beating, and denying women the right to vote.
People who opposed these were ridiculed as zealots and extremists. If
what is right and what is legal were the same thing, history would
remember Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela as criminals
and Judas Iscariot, Caligula, and Adoph Hitler as heroes.

What Susan Ivey does may be legal, but it is not by the wildest
stretch of the imagination ethical or worthy of being honored or
celebrated. Please spare a thought for how history will view people
like her and those who, like the University of Florida Alumni
Association, supported what she stands for: willful deceit of
the vulnerable,death, disease, and destruction.

We ask that you, as President of the University of Florida, please
take the courageous action to remove the CEO of RJ Reynolds Tobacco
from the Board of Directors of the University of Florida Alumni
Association, and renounce the professorship in international business
recently endowed by this tobacco industry CEO who makes her living by
destroying the lives of others.

With tobacco predicted to painfully slay one billion this century, how
can an outstanding place of learning such as the University of Florida
allow a death trader to cast such a prominent dark shadow?

We sign this petition out of love and respect for those whose lives
have been and will be devastated by tobacco.