[Straits Times] AN INDONESIAN woman exhales cigarette smoke into the mouth of a gaunt, naked patient at a Jakarta clinic, where tobacco is openly touted as a cancer cure.| Cheez! Why didn't I think of this? |
'I missed this,' says the woman, a regular customer, with an American accent, as Phil Collins's 'I Can Feel It' blares in the background.
Griya Balur would be shut down in many parts of the world, but not in Indonesia, one of the developing-country new frontiers for big tobacco as it seeks to replace its dwindling profits in the health-conscious West.
Long traditions of tobacco use combined with poor regulation and the billions of dollars that flow into government coffers from the tobacco industry mean places like Griya Balur go unchallenged.
The 'treatment' for the emphysema sufferer includes the blowing of smoke from 'divine cigarettes' infused with 'nanotechnology' to remove their cancer-causing 'free radicals", through a tube into her diseased lungs.