Humans are sensual beings. We like our creature comforts. If some of us want to indulge in self-destructive recreational activities, why would the government consider it to be any of the government’s business? Silly question; politicians are convinced that everything is their business.
In recent years, thousands of people who have consumed tobacco products for decades, suddenly proclaimed that they were shocked. . .SHOCKED ! to discover that inhaling smoke is not a healthful activity. Their lawyers were also deeply shocked and appalled. Never mind that medical illustrations from the 1600s clearly depicted cancerous lesions called “pipe smoker’s lip” centuries before anyone dreamed of actually inhaling tobacco smoke.
Only cigarette smoke is inhaled, and cigarettes did not become a popular habit in America until after World War I. Prior to the Great War virtually all tobacco consumers were men, and men smoked cigars or pipes; cigarettes were a predilection of homosexuals and a few women. . .and the French. When American doughboys returned from the sin pits of naughty France, they brought with them a taste for the cigarette. The tobacco companies were only too happy to satisfy the new demand for another tobacco product.
By the time the Bloomer girls began agitating for more rights and freedoms the American market of male tobacco consumers had been saturated. So the boys at Big Tobacco hired a smart behavioral psychologist to tell them what cigarettes symbolized to modern women. This sage informed them that for many women cigarettes were “torches of freedom” which modern women were eager to defiantly hold aloft. You could say they were blowing smoke in the face of patriarchy. In short, cigarette brandishing became a fashionable social statement for feminists. The tobacco bosses were quick to exploit this new insight in their advertising. During the feminist revival of the 1970s, the Virginia Slims ads that bankrolled Ms Magazine and women’s sports events, exploited this same insight into women’s psychology. It worked like a charm. The typical Slims ad contrasted a small black-and-white photo of a woman in period dress scrubbing laundry on a washboard with a full-color photograph of a fashion model posing with a lit, but smokeless, cigarette. No one ever pointed out that the woman at the washtub was the only woman in the ad doing anything healthy and productive.
Everyone knew that smoking tobacco was a rank and toxic indulgence that was offensive to everyone whose sensibilities had not been blunted by constant exposure to the evil weed. People simply pretended it wasn’t so nasty. “Mind if I smoke?” was the question non-smokers least wanted to hear. “Not at all,” was the standard lie in reply.
This is the central problem: cigarettes are designed to smolder. Smoldering is incomplete combustion. Smoldering produces smoke. Tobacco smoke includes about fifteen-hundred combustion products, including benzene, cadmium, cyanide, ammonia, lead, benzopyrene and radioactive polonium. You wouldn’t want any of this stuff in your body with the possible exception of water vapor and nicotine.
Nicotine is the only reason a tobacco consumer consumes tobacco. Aside from the comforting rituals of buying, unwrapping, prepping, fondling, lighting and gesturing with one’s chosen tobacco product, the ultimate purpose of tobacco consumption is the delivery of nicotine to the receptors on specialized brain cells inside the tobacco consumer’s skull. It’s not a big sin; the consumption of nicotine by itself is rather harmless. By itself, nicotine is no more harmful than the caffeine we offer children with every can of Coke or Mountain Dew; it does no harm to the God-given temple of our bodies. It’s all the other useless crap in the smoke that causes asthma attacks and heart disease and makes people cough up those gigantic yellow loogies. So you’d think that anyone who invented an smokeless, odor-free, way to provide nicotine junkies with a quick fix without endangering anyone’s health would be instantly hailed as a genius, a benefactor of mankind and an all-round good Joe. Well, if you think that, then you don’t understand politicians.
To show how serious they are about curbing the vendors of nicotine, our elected drug warriors recently dropped the hammer on. . .lollipops. I’m not kidding. Nicotine is now an unregulated drug only when consumers inhale it along with those fifteen-hundred other toxic and radioactive chemicals. When harmlessly mixed with a natural sweetener to mask the bitter taste of nicotine it becomes an illegal product, according to an FDA watchdog. The Food and Drug Administration has banned the Internet sale of nicotine lollipops. Liberal California Democrat Rep. Henry Waxman led the charge against the harmless little suckers by railing: “An addictive drug should not be masked by sweeteners and sold as a lollipop without a thorough review by the FDA and strict safeguards to prevent inappropriate underage use.” It’s a nice sound bite, but Mr. Waxman is clueless. The nicotine dosages are well within established safe limits and at three bucks a pop, they are unattractive to kids. And besides, kids already have easy access to an unregulated source of nicotine: cigarettes.
The Acting Director of the FDA’s Office of Compliance, one David J. Horowitz, Esquire, sent a letter to several pharmacies that threatened them with “seizure and/or injunction” if they did not desist from dispensing nicotine lollipops. In response, Mr. L.D. King, executive director of the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists, said that making nicotine enhanced products is legal as long as pharmacists abide by federal regulations. Compounding pharmacists carry on the tradition of old-fashioned apothecaries and prepare special prescription medicines at a doctor’s request. In the past two years, hundreds of compounding pharmacies have been dispensing nicotine fortified lollipops and lip balms. The pharmacists assert that the law that permits compounding, the preparation of medicines from bulk ingredients, also permits the formulation of nicotine lollipops. Mr. David Sparks, president of Professional Compounding Centers of America, which supplies drug ingredients to pharmacists, said that the various salt forms of nicotine, including nicotine salicylate, are permitted in compounding.
The lollipops were sold in a variety of flavors and dosage strengths. They had warning and usage labels. Child proof containers were also provided. The helpful lollipop literature says that placing the lollipop in your mouth for five minutes will substitute for a single cigarette; a whole pop will substitute for half a pack of smokes. Says pharmacist Pat Frieders, founder of The Compounder Pharmacy, which sold nicotine pops: “I think people should have some freedom” to buy the lollipops.
So the harmless lollipops are banned but cigarettes are legal, which means that a nicotine junkie with a two-pack-a-day monkey on his back must spend $2000 each year to purchase 45 pounds of chemically-treated tobacco leaves which he will then burn in a smoldering cloud to release less than one ounce of nicotine. Welcome to Mr. Waxman’s Neighborhood.
The nicotine content of cigarettes is left to the cigarette companies. Only non-tobacco products containing nicotine are heavily regulated. In other words, stupid government regulation now prevents the creation of harmless alternatives to the most deadly drug delivery device ever invented: the cigarette. Even smokeless tobacco products are much safer than cigarettes, but government regulations prevent the producers of smokeless tobacco products from telling you that simple fact. Therefore, government regulation is working at every turn to enhance cigarette sales. According to Elizabeth Whalen of the American Council on Science and Health, “If everyone switched from cigarettes to smokeless tobacco, instead of 450,000 deaths per year there would be a mere 6,000 because of smokeless tobacco.” If lollipops were the preferred nicotine delivery system, then the death rate would be microscopic.
Since researchers have concluded that the cancer risk from indoor second-hand smoke is 100 times greater than exposure to indoor asbestos, you’d think that our elected officials would welcome alternatives to the cigarette, especially when we are spending billions of dollars to remove asbestos from our buildings. Well, fat chance! Any harmless nicotine delivery system that could seriously compete with cigarettes would also take from the politicians the very mother’s milk of politics: money, the money from which their personal political power flows.
When the greedy politicos saw that tobacco companies were making a fortune selling a perfectly legal product that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans every year, they summoned up all their moral indignation and demanded a fat piece of the action. Beginning in the 1990s, anti-tobacco lawsuits resulted in 46 states receiving enormous settlements in the hundreds of billions of dollars. This booty was supposedly an attempt by those states to recover the broad-spectrum costs of their resident’s tobacco habits. The states’ attorneys did their best to skew the numbers in their own favor. The net cost of smoking is probably less than they asserted: cigarettes are America’s most heavily taxed consumer product, which is a big boost to state treasuries. One in every three smokers dies prematurely, which is a big saving to society in undispensed pension benefits and medical entitlements.
The 1998 agreements between the state attorneys general and the tobacco companies will result in a payout of $246 billion over 25 years. Some states have already chosen to sell their future payments at a discount to investors. Wisconsin sold its entire $5.9 billion bag of booty for a quick $1.59 billion. The tobacco companies are now scrambling to replace their lost billions by selling more cigarettes as fast as they can.
In the end, nothing has changed. The smokers keep on smoking, the tobacco companies keep selling cigarettes, and the politicians get the increased influence that comes with that big bundle of tobacco cash, all the while decrying the evils of Big Tobacco.
To win public support for their lawsuits, the politicians had declared that the settlement money would be used to fight the demon weed. They made this declaration in the same sincere tone of voice that they affected to convince us that state-run lottery money would be used to finance education. So what are they doing with the tobacco settlement money? According to the Government Accounting Office, less than a tenth of it will ever be spent discouraging tobacco use. Most of it is being spent on highways and museums and such. The keepers of the public till up in Niagara County, New York spent $70,000 of their anti-tobacco cash to install a sprinkler system on a golf course. Alabama used some of its money to discourage satanic worship in its public schools. In North Carolina the elected guardians of public virtue gave $41 million of their anti-tobacco booty to . . .tobacco growers. Yup! In the wacky world of politics this sort of spending has its own twisted logic. How, after all, can politicians carry on the lucrative war against tobacco if growers stop supplying smokers with ever more tobacco?
Cigarette taxes now range from the low of Virginia’s 2.5 cents per pack to New York’s $1.50 per pack. New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg just hiked the city’s per-pack tax on cigarettes from 8 cents to $1.50, so a pack of smokes in that city costs about $7.50. The mayor imagines that his newly imposed penalty on smokers will make them abandon their habit; he says he hopes the city’s revenue from cigarettes will be tiny. Dream on, Mr. Bloomberg. Stiff taxes on desired products always encourage tax evasion, both legal and illegal. City dwellers can buy their smokes in the suburbs. Westchester County, just north of New York City, is now enjoying boom-town sales of cigarettes thanks to Mr. Bloomberg. Why would any sane New Yorker pay $7.50 for a pack of cigarettes when he can buy his preferred brand on the Internet for $2.70? Smugglers make a fat and tax-free income by trucking cigarettes from North Carolina (state tax: 5 cents a pack) up to Mayor Bloomberg’s hometown. Two years ago the FBI arrested 18 people who were working the North Carolina-to-New York City corridor and charged them with funneling their profits to the terrorist group Hezbollah.
Smokers tend to be working class folks or poor. Only 9 percent of Americans with an income in excess of $75,000 smoke tobacco. As income declines, the number of smokers exceeds one in every three of the poor. Very few of the smoking poor are Republicans, so why do the Democrats push so hard for tax increases aimed at their own constituencies? They can posture before the cameras and say that they are well-intentioned health advocates, but the suspicion lingers that they themselves have developed a tobacco tax habit. And besides, poor smokers don’t get much public sympathy these days, so why would any rich Democrat politician risk unpopularity by lightening the tax burden on poor tobacco addicts.
When the Food and Drug Administration demanded that the tobacco companies print bold health warnings on every pack of cigarettes, the boys at Big Tobacco had a panic attack. They hired more behavioral psychologists to tell them the exact location on the pack where the warning label would be the least conspicuous and the least alarming to cigarette consumers. You can imagine their collective relief when the wise men told them that, after extensive investigation, they had concluded that it didn’t matter a whit where the warning label was positioned on the package: smokers already knew that tobacco was an unhealthy indulgence; smokers had already made the decision that the benefits of smoking outweighed its risks. Smokers are, by temperament, risk takers. Survey data also show that smokers wildly over estimate the dangers of smoking. Smokers, on average, expressed the belief that over 40% of smokers develop lung cancer. In truth, the number is only 15%. So smokers believe that the tobacco cancer threat is almost three times greater than it actually is, and yet they still choose to smoke. In other words, smokers are uninterested in health warnings on cigarette packages; in their hearts, they have already struck a bargain with the Devil on the health issue. The most telling consequence of the imposition of warning labels on cigarette packages has been to effectively immunize the tobacco companies against any more lawsuits from three-pack-a-day tobacco lovers. No one can claim they weren’t warned of the dangers of smoking. America is now home to almost as many previous smokers as active smokers, so whining about the iron grip of your nicotine addiction won’t sway a jury.
So that’s how things work in our weird republic: the FDA discourages the promotion of less dangerous alternatives to tobacco, which helps the cigarette industry thrive; the FDA’s labeling rules serve to immunize the tobacco companies from lawsuits from individual smokers; the politicians shakedown the tobacco companies for hundreds of billions of dollars and then lavish 95% of the shakedown money on stuff that makes them look like snappy breadwinners in their home districts and shoo-ins for re-election.
It’s enough to drive a person to drink.
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Thomas Clough
Copyright 2002