When you're done with this collection there's more!
 
 

The Liberty Manifesto P. J. O'Rourke - Cato Inst.

All we have is the belief that people should do what people want to do, unless it causes harm to other people. And that had better be clear and provable harm. No nonsense about second-hand smoke or hurtful, insensitive language, please.  There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself.

 

I'd rather smoke than kiss National Review - Florence King - 7/9/90

A misanthrope is someone who hates people. Hatred of smokers is the most popular form of closet misanthropy in America today. Smokists don't hate the sin, they hate the sinner, and they don't care who knows it. Their campaign never would have succeeded so well if the alleged dangers of smoking had remained a problem for smokers alone. We simply would have been allowed to invoke the Right to Die, always a favorite with democratic lovers of mankind, and that would have been that. To put a real damper on smoking and make it stick, the right of others not to die had to be invoked somehow, so "passive smoking" was invented. The name was a stroke of genius. Just about everybody in America is passive. Passive Americans have been taking it on the chin for years, but the concept of passive smoking offered them a chance to hate in the land of compulsory love, a chance to dish it out for a change with no fear of being called a bigot. The right of self-defense, long since gone up in smoke, was back.

 

I have a basic human right to look at fag packets The Spectator - Claire Fox - June 4, 2008

Has your personal life been ‘denormalised’ yet? Mine is about to be, and believe me it’s not pleasant. The health ministries in Scotland and Westminster have just announced plans to make a perfectly legal habit seem as abnormal as possible. The SNP’s Public Health Minister Shona Robinson, quickly followed by England’s own health secretary Alan Johnson, tells us that public displays of cigarettes are hindering official ‘efforts to denormalise smoking’. Apparently, being able to see the rows of cigarette packets that are a familiar sight in every corner shop and garage in the country makes smoking seem like a normal part of life. And that just won’t do.  The problem for our great leaders is that notwithstanding their best efforts, smoking is a normal part of millions of people’s lives. What a nuisance — 25 per cent of the adult population just won’t conform. Despite being bludgeoned with gory details of the health risks and being evicted into the cold and rain, they keep puffing away. Maybe further humiliation will make them feel even more like deviant pariahs. Smokers will now have to purchase their illicit weed furtively under the counter, reminiscent of the days when backstreet shops used to sell porn and condoms. A perfectly everyday, innocent transaction will now become embarrassing and hence, ‘de-normal’.  I don’t expect anyone to get overexcited by the detail of the new ‘point of sale’ restrictions, which seem largely silly gestures rather than serious proposals. Whether it’s not being able to see the variety of brands and prices behind the counter or the proposed ban on vending machines, these plans may inconvenience smokers — they’ll certainly cause a loss of business for cornershop retailers — but they’re hardly life or death changes. Meanwhile, the plan to prohibit the sale of packets of ten is just plain daft; as others have noted, you wouldn’t try to cut chocolate consumption by only selling supersize bars. Yes, I concede, these measures are fairly petty and trivial. However, more serious and not a little sinister is when politicians start legislating to impose their version of normal on us all. Bet I can guess what a life lived according to government approval looks like. Mr & Mrs Normal Citizen will: count their units, eat their greens and recycle (and cycle) with gusto — meet the modern-day Young Pioneers.  One good thing about this relentless war on tobacco is that it makes a mockery of the original arguments for the smoking ban. That law, we were assured, was certainly not about the government interfering in individuals’ choices. Instead we were subject to the loudly touted but less convincingly proven pseudo-scientific ‘evidence’ that passive smoking caused harm to others. Politicians conceded that the state had no jurisdiction over people taking risks with our own health; the ban was solely to protect hapless non-smokers in the pub, club or bar. Now no such spurious explanations are given. Even zealots cannot make a case for linking vending machines to second-hand smoke. This is explicitly about making smokers stop smoking (and to reach the government’s target of reducing the smoking rate to 21 per cent by 2010).  Of course, this is not posed as a coercive measure to force the hardcore to go against their choice to smoke. Rather it’s official help for us to do what we all are supposed to agree is in our best interest. Robinson explained to the Scottish parliament that ‘displays stimulate impulse purchases among those not intending to buy cigarettes and, importantly, among smokers who are trying to give up’. Stella Duffy, chief executive of the anti-smoking campaign ASH, tells us, ‘Putting cigarettes out of sight will support smokers who are trying to quit’. How nice — these caring Samaritans are just trying to protect muddled smokers from their own impulses and weak wills.  The problem with this outlook is that it flies in the face of the very basis of a free democratic society. It undermines the idea that people are self-determining subjects. Instead we are posited as impressionable, prey to addictions, incapable of resisting advertising, compelled to act by the mere glimpse of a few fag packets. The serious implications of infantilising adults in this way were spelt out by none other than freedom’s champion John Stuart Mill 150 years ago. In one of the less fashionable sections of On Liberty, Mill wrote about the regulation of ‘beer and spirit houses’. He classed drinking as an individual act (as indeed smoking is), ‘for right or wrong’, and argued that along with religion, opinion and other ‘experiments in living’, it should be ‘outside’ the scope of the law. He pointedly described attempts at making alcohol ‘more difficult to access’ and ‘diminishing the occasions of temptation’ as ‘suited only to a state of society in which the labouring classes are avowedly treated as children or savages’.  Speaking of children and savages, it is not surprising that one of the 21st-century excuses for ‘diminishing temptation’ is the protection of the young. Whenever excessive regulation is on the horizon, you can guarantee our kids will be wheeled out as a battering ram against adult opposition. Alan Johnson claims that because ‘you can’t have any control over the age of the person’ buying cigarettes from a vending machine, they should be scrapped (even though the law already prohibits those under 18 from pubs that host vending machines). He claims that younger people ‘are more influenced by advertising’. That will explain the popularity of cannabis, then, all those billboards and TV ads. Finally, packets of ten are popular with non-wage-earning teenagers. But even with falling educational standards, the average 15-year-old can calculate that buying a packet of ten every two days can be replaced by buying a packet of 20 every four days.  What’s more, it doesn’t take an expert in child psychology to surmise that turning cigarettes into an under-the-counter purchase will most likely make them even more glamorous to your average rebellious teen. When politicians scaremonger about the alarming recent increase in numbers of underage smokers, they fail to acknowledge that this coincides with the most intensive anti-smoking drive ever known. Might there be a lesson in this? Of course, coming up with rational objections to these illiberal measures misses the point. As the use of that ugly word ‘denormalising’ makes clear, this legislation is less concerned with enforceable policy than in sending messages about what constitutes normal, acceptable behaviour. Ms Robinson explained her legislation as an attempt ‘to shift cultural perceptions of smoking’. In other words, this is law used as propaganda. But all is not lost — in England at least. The proposals are only going out for consultation this month, so we can all have our say. Oh sorry. The Secretary of State for Health has already gone on Andrew Marr’s TV couch pre-consultation and declared that he supports the Scottish bans. Presumably anyone consulted who dares express ‘denormalised’ views will be ignored. Let’s bombard him anyway. For those many of us still keen to embrace Mill’s ‘experiments in living’, and to normalise a freedom, it really is time to draw the line here.

 

Smoking ban unfair, insulting Freep.com - Jacob Grier - May 15, 2008

When I head to the Upper Peninsula every summer, one of my favorite activities is relaxing outside with a cigar on a beautiful Michigan night. I'm lucky I don't visit in the winter. Now that the state Senate has passed a bill to ban smoking in bars and restaurants, Michigan smokers may soon find themselves out in the cold. The ban is touted as a way to rescue bar and restaurant workers from the much-hyped perils of secondhand smoke. But before approving such legislation, it's worth asking whether these workers really need protecting. Often working as a bartender, I find it a bit disconcerting to see my profession become the object of such concern in so many states and cities. Firefighters, fishermen, coal miners, and even pizza delivery drivers take on far greater dangers than I ever have serving drinks. Dangerous occupations are often regulated by the government to protect workers. But the risks of secondhand smoke are neither hidden nor so excessive as to warrant a ban. Given the rapid rates of employee turnover in the hospitality industry and the array of smoke-free job options in bars and restaurants, people are capable of deciding for themselves whether to work in a smoky environment. Business owners who try to force undesirable conditions on their employees will find themselves losing staff and having to pay higher wages. Government interference is unnecessary and, frankly, insulting to many of us who labor in the industry. Ban proponents disingenuously compare smoking laws to benign regulations such as keeping rats out of the kitchen, making the staff wash their hands and keeping meat refrigerated. They're missing an obvious point: There are not, so far as I know, groups of oppressed consumers demanding restaurants where the cooks have dirty hands and the meat is rotten. People do demand places where they can smoke and drink together. In addition, what goes on in the kitchen is difficult for diners to discover from the outside, while smoking policies are easily ascertained. So long as entrepreneurs, customers and employees gather in such places willingly, there's no justification for the government stepping in to prevent them. Supporters of these bans may be sincere about protecting workers. I suspect, however, that for many of them, the public health argument is a feel-good excuse for imposing their preferences on the rest of society. The fight that ensued over this issue in Washington is a telling example. Before our ban was passed, City Councilwoman Carol Schwartz introduced a compromise that would have provided tax breaks to smoke-free businesses, increased fees for those that allow smoking and required smoke-friendly establishments to install expensive ventilation systems. If the council's goal had truly been to provide workers with more options, the Schwartz proposal would have done that. But predictably, her sensible compromise was roundly ignored in favor of a citywide ban. The lawmakers in Lansing are taking a similarly excessive approach. The good news for nonsmoking Michiganders is that business owners are already curtailing smoking in response to consumer preferences, just as they were in Washington before our ban took effect. A glance at the Web site of Michigan Citizens for Smokefree Air reveals 3,500 restaurants in Michigan are smoke-free. As tolerance for tobacco smoke continues to wane, more and more managers will see the benefits of joining them. Nonsmokers have good reason to desire smoke-free bars and restaurants. Tobacco smoke is smelly and annoying. Or is it aromatic and enjoyable? The difference is a matter of taste. Smokers ought to have places that cater to their preferences, just as nonsmokers do. Michigan should resist the urge to join California, the District of Columbia and countless other states and cities in the panic over tobacco. Reasonable people can disagree about whether the government should take steps to discourage indoor smoking, but a complete ban would go far beyond legitimate health concerns to violate the freedom of business owners, workers and customers throughout the state.

 

Wellness Über Alles American Thinker - Anonymous - May 10, 2008 The author has requested anonymity for career reasons.

A new battlefront in the war to erase politically incorrect civil liberties is taking place across corporate America under the innocuous-sounding banner of "Wellness."  Wellness certainly sounds nice; what kind of person is against wellness?  That sounds as crazy as being anti-hope, or standing in the way of change.  Obviously we all want to be well, but now it appears you won't have much choice in the matter.  Be well or face consequences beyond the state of one's health. But always remember: We're doing this for your own good. The latest thing that's in our best interest is a renewed focus on quitting smoking, or as they say in more sophisticated circles, smoking cessation.  And I'll take a brief time out to recognize that, indeed, quitting smoking is in a smoker's best interest, however, what's different this time around are the tactics employed.  More...

 

March of the zealots Numberwatch - John Brignell - March 2008

Every age has its dominant caste. This is the age of the zealot. Twenty years ago they were dismissed as cranks and fanatics, but now they are licensed to interfere in the every day lives of ordinary people to an unprecedented degree. When Bernard Levin first identified the new phenomenon of the SIFs (Single Issue Fanatics) many of us thought it was a bit of a joke or at most an annoyance. Now the joke is on us. In that short time they have progressed from being an ignorable nuisance to what is effectively a branch of government. They initiate legislation and prescribe taxation. They form a large and amorphous collection of groups of overlapping membership, united and defined by the objects of their hatred (industry, tobacco, alcohol, adiposity, carbon, meat, salt, chemicals in general, radio waves, field sports etc.) Their success in such a short time has been one of the most remarkable phenomena in the whole of human history. This quotation says it all: Imagine telling somebody twenty years ago that by 2007, it would be illegal to smoke in a pub or bus shelter or your own vehicle or that there would be £80 fines for dropping cigarette butts, or that the words "tequila slammer" would be illegal or the government would mandate what angle a drinker's head in an advertisement may be tipped at, or that it would be illegal to criticise religions or homosexuality, or rewire your own house, or that having sex after a few drinks would be classed as rape or that the State would be confiscating children for being overweight. Imagine telling them the government would be contemplating ration cards for fuel and even foods, that every citizen would be required to carry an ID card filled with private information which could be withdrawn at the state's whim. They'd have thought you a paranoid loon. The vanguard There is no question that tobacco haters are in the van and their unflinching, ruthless, mendacious campaign serves as an example to the rest. Their remarkable success is a spur to the others and their methods a model to be emulated. These include the gross abuse of the statistical method; the invention of numbers (particularly body counts, with no actual bodies or post-mortems) that grow mysteriously with time; the eschewal of anything approaching the scientific method; above all, the relentless, unceasing drum beat of propaganda. They never give up. Each tawdry victory strengthens the appetite for more. Having achieved the ban in public places (i.e. private property) they now seek to penetrate the home. In order to get their ban, the activists followed the advice of Adolf Hitler (The broad mass of a nation will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one). They needed to plant an arrant falsehood in the public mind, that second hand smoke was a deadly poison. The charge was led by the US EPA, who in 1994 published a so-called meta-study that was then a unique example of multiple statistical fraud and revealed the lowest standards of statistical significance ever recorded (since greatly bettered by subsequent zealots). Thereafter the campaigners did not even bother with corrupt science. They simply made pronouncements that were dutifully reproduced by their allies in the establishment media. One oft repeated one is that “there is no lower limit for damage caused by second hand smoke”, which is an example of the concentration fallacy and a contradiction of the first law of toxicology (the poison is in the dose). They pioneered the virtual body count, produced from nowhere and endowed with a remarkable capacity to grow on its own. The British zealots announced a body count of 1,000 a year (considerably greater pro rata for population than the EPA claim) which became 4,000 and then 11,000, with no evidence adduced.. It is now a matter of history that the campaign for a smoking ban was astonishingly successful. It was not only a bad day for human liberty and freedom of choice, but also defeat for science and a model for other zealots to embrace dishonesty in their crusades. At a time of threatened collapse of our society it was remarkable for its irrelevance. It offers the activists the ineffable pleasure of being able to oppress and humiliate a minority on the basis of an apparent justification. The anti-democratic EU, as always, leads in the suppression of free speech. One of the most frequently heard pieces of propaganda is that passive smoking causes childhood asthma. Children of the fifties did more passive smoking in one visit to the cinema than modern children do in their whole lives. Childhood asthma was then virtually unknown. It has increased steadily in subsequent decades, while environmental tobacco smoke has declined. It is now a major health problem. These facts are incontrovertible. Yet to state them is to arouse wrath. The sad side-effect of the dogma is that it diverts impetus from the search for the real cause: not a unique result of zealotry. More...

 

Truth is the first casualty of activism National Post - George Jonas - March 15, 2008

Rudyard Griffiths, co-director with Patrick Luciani of The Salon Speakers Series, sent me a copy of Czech President Vaclav Klaus' address delivered at Prague Castle this week. "Future dangers will not come from the same source," said the Czech head of state, speaking at the 60th anniversary of the communist takeover of the former Czechoslovakia. "The ideology will be different. Its essence will nevertheless be identical: an attractive, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice a man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality. "What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and its present strongest version, climate alarmism." Indeed. There are many systems of social philosophy built on the proposition that public causes transcend individual freedoms, interests or morality. Lying in a good cause is OK. So is coercion. The main champions of this proposition used to be Marxists and Nazis, but it doesn't take a Marxist or a Nazi to bully and lie. Just about any "activist" can do it. So can any official, carrying out social policy. The current champions may be the climate alarmists of the environmental movement, but anti-smoking crusaders come a close second. Take extortion. After British Columbia, New Brunswick has become the latest province to try its hand at it: extortion masquerading as a lawsuit against the tobacco industry. The Ontario government is mild in comparison: It merely proposes to outlaw smoking in private cars while transporting children. For the record, I don't smoke, don't allow children in my car and own no tobacco stocks. I believe staying away from cigarettes would save lives (as would staying away from fast-food, fast sex and fast demagoguery). Educational efforts to gradually phase out smoking are fine by me. What isn't fine is bullying and lying. In reverse order, actually, since the anti-smoking lobby has to lie before it can bully. A key lie continues to be that the health hazards of secondhand smoke have been scientifically established. In 1986, when then-U.S. surgeon-general C. Everett Koop wanted to see cigarettes banned, he made a flat statement, backed by the considerable weight of his office, that the effects of second-hand smoke were responsible for 2,000 deaths in the United States. Challenged by scientists, he blithely retreated, saying that while he may have pulled the figure out of a hat, it was all in a good cause. The principle was right. But the principle wasn't right. A 1987 study by the American National Academy of Sciences found no evidence that second-hand smoke jeopardizes the health of non-smokers. As even Koop admitted, the majority of 16 studies on environmental tobacco smoke and lung cancer found no statistically significant relationship. (One field study concluded that a nonsmoker would have to sit behind an office desk for 550 continuous hours before being exposed to the nicotine equivalent of a single cigarette.) If your aim is to ban or regulate smoking, you must show that smoking harms non-smokers. And if you can't show it because the evidence is equivocal, you must create an atmosphere of hysteria. In 1993, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) went one better than Koop. They took the official position that second-hand cigarette smoke is a health hazard, responsible for 3,000 lung cancer deaths in the U.S. Five years later, a federal judge in North Carolina found the EPA made serious mistakes evaluating the risk of second-hand smoke. Federal District Judge William Osteen ruled in 1998 that the "EPA publicly committed to a conclusion before research had begun," and that the "EPA disregarded information and made findings on selective information." The EPA defended itself by saying it had never claimed that minimal exposure to second-hand smoke posed a huge individual cancer risk. It only said that, while the lung cancer risk from second-hand smoke was relatively small compared to the risk from direct smoking, unlike a smoker who chooses to smoke, the nonsmoker's risk was often involuntary. It was a splendid illustration of how regulators, whose stock in trade is removing people's choices, can blithely cast themselves as protectors of volition. Don't smoking bans replace volition altogether? Oh well, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. (For eggs, read liberty -- piffle compared to the sacred cause of public hygiene.) I have nothing against the EPA's agenda; I only dislike coercion and lies. I'm not in favour of environmental smoke, only opposed to environmental hysteria. And I marvel that we don't even blink anymore as government metastasizes into such private spaces as our cars. Unhealthy as smoking is, it's not half as unhealthy as politicized science. When the Czech President raised the alarm this week about the cause-driven state "that transcends the individual in the name of the common good," he was only reminding us that in order to survive cancer or global warming, it's unnecessary to succumb to tyranny.

 

Please Do Smoke, If You Like Why Gov. Kaine's Ban for Restaurants and Bars Is a Bad Idea Washington Post - Thomas Firey and Jacob Grier  - January 20, 2008 The writers are, respectively, a policy analyst and media manager at the Cato Institute.

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine recently announced that he'll renew his fight to ban smoking in all Virginia bars and restaurants. He defended this push by citing the dangers of secondhand smoke, saying, "The scientific evidence about the health risks associated with exposure to secondhand smoke is clear and convincing. Recognizing the negative health effects and high public costs of secondhand smoke, Virginia must act to protect the workers and consumers in its restaurants."  We're pleased the governor has such command of the epidemiologic literature. Usually, when politicians make such statements, they have little if any familiarity with the scientific research. Kaine should cite the empirical studies showing the health effects of bar and restaurant patrons' occasional exposure to environmental tobacco smoke. We're not aware of any such studies; even the much-cited recent surgeon general's report on secondhand smoke offered no statistical evidence of diminished health from occasional exposure. The findings on health effects that we've seen involve people who are chronically exposed to secondhand smoke -- people such as the spouses and children of smokers who've had decades of regular, concentrated exposure.  The governor further claims that he has "clear and convincing" scientific evidence that a ban would decrease health risks and reduce "high" public costs. Can he tell us what those costs were and how they were calculated? How much will Virginia's current trends in mortality and morbidity change as a result of his prohibition? Will he and state legislators promise to repeal the law if no such change materializes?  Of course, people have a right to avoid exposure to secondhand smoke, no matter what studies show. But they don't have the right to force everyone else to live according to their preference. Fortunately, the world can accommodate their desires along with those of people who don't mind tobacco smoke, just as it can accommodate people who like Chinese food and people who prefer hamburgers. Restaurant and bar owners want to make money, and they do so by catering to different market niches. In Northern Virginia, many restaurants and bars advertise that they are smoke-free, while others cater to a smoking crowd. This offering of many different choices is a virtue of open markets. So why would Kaine override the smoking choices of different people and instead impose his preference on all Virginians?  The governor noted his concern for the health of hospitality workers, who may have more exposure to secondhand smoke. But when bar and restaurant owners set their smoking policies, they must consider the preferences of their staff or else they'll find themselves facing rapid turnover and paying higher wages. Why should all Virginia bar and restaurant workers be forced to work in a nonsmoking environment that only some of them demand?  Liberal societies allow people to make decisions that others don't like. If some Virginians want to eat and drink in an establishment that allows smoking, and some workers want to work there, and some entrepreneur wants to finance that business, why does the governor think he should overrule them?

 

Taking liberties Once again, personal choices are under attack by good-for-you government. L.A. Times - Jonah Goldberg - January 20, 2008

Remember this? "There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical...." Younger readers may not remember the opening to "The Outer Limits," a pretty good sci-fi rip-off of "The Twilight Zone" (and they may have only a fuzzy understanding that TVs used to have knobs to control the horizontal and vertical). But as they read the news these days, maybe they can find a new appreciation for the creepy feeling of powerlessness that opening once gave viewers.  For instance, California is proposing revisions to its housing code that would require all new or remodeled homes to have a "programmable communicating thermostat." Equipped with special "nonremovable" FM radio receivers, these devices would allow state power authorities to set the temperature in your home as they see fit. Ostensibly to manage demand during "price events" and other "emergencies," you would basically cede control of your home's heating and air conditioning to the state (when and if state officials wanted to exercise it).  Taken by itself, this may not sound so scary. But then again, as Gulliver learned, one Lilliputian is an intriguing freak. Two are kind of cool. But 10,000 teeny-weeny folk tying you down?  Of course, tying Americans down, limiting their options, foreclosing on any path not acceptable to today's social controllers of the right and the left is perhaps the defining spirit of our age. In New York City, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg has become a champion of a supposedly new "post-partisan" movement of for-your-own-good-government, trans fats are off the menu. Smoking has become the ceremony of heretics and outlaws. In 2006 alone, New York City banned -- or attempted to ban -- pit bulls; trans fats; aluminum baseball bats; the purchase of tobacco by 18- to 20-year-olds; foie gras; pedicabs in parks; new fast-food restaurants (but only in poor neighborhoods); lobbyists from the floor of council chambers; vehicles in Central and Prospect parks; cellphones in upscale restaurants; the sale of pork products made in a processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C.; mail-order pharmaceutical plans; candy-flavored cigarettes; the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus; and Wal-Mart.  David Harsanyi, author of "Nanny State," reports that there are "No Running" signs in Florida playgrounds, perhaps to make it easier for the authorities to catch toddlers and outfit them with mandatory helmets, chin guards and corrective shoes.  Nor is this a purely American phenomenon. Paris -- where smoking a Gauloise while tucking into some runny cheese has long been the national pastime -- recently banned smoking in bars, restaurants and cafes. Britain has gone just plain bonkers, updating its omnipresent anti-crime and anti-terror security cameras to catch people eating in their cars while on the road, now a major offense.  In Canada, there are now a slew of public service announcements that use fear, terror and gruesome imagery to encourage workplace safety. You can find them on YouTube. My favorite features an attractive young female chef in the kitchen of her restaurant, gushing that she's about to get married and have a wonderful life. Unfortunately, proper safety precautions weren't taken, and in the middle of the ad, while she's speaking to the camera, she slips and falls, pouring boiling oil on herself. She screams in agony. We see her scalded hands clenched in pain, the singed flesh on her face peeling off. So remember kids, safety never takes a vacation! Much of this, as Reason magazine's Jacob Sullum has long argued, stems from the "totalitarian" temptation inherent to seeing healthcare as a sub-category of politics and policy. When government picks up the tab for health costs, it inevitably feels it is responsible for curtailing them through "prevention," which can often elide into compulsion. As Faith Fitzgerald, a professor at the UC Davis School of Medicine, put it in the New England Journal of Medicine: "Both healthcare providers and the commonweal now have a vested interest in certain forms of behavior, previously considered a person's private business, if the behavior impairs a person's 'health.' Certain failures of self-care have become, in a sense, crimes against society, because society has to pay for their consequences." But there's another factor at work as well. We are seeing a return to the idea -- first championed by social planners in the progressive era -- that government can and should play the role of parent. For instance, Michael Gerson, once a speechwriter for President Bush, advocates a new "heroic conservatism" -- an updating of his former boss' compassionate conservatism -- that would unleash a new era of statist regulations. On the stump, Hillary Clinton refers to her book, "It Takes a Village," in which she argued that we all must surrender ourselves to the near-constant prodding, monitoring, cajoling and scolding of the "helping professions." Clinton argues that children are born in "crisis" and government must respond with all the tools in its arsenal from the word go. She advocates putting television sets in all public gathering places so citizens can be treated to an endless loop of good parenting tutorials.  Mike Huckabee, who represents compassionate conservatism on steroids, favors a nationwide ban on public smoking. Everywhere, from Barack Obama to John McCain, we are told that our politics must be about causes "larger than ourselves." What we used to think of as individual freedom is now being recast as greedy and selfish.  We've seen this before. The original progressives -- activist intellectuals, social reformers, social gospel ministers and other would-be planners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- touted "social control" as the watchword of their movement. One reason the progressives supported World War I so passionately was not because they supported the aims of the conflict but because they loved domestic mobilization. John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator who sang the praises of the "social benefits of war," was giddy that the conflict might force Americans "to give up much of our economic freedom. ... We shall have to lay by our good-natured individualism and march in step." The progressives believed that people needed to be saved from themselves. Journalist and commentator Walter Lippmann dubbed average citizens "mentally children and barbarians." "Organized social control" via a "socialized economy" was the only means to create meaningful freedom, argued Lippman, Dewey and others. And by free, the progressives meant free to live the "right" way.  A similar dynamic defined much of Nazi Germany. Nazi Youth manuals proclaimed that "nutrition is not a private matter!" "Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz" -- essentially, all for one, one for all -- was the rallying slogan of the Nazi crackdown on smoking, the first serious anti-tobacco campaign of the 20th century. The first systematized mass murder in Nazi Germany wasn't of the Jews but of the "useless bread-gobblers" and other lebensunwertes leben ("life unworthy of life"). The argument was that the mentally ill, the aged, the infirm were too much of a drain on the socialist economy.  Now, nobody thinks anything like that is in store for us these days. But we can come far short of that and still overshoot the mark of what is desirable by a wide margin.  More important, it's worth remembering that liberty is usually found in the small joys of daily life. In "Democracy in America," Alexis de Tocqueville warned: "It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones."

 

Stealing liberty by increments Republican American - Walter E. Williams - January 14, 2008

President Bush signed an energy bill last month that will ban the sale of Edison's incandescent bulb, starting with the 100-watt bulb in 2012 and ending with the 40-watt bulb by 2014. You say, "Hey, Williams, what's wrong with saving energy, reducing our carbon footprint and stopping global warming?" Before you get too enthused over governmental energy-saving efforts, you might ponder what's down the road. The California Energy Commission recently proposed amendments to its standards for energy efficiency. Its standards include a requirement that any new or modified heating or air-conditioning system must include a programmable communicating thermostat (PCT) whose settings can be controlled remotely by government authorities. A thermostat czar, sitting in Sacramento, would be empowered to reduce the heating or cooling of your house during what he deems as an "emergency event." Should you disagree with the czar's temperature setting for your house, the commission is one step ahead of you: "The PCT shall not allow customer changes to thermostat settings during emergency events." In other words, the thermostat must be configured in a way that doesn't allow the customer to override the czar's decision. Some people might agree with this level of government control over their lives, but if these amendments become law, you can bet there are other intrusive energy-saving proposals waiting in the wing. For now, California's energy communists simply are testing how much intrusiveness Californians peaceably will accept. I can imagine the state Energy Commission requiring remotely controlled main circuit-breaker boxes that control all of the electricity coming into your house. That would enable the energy czar to manage your electricity use. Say you're preparing a big dinner. The energy czar might decide that you don't need so much heat in the rest of the house. Or, preparing a big dinner might mean the energy czar would turn off the energy to your washing machine and dryer while the electric stove is on. There's no end to what the energy czar could do, particularly if he enlists the aid of the Department of Health Services. Getting six to eight hours of sleep each night is healthy; good health lowers health costs. So why not make it possible for the energy czar to turn the lights off at a certain hour? The Department of Education knows children should do their homework after school rather than sit playing video games or watching television. The energy czar could improve education outcomes simply by turning off the television or at least turning off all non-educational programs. You say, "Williams, you must be mad. All that would never happen." That's the same charge one might have made back in the 1960s, when the anti-tobacco movement started, if someone predicted that the day would come when some cities, such as Calabasas, Calif., would outlaw smoking on public streets. If someone had predicted that there'd be bans on restaurants serving foie gras; citations for driving without a seat belt; and school bans on children having peanut-butter sandwiches in their lunch boxes, I'm sure people would have said that would never happen. California's Energy Commission, along with its legislature, has the power to mandate that all heating and cooling devices have programmable communicating thermostats by 2009. After all, it's never too early to start saving energy or prepare for an "emergency event." The reason they won't is they would encounter too much political resistance. Their agenda is far more achievable using techniques dear to all tyrants: There's less resistance if liberty is taken away a little bit at a time.

 

Our Lying, Cheating Do-Gooders: Part Two Center for the Advancement of Capitalism - Edward Cline - December 5, 2007

Unlike the “debate” over anthropogenic global warming, the “debate” over the alleged health risks of secondhand smoke (environmental tobacco smoke, or ETS) is apparently over, not because the advocates of smoking bans have proven their assertions, but because: first, the advocates wish their allegations to be true; and, second, government force is backing up those assertions, thus giving them an aura of legitimacy in the name of “public health.” More...

 

Junk Science: Food Nannies’ Halloween Cancer Scare Fox News - Steven Milloy - November 1, 2007 Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and DemandDebate.com. He is a junk science expert and advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The latest food scare was announced, appropriately enough, on Halloween. But the science behind the scare is about as believable as are ghosts and goblins. "Landmark Report: Excess Body Fat Causes Cancer; Panel Also Implicates Red Meat, Processed Meat and Alcohol" blared the media release about a new report from the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR). The massive 537-page tome "assembled over five years by nine independent teams of scientists, hundreds of peer reviewers and 21 international experts who reviewed over 7,000 large-scale studies” purports to be the “most comprehensive ever published on the evidence linking cancer risk to diet, physical activity and weight." "The most striking finding in the report is that excess body fat increases risk for numerous cancers... Even small amounts of excess body fat, especially if carried at the waist, increase risk," proclaimed the media release. The report advises limiting the intake of hamburgers, French fries, milk shakes, pastries and soft drinks. It says that there is "no safe level of consumption" of processed meats a hysterical claim that is not even true for the most poisonous substances. This certainly is a landmark report never before have so many scientists labored so long to embarrass themselves and their academic disciplines. There’s not enough room in this column to debunk each and every claim made in the AICR report, but we’ll look at some examples after considering some fundamental facts and principles. First, scientists don’t really understand carcinogenesis very well. It’s known that the risk of cancer increases with age possibly because of the deterioration of DNA repair mechanisms and a few well-documented risk factors, such as family history of cancer, heavy smoking, and exposure to certain viruses and some exposures to radiation. Outside of those and perhaps a few other risk factors, the occurrence of cancer is largely inexplicable. Significantly, not a single case of cancer among the tens of thousands studied in the "7,000 large-scale studies" was definitively linked with any specific dietary factor. The AIRC report’s claim to link diet with cancer largely amounts to post-facto guesswork abetted by statistical hijinks and imagination run amok. A cardinal principle of epidemiology is that it is a very useful methodology when looking for linkage between high rates of rare diseases the sort of relationship classically found, for example, in outbreaks of food poisoning. But epidemiology is wholly incapable of identifying low risks of relatively common diseases or conditions, such as most cancers. The reason for this is simple: the margin of error in study data due to inaccurate and incomplete data collection is typically far greater than the size of any statistical relationship that may exist or be detected. Accordingly, the rule of thumb in epidemiology, as famously espoused by the National Cancer Institute, is that, "In epidemiologic research, [increases in risk of less than 100 percent] are considered small and usually difficult to interpret. Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias or effects of confounding factors that are sometimes not evident." Further, just because a reported risk is greater than 100 percent, that does not necessarily indicate a cause-and-effect relationship. Such reported risks may be statistically insignificant (indicating they could have occurred by chance) or have wide margins of error (indicating flaky data). And, of course, for any statistical risk to have meaning, it must be backed up by biological plausibility. With these concepts in mind, let’s consider the AICR report. The vast majority of the results from individual studies between every type of food and every type of cancer cited in the report are either significantly below 100 percent and/or statistically insignificant. The relatively few cited risks that exceed 100 percent are typically not statistically significant or have wide margins of error. Consider the data presented for processed meat, which the AICR report claims to be too dangerous to eat. Of the 17 study results concerning processed meat and colon cancer comparing high consumption to low consumption 15 are way below, and one is at the 100 percent-risk threshold. Thirteen studies aren’t statistically significant. Not only is the lone study claiming a risk above 100 percent (a reported 250 percent increase in risk) barely statistically significant, it has a margin of error four times the size of the reported risk. Of the seven studies reporting a cancer risk per serving of processed meat, all reported risks are substantially below the 100 percent threshold. Four results are clearly not statistically significant and two are borderline insignificant. On the basis of these dubious statistical results, the AICR report concludes that “processed meat is a convincing cause of colorectal cancer.” This is an appalling and unsupported conclusion. In the end, the AICR report isn’t really science at all it’s more of bloody crime scene where science got violently mugged by hoods costumed as health and nutrition experts and wielding statistical pepper spray. In some ways, this shoddy science isn’t surprising when one considers that the AICR also pitches cranberry recipes and other culinary snake oil as a means of reducing cancer risk. The AICR advocates against consuming fat, salt, sugar and alcohol-- an agenda worth $37 million in charitable donations in 2006. So we shouldn’t be surprised when the food police issue a “report” advancing such a lucrative agenda.

 

Where's the Consensus on Secondhand Smoke? Heartland Institute - Joseph Bast - November 1, 2007

More than a year has passed since U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona said, "The debate is over. The science is clear: Secondhand smoke is not a mere annoyance, but a serious health hazard." At the time, Carmona released a seemingly impressive 727-page report on secondhand smoke, the introduction of which claims secondhand smoke killed approximately 50,000 nonsmoking adults and children in 2005. Carmona's report stated the new orthodoxy in the anti-smoking establishment: There is a "consensus" on the dangers of secondhand smoke. But did his report actually make the case?   Junk Science and Courtrooms Understanding Carmona's report requires familiarity with a different report--the Federal Judicial Center's 2000 "Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Second Edition," the official guide for judges to understand and rule on science introduced in courtrooms. According to the manual, nearly all the studies cited in Carmona's report wouldn't pass muster in a court of law because they are observational studies, the sample sizes are too small, or the effects they show are too negligible to be reliable. More...

 

Nanny state becomes granny state San Francisco Chronicle - Debra J. Saunders - October 14, 2007

Last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a measure that subjects drivers who smoke with minors in cars to a $100 fine. The Belmont City Council passed a measure to ban smoking, not only on sidewalks or in parks, but even in your own apartment or condo, if the neighbors complain.  Witness the Florida-ization of California. Wags have called California the Nanny State. Now it's turning into the Granny State - as Sacramento lawmakers pass laws that work like real estate CC&Rs (covenants, conditions and restrictions) that restrict how other people can live. My generation is the generation that got away with everything. We partied. (OK, maybe you didn't, but I did.) We partook of illegal substances. We changed the drinking age to 18, as we chanted, "Old enough to fight, old enough to drink." We promised that when we were in charge, we wouldn't tell people how to live their lives. We would let others find their own path and make their own mistakes. So what do we do when we are old enough to run things? Having sown our wild oats, we're outlawing oatmeal. The drinking age in America is 21 - states that don't comply stand too lose 10 percent of federal highway funding.  California lawmakers repeatedly have tried to pass bills to make California the first state to raise the smoking age from 18 to 21. After the Belmont vote, it seems only a matter of time before it passes. Look what we've done with America. If you're 18, you can serve in Afghanistan, but don't drink a beer. You can vote, but if some California lawmakers have their way, you won't be able to buy a cigar.  In Belmont, soon you might not be able to smoke in your own home, while statewide you will be subject to a fine if you drive and smoke with someone under 18 in your car.  What about freedom? Perhaps Californians should be grateful that the bill by Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View, to make it a crime for a parent to spank a young child did not survive. Ditto Gov. Schwarzenegger's veto of a bill to require car seats for children up to 8 years old. Note that liberals are leading the way in pushing granny state laws. Only one Republican in the entire Legislature voted for SB7 (the smoking in cars with minors bill), while Democrats provided all 44 aye votes in the Assembly and 20 yes votes in the Senate. Democrats were behind bills to ban the sale of soft drinks first in elementary and middle schools - then in high schools. (Fairweather Republican Schwarzenegger signed said legislation.) The generation that lobbied for kegs on campus is booting cola out of classrooms. Sure, liberal lawmakers talk about choice. But if they believe your choices are bad for you, they will use the full force of the law to impose their will on you. "It is, 'I can do it, so I'm going to'," explained Belmont Councilman Bill Dickenson, who voted against the even-in-your-own-home smoking ban. Assembly GOP Leader Michael Villines of Clovis lamented bills to mandate "what you can eat and can't eat" - when mainstream voters are looking for "a good school, a good job and to live in a safe community." Pity the poor busybody politician in search on an excuse to pass laws that mandate how other people live. After all, they can't outlaw all unhealthy behavior, so they have to find unpopular targets - smokers, fat people - or claim they are passing a granny law For The Children. Then, they expand childhood. So that law to require booster seats for children until they're age 6 or weigh 60 pounds is reapplied to kids up to age 8. After all, Sacto solons can't allow parents to decide whether or not to put school-age children in car seats. And they want to tell voting-age military-age 20-year-olds, who can't drink, that they can't smoke. I don't want to knock old people. I plan on being one some day. But I don't want a stereotypical old lady, who peaks through her curtains, passing laws that dictate what I can or cannot do - especially in my own home. Yet that is what Sacramento lawmakers - the macho Schwarzenegger even - have decided they have the right to do. My generation thought we'd be so tolerant and open to the different drummer. Yet we keep electing politicians who believe they have a right to dictate how other adults live. Busybody granny politicians treat adults - whether they're 20 or 50 - like children. Maybe they're right, because California voters let them do it.

 

Anti-Tobacco Crusaders Boldly Go into Smokers' Homes Townhall.com - Jacob Sullum - October 10, 2007 Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine

During Prohibition, making and selling liquor was illegal, but drinking it was not. With tobacco, we are moving toward the opposite situation, where it will be legal to make and sell cigarettes but not to smoke them.  A smoking ban recently approved by the city council of Belmont, Calif., a town halfway between San Jose and San Francisco, is so sweeping that saying where it does not apply is easier than saying where it does. Smoking will still be allowed in tobacco shops, in automobiles, in some hotel rooms, in private residences that do not share a floor or ceiling with other private residences, and on streets and sidewalks, assuming you can find a spot that is not within 20 feet of a smoke-free location.  That may be hard, since Belmont's smoke-free areas include not only buildings open to the public but outdoor locations where people wait, such as ATM lines and bus stops, or work, such as construction sites and restaurant patios. But a smoker who despairs of finding an outdoor area where smoking is allowed can still light up even if he does not own a car and is unlucky enough to live in an apartment or condominium. He just has to land a role in a theatrical production "where smoking is an integral part of the story."  Meanwhile, the Los Angeles suburb that dubbed itself "Clean Air Calabasas" when it was leading the smoke-free march into the great outdoors is considering an extension of its ordinance that would cover apartments. Even if your landlord doesn't care whether you smoke, Clean Air Calabasas does.  The official justification for these ever-more-intrusive smoking bans is that the slightest whiff of secondhand smoke poses an intolerable hazard. The Belmont ordinance claims tobacco smoke is "extremely dangerous," regardless of dose, and warns that even "exposure to outdoor secondhand smoke may present a hazard under certain conditions of wind and smoker proximity."  Predictably, the ordinance cites former Surgeon General Richard Carmona's assertion that "there is no risk-free level of secondhand smoke exposure." But this pseudoscientific leap of faith amounts to saying that every little bit hurts, even if the damage can't be measured.  Epidemiological studies generally find that adults who live with smokers for decades are slightly more likely to get lung cancer and heart disease. The difference is so small that it's hard to say whether it signifies a causal relationship. There is also evidence that very young children of smokers are more prone to earaches and lower respiratory infections. What do these studies of prolonged, relatively intense exposure prove about a little smoke seeping under the door of your apartment or wafting your way on the street? Absolutely nothing.  But the politicians who take the misleading statements of public-health officials like Carmona and run with them cannot be bothered by the facts. New York Assemblywoman Sandra Galef (D-Ossining), who wants to ban smoking on playgrounds, recently told Newsday that "the scientific reports say that secondhand smoke has as much of a negative effect on your health as smoking directly."  Got that, kids? If your parents smoke, you might as well start smoking yourself; the health effects won't be any worse.  One of Galef's colleagues, Assemblyman Ivan Lafayette (D-Queens), said lighting up around children is worse than physical abuse. "They're both horrible things," Lafayette averred, "but one is going to kill the child."  As those remarks suggest, the next rationale for banning smoking in private residences may be child protection, which will allow the government to go after smokers in detached homes as well as apartments. Already several state and local jurisdictions have banned smoking in cars carrying minors. Such laws raise the question of why legislators are ignoring the setting in which the vast majority of children's exposure to secondhand smoke occurs. Now that anti-smoking crusaders have crossed the threshold into people's homes, they are not likely to turn back.

 

Anti-Smoking Paternalism: A Cancer on American Liberty The Conservative Voice - Don Watkins - October 2, 2007 Don Watkins is a writer and research coordinator at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, CA.

Across the country, state and local governments are banning smoking on private property, including bars, restaurants, and office buildings. This is just the latest step in the government's war on smoking--a coercive campaign that includes massive taxes on cigarettes, advertising bans, and endless multi-billion dollar lawsuits against tobacco companies. This war is infecting America with a political disease far worse than any health risk caused by smoking; it is destroying our freedom to make our own judgments and choices. According to the anti-smoking movement, restricting people's freedom to smoke is justified by the necessity of combating the "epidemic" of smoking-related disease and death. Cigarettes, we are told, kill hundreds of thousands of helplessly addicted victims a year, and expose countless millions to unwanted and unhealthy secondhand smoke. Smoking, the anti-smoking movement says, in effect, is a plague, whose ravages can only be combated through drastic government action. But smoking is not some infectious disease that must be quarantined and destroyed by the government. Smoking is a voluntary activity that every individual is free to choose to abstain from (including by avoiding restaurants and other private establishments that permit smoking). And, contrary to those who regard any smoking as irrational on its face, cigarettes are a potential value that each individual must assess for himself. Of course, smoking can be harmful--in certain quantities, over a certain period of time, it can be habit forming and lead to disease or death. But many individuals understandably regard the risks of smoking as minimal if one smokes relatively infrequently, and they see smoking as offering definite value, such as physical pleasure. Are they right? Can it be a value to smoke cigarettes--and if so, in what quantity? This is the sort of judgment that properly belongs to every individual, based on his assessment of the evidence concerning smoking's benefits and risks, and taking into account his particular circumstances (age, family history, profession, tastes, etc.). If others believe the smoker is making a mistake, they are free to try to persuade him of their viewpoint. But they should not be free to dictate his decision on whether and to what extent to smoke, any more than they should be able to dictate his decision on whether and to what extent to drink alcohol or play poker. The fact that some individuals will smoke themselves into an early grave is no more justification for banning smoking than that the existence of alcoholics is grounds for prohibiting you from enjoying a drink at dinner. Implicit in the war on smoking, however, is the view that the government must dictate the individual's decisions with regard to smoking, because he is incapable of making them rationally. To the extent the anti-smoking movement succeeds in wielding the power of government coercion to impose on Americans its blanket opposition to smoking, it is entrenching paternalism: the view that individuals are incompetent to run their own lives, and thus require a nanny-state to control every aspect of those lives.  This state is well on its way: from trans-fat bans to bicycle helmet laws to prohibitions on gambling, the government is increasingly abridging our freedom on the grounds that we are not competent to make rational decisions in these areas--just as it has long done by paternalistically dictating how we plan for retirement (Social Security) or what medicines we may take (the FDA). Indeed, one of the main arguments used to bolster the anti-smoking agenda is the claim that smokers impose "social costs" on non-smokers, such as smoking-related medical expenses--an argument that perversely uses an injustice created by paternalism to support its expansion. The only reason non-smokers today are forced to foot the medical bills of smokers is that our government has virtually taken over the field of medicine, in order to relieve us inept Americans of the freedom to manage our own health care, and bear the costs of our own choices. But contrary to paternalism, we are not congenitally irrational misfits. We are thinking beings for whom it is both possible and necessary to rationally judge which courses of action will serve our interests. The consequences of ignoring this fact range from denying us legitimate pleasures to literally killing us: from the healthy 26-year-old unable to enjoy a trans-fatty food, to the 75-year-old man unable to take an unapproved, experimental drug without which he will certainly die. By employing government coercion to deprive us of the freedom to judge for ourselves what we inhale or consume, the anti-smoking movement has become an enemy, not an ally, in the quest for health and happiness.

 

Smoke, mirrors and taxes Scripps Howard News Service - Dale McFeatters - October 1, 1007

Congress proposes to fund its $35 billion expansion of children's health coverage -- assuming it survives an expected presidential veto -- with a 61-cent increase in the federal cigarette tax, bringing it to a dollar a pack. Superficially, the idea has considerable appeal. The high tax might discourage -- it certainly punishes -- people engaged in a life-threatening habit that the government officially discourages. Simultaneously, it provides the funds to extend health coverage to uninsured children. But Congress may find it has run afoul of the law of unintended consequences. If the tax works as planned, the number of smokers will decline and so will the revenue. Increasing the tax again might run afoul of another law -- diminishing returns -- and Congress would face the unpleasant task of either capping the program or increasing taxes elsewhere. Critics of the tax say that funding the natural increase in the child health program over the next 10 years will have Congress in the perverse position of needing 22 million new smokers. The tax will fall most heavily on the poor and the poorly educated because disproportionately more of them are smokers. It may be correct if mean-spirited to say they shouldn't be smoking in the first place, but taxes that single out a class of people are generally not good policy. However, the cold political fact is that cigarette smokers are just not politically popular and the imposition of this punitive tax smacks of "serves them right." The tax increase will raise the cost of cigarettes substantially. Six states already impose a tax of $2 per pack or more -- Arizona, Maine, Michigan, Rhode Island and Washington, with New Jersey topping the list at $2.57. And counties and cities also add taxes, with New York City hitting smokers for $1.50 a pack on top of the state levy of $1. As cigarettes become more expensive, they also become more attractive targets for robbery, theft and hijacking, and more states are likely to join New York and New Jersey in their battle with a black market in bootlegged cigarettes. The price of a justifiable expansion of child health care may have the unintended consequence of creating a new class of tax evaders.

 

Congress Wants to Smoke Out Taxpayers — Again FOXNews.com - JD Foster - September 7, 2007 JD Foster is the Norman B. Ture senior fellow in the economics of fiscal policy at The Heritage Foundation (heritage.org).

Congress is looking to raise the federal tobacco tax again. The excuse this time is to help pay for a huge expansion of the State Child Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Expanding the SCHIP program is unwise, not least as another step on the road to government-run health care. Raising taxes to pay for more spending generally is a case of the old adage that two wrongs don't make a right. But turning to a tobacco tax hike is discriminatory and thus especially unsavory. Congress has long held tobacco users and the industry in high contempt. Smoking and the tobacco industry are widely unpopular, especially among upper-class trendsetters (and even among conservative economists). The product is severely unhealthful. And the only real defense the industry can muster is their shareholders' contentment in enormous ongoing profits. Yet Congress won't eradicate tobacco entirely. Why is that? It's not as though we're dealing with poppy growers in Afghanistan. The whispered excuse is the political power of tobacco interests. To be sure, the tobacco industry has been a big player in Washington, D.C., for a long time, but that's not why Congress has won't match actions to rhetoric. The real reason is that Congress itself is addicted to tobacco. The tobacco addiction Congress suffers is tax revenues -- the nico-tax addiction. The federal tobacco tax is now 39 cents a pack, generating $7.2 billion in tax receipts in 2005. Of course, the tobacco tax addiction extends well beyond our nation's capital. Every state levies a tobacco excise, from a high of $2.75 a pack in New Jersey to a low of 7 cents a pack in South Carolina. If lawmakers meant all the mean things said about tobacco companies, they would drive the product from our shores. They need not pass a constitutional amendment or alter the Federal Drug Administration mandate to erase the touted scourge. As Chief Justice John Marshall once said, "The power to tax involves the power to destroy." If Congress really wanted to destroy the tobacco industry, a truly punishing tax increase would do the trick. But Congress loves tax revenue more than it hates tobacco. And so, from time to time, they threaten to raise the tobacco tax further, but not too much. In this case, Congress is looking to roll in an increase in the tobacco excise to $1 a pack along with expanding this specific government-run health-insurance program. SCHIP was part of the 1997 budget deal as the first step toward national health insurance. Congress now wants to take the next step by vastly expanding coverage. The Senate has already passed a bill to more than double the program to $60 billion. But under the budget rules, it has to pay for the new spending. Enter the higher tobacco tax -- just high enough to generate the needed revenues, but not so high as to reduce materially the ranks of smokers or do real damage to the industry. Though most Americans actively disdain tobacco and tobacco companies, they still ought to take great affront at a tax policy expressly designed to discriminate against the use of a legal product. This discrimination cannot be justified on the basis of tobacco's alleged costs to society, because no other product is subject to such a test. If such a test were applied widely, the nightly news could be subject to a special tax. This discrimination cannot be justified on the basis of personal health because, again, no other product is subject to such a test and, in any event, that should be a personal decision. A tax on tobacco at any level is government-sanctioned economic discrimination justified only on the basis of political whim and expediency. Even if one could somehow justify a higher tobacco tax, there is no justification for a higher overall tax burden. If Congress raises the tobacco tax, then some other tax should be reduced commensurately. At 18.8 percent of gross domestic product, the federal tax burden is already again above the modern historical average, and it is expected to increase in coming years even with the extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. Congress should be looking for ways to cut taxes, not to raise them. The historical average tax share should be regarded as a dangerous ceiling, not a target or a floor. The SCHIP reauthorization bill is a bad bill all around. It's far too expensive. It's a big next step toward national health insurance. It requires a big increase in taxes that are already too high. And the tax hike in question shows that the sad congressional addiction to the nico-tax is undiminished.

 

The 'addictions' racket Pittsburgh Tribune-Review - Dimitri Vassilaros - August 31, 2007

Could you really be addicted to substances and behaviors?  John Luik, University of Oxford Rhodes Scholar and senior fellow at the Democracy Institute in Washington, D.C., says the definition of addiction has been manipulated to increase health-care profits by lowering personal responsibility. So, could dark chocolate from Belgium be addictive?  Fat chance, he says.  "When people hear the word 'addiction,' they imagine addiction means hopelessly and compulsively using against your will -- addicted to illegal drugs and smoking," says Mr. Luik, author of "Science Through the Looking-Glass: The Manipulation of 'Addiction' and Its Influence on Public Policy."  But now the word also is used by lawyers regarding certain foods, essentially saying people have no control over eating and drinking as well as other types of human behavior, Luik says.  Are humans simply victims of their needs, wants and, especially, their darkest desires?  "My central message is that when you look at the research, it's simply not true. People do have control over their behavior. They are not forced to do any of these things. When people say they have to eat hamburgers and milkshakes, there's no scientific evidence to suggest that is true," he says.  That could have profound implications regarding lawsuits alleging harm by the fast-food industry.  Your Honor, and ladies and gentlemen of the jury; every day Ronald McDonald ordered me to eat a dozen Big Macs and untold supersized fries. I am at his mercy. To be made whole, that clown must be made to pay.  "So the downside of this is that you have a whole group of people who've had the burden of responsibility removed. They are no longer responsible for their own behavior," Luik says.  Addiction labeling accelerated in the 1970s when the culprit -- the pubic health establishment -- said smokers were addicted and, therefore, it was supposedly harder for them to quit, he says.  The impact was horrible, Luik says, because it lessened the motivation to try changing their behavior. The alternative was to look for redress from the government or the evil industry. Picture Big Tobacco thugs ramming unfiltered cigarettes up people's noses.  Big Health Care may declare addictions to food and video games, he says. New ailments can mean new money from government and other entities for the health-care industry to deal with the so-called malady, Luik says.  Unlike cancer, heart disease or even an ingrown toenail, addiction cannot be proven, he says. There's no test, not even a way to prove that the so-called addict has not tried hard enough to stop.  There's also a nettlesome Catch-22.  "Once you say that any class of people can overcome an addiction, it removes the argument that it's a compulsive behavior," Luik says. "Even if you look at smoking, 50 million living Americans have quit." When that fact is juxtaposed with the claim that smoking is addictive, are there really any "victims"?  Willpower can stop the desire to smoke, drink alcohol or gamble, he says. But can willpower even cure a toenail, let alone cancer?  Rugged individualism and rational thought somehow have morphed into wretched victimhood and repulsive stupidity.  How do "victims" willingly degrade themselves -- demanding rewards for not resisting temptation -- without dying of shame?

 

The Health Police Cometh NY Sun - Andrew Wolf - August 24, 2007

Members of the City Council, that intrepid band of public servants hell-bent on finding the most intrusive ways of interfering in the lives of the rest of us, have a new cause. They seek to ban smoking in private automobiles when a child is present. The question to me is not whether children need protection in this case, but at what point our private space begins and ends, and for what reasons society will tolerate the breaching of that space. If the police (who obviously, according to some Council members, don't have enough to do already) can stop a parent from smoking in his or her car, is the next step prohibiting smoking in any home with children? Or perhaps the next step is enforcing some future ban on children eating fast food or sugar-laden snacks? And who is to decide just what is good for you and what is not? Does anyone on the City Council have any expertise here? Or are they just grabbing for a quick headline? These are the folks who brought you the ban on aluminum baseball bats, even in the absence of any evidence that such bats are more dangerous than the more expensive and far less durable wooden variety. Despite this, the Council was totally comfortable making a decision based on their gut feelings. Similarly, we may surmise that the closed confines of an automobile may expose a child to danger from a smoking adult, but where is the scientific study that confirms this? Earlier this week I chatted with the chair of the City Council's Health Committee, Joel Rivera. He was the fellow who proposed restrictive zoning to limit the number of fast-food restaurants in poverty stricken communities, an idea that hasn't advanced even among his eager-to-meddle colleagues, although his advocacy for this scheme won him a measure of press exposure that reached far beyond city limits. Mr. Rivera was elected to the Council to fill his father's seat, when the elder Rivera moved to the state Assembly back in early 2001. At the time he was a 22-year old college student. He is a very nice young man, but he still hasn't completed his college degree nor possesses any special training in the public health field. This lack of credentials doesn't stop Mr. Rivera from earnestly prattling on about childhood obesity, soaring diabetes rates, and future heart attacks all due to the Big Macs or Whoppers consumed by the little tykes apparently running wild through the city, unsupervised by parents, their pockets stuffed with cash to buy these dangerous treats. Despite the mania surrounding all these neverending health crises, the average life span of New Yorkers continues to steadily increase, despite their poor habits, and thus far without any special help from Mr. Rivera or his colleagues. If we begin stopping motorists because some of us think that they are unfit parents because they smoke in their cars with children present, how long will it be before a similar ban might be imposed on smoking in the home? What will be the punishment for such an infraction? Might the ban on candy bars, chips, ice cream, and other treats, now enforced in school lunchrooms, also be extended to the home? Will future caseworkers from ACS remove children exposed to these dangers from their parents just as they remove children today who are being physically abused? Does this sound preposterous? This level of government interference may seem extreme, but has been seriously considered in Britain, a place where silly ideas are often market-tested before being brought here. Earlier this year, the mother of eightyear-old Connor McCreaddie of Newcastle, England was called into a meeting with teachers, social workers, and health officials to determine her fitness as a parent. Serious consideration was given to taking the child from her for neglect. Connor wasn't being beaten or sexually abused, and he certainly wasn't underfed. Nicola McCreaddie appears to be a loving mother. But Connor is quite obese, reported to be over five feet tall and already wearing a size eight shoe despite his tender age. From his size as well as his mom's, it is clear that there is a genetic factor at play here. This didn't stop the local officials from attempting to intervene, and they got support right from the top of the British health bureaucracy. The BBC reported that the British secretary of state for health, Patricia Hewitt, stated "we have got a boy whose life and health have already been shockingly damaged because he is quite clearly eating the wrong food, and not able to take enough exercise. As I understand it, social services and children's services are rightly very, very concerned about this boy, and are trying to make sure that they give him and his family every possible support in dealing with what is quite clearly a growing threat to this child's health and happiness." Even if it meant taking him from his mother's care. This case didn't go anywhere as the outrage resulting from an avalanche of international publicity gave Connor and his mom a degree of protection from the intervention of the politicians and bureaucrats. But can this happen here? Our City Council appears ready, willing, and able.

 

Surgeon General Soft on Science FoxNews.com - Radley Balko - July 16, 2007 Radley Balko is a senior editor with Reason magazine. He publishes the weblog, TheAgitator.com

In testimony before Congress last week, former U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona said that the Bush administration has an adversarial relationship with science. "Anything that doesn't fit into the political appointees' ideological, theological or political agenda is often ignored, marginalized or simply buried," Carmona said. "The problem with this approach is that in public health, as in a democracy, there is nothing worse than ignoring science or marginalizing the voice of science for reasons driven by changing political winds." This is a common criticism of the Bush administration, made most thoroughly in journalist Chris Mooney's 2005 book, "The Republican War on Science." When it comes to issues such as global warming, stem cell research or the teaching of evolution — the argument goes — the White House adopts what you might call a "faith-based" approach to science, not an approach grounded in empiricism. I'm sympathetic to this charge. One issue Carmona didn't address is medical marijuana. Last year, the FDA put out a baldly political press release claming that "no sound scientific studies supported medical use of marijuana for treatment in the United States." This is flatly wrong. A wide-ranging 1999 Institute of Medicine report actually did show medical benefits from smoked marijuana while also finding minimal harmful side effects. The FDA press release was right in one respect: There have been no conclusive studies since. But there's a good reason for that: The federal government won't allow them. Carmona didn't mention medical marijuana in his list of grievances because Carmona isn't any more interested in actual science on the medical marijuana issue than the Bush administration is. When the New York Times asked him his position on the issue, he gave the odd reply that he was against medical marijuana because, "Smoking is bad for you." In other interviews, Carmona has said medical marijuana is a "science issue, not a political issue," which would be a great answer had Carmona actually looked at the science during his tenure and not merely at the political landscape. Of course, merely suggesting that we study the possibility of reforming federal drug policy cost Dr. Jocelyn Elders, one of Carmona's predecessors, her job. So perhaps you can't blame him. It may, indeed, be a fair point to accuse the Bush administration of politicizing science. But Richard Carmona isn't the person to make it. Carmona's entire term as surgeon general has been marked by embracing every last hobgoblin promoted by the public health movement, generally above and beyond what the science says. Sometimes in spite of it. Last year, for example, Carmona boldly claimed that America's weight problem was a "terror within," and that the threat posed by obesity would "dwarf 9/11, or any other terrorist event." Carmona trumpeted claims from the Centers for Disease Control that obesity kills 400,000 Americans each year to support his bizarre and completely out-of-context comparison, despite claims from critics that the 400,000 was exaggerated and flawed by poor methodology. The CDC later admitted its obesity mortality estimate was off by a factor of 15. Carmona never has let the facts get in the way of his positions on tobacco, either. While drumming up press coverage for a report his office published on secondhand smoke last year, Carmona implored, "Breathing secondhand smoke for even a short time can damage cells and set the cancer process in motion. Brief exposure can have immediate harmful effects on blood and blood vessels, potentially increasing the risk of a heart attack." This was consistent with the Office of Surgeon General's longtime crusade against smoking, which of late includes support for comprehensive public smoking bans. But the actual report accompanying Carmona's statement to the press said nothing of the kind. Anti-smoking activist Dr. Michael Siegel — who worked for two years in the CDC's Office on Smoking and Health — wrote on his Web site, "The Surgeon General's press release distorts the science presented in the report and ends up presenting misleading and inaccurate information to the public." Anti-tobacco groups, Siegel wrote, "are widely distorting the science to create a more sensational and emotional impact on the public. When this phenomenon goes all the way up to the level of the surgeon general's office, you know you've got a serious scientific integrity problem." Carmona has adopted an activist, if not necessarily science-based, hard line on other issues, too. Take the touchy subject of alcohol and pregnancy. In 2005, Carmona revised the official federal government position recommending that pregnant women "limit" the amount they drink, to warning them to abstain from alcohol altogether. But as Carmona's own press release concedes, there's simply no new science to back up that position. There are no studies suggesting that a glass of wine or two per week has any effect on fetal development at all. The announcement was typical paternalistic public health hype. It overstated the risk, made an overly cautious, superfluous recommendation and then made an unscientific, "for the children"-type appeal to emotion. A final example is smokeless tobacco. In 2003 testimony before Congress Carmona stated, "There is no significant scientific evidence that suggests smokeless tobacco is a safer alternative to cigarettes." He then called for an outright prohibition on smokeless tobacco products. The remark was so farcically not true, one anti-smoking activist called it "a barefaced lie." Users of smokeless tobacco — particularly varieties such as the Swedish product "snus" — are up to 10 times less likely to get lung cancer than smokers. But you wouldn't know that from government or public health literature. The British medical research group Bio Med Central reported in 2005 that, "A study of 316 Internet Web sites showed that most government, health advice and advocacy Web sites suggested that smokeless tobacco use is as harmful as cigarette smoking, even though the risk is actually extremely small compared to that from smoking." In this case, Carmona's political posturing in the face of actual science may well be costing lives. Were smokers told the truth about the significantly lower risks associated with smokeless tobacco, many would perhaps decide to switch, getting the same nicotine kick at only a tenth of the risk. None of this is really new. The Office of Surgeon General always has been overtly political, a captive of the most hysterical public health activists. Its only real powers are tongue-clucking and finger-wagging, usually about the latest moral panic, lecturing the American public to knock off its bad habits, lest somebody get hurt. Richard Carmona's tenure was no different, which is why it's laughable to hear him lecture someone else about science.

 

Freedoms gone in puff of smoke Toledo Blade - Letter to the Editor - Joe Ranker - June 10, 2007 C.L.A.S.H. Note:  We don't usually include letters to editors in this section but this one was too eloquent to pass up.

I wonder what George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and the boys would have to say about the state of the republic, here in Ohio, these days? What would they say when they learned that all of the courage, sacrifice, honor, and wisdom they expended to start us off on the road to liberty, freedom, and self-determination, has all gone up in a puff of smoke? What would they say when they learned that the government for which they so carefully drew the blueprint has become so powerful that it can make criminals of its citizens for nothing more than choosing to allow the consumption of a legal product on their own property? What would they say when they learned that one tavern owner may put up a sign that says "No Smoking," but another tavern owner will be punished for putting up a sign that says "If smoking offends you, don't come in"? And what would they say when they learned that our scarce law enforcement dollars will be spent to find and punish these tavern owners at the same time that a sworn enemy of our country is trying his best, every day, to expose us all to a firsthand whiff of substances so terrible that they would be beyond the imagination of these fathers of our country? I believe they would be speechless. But they would shed a tear. And their tears would not be caused by secondhand tobacco smoke!

 

Warning: Nanny state may be hazardous to your freedom Boston Herald - Jonah Goldberg - June 10, 2007

The British government recently unveiled plans for a massive crackdown on “excessive drinking,” particularly among the middle class. It will include all of the familiar tactics of public health officials: dire new warnings on wine bottles, public awareness campaigns, scolding from men and women in lab coats.       But the public response has been a bit more strident than what we’re used to over here. Boris Johnson, a member of Parliament and a conservative journalist, writes in The Telegraph: “I am told that the drinks industry is in two minds. Some say capitulate and agree to the ‘voluntary’ code; some say fight and force (the government) to try to bring forward legislation. I say fight, fight, fight. Fight against these insulting, ugly and otiose labels.”       Sarah Vine, writing in The Times, is even more passionate, decrying a “. . . pernicious new Puritanism that is slowly squeezing the life and soul out of Britain. Ye gods, as my grandmother used to say, almost all the middle classes have left is their glass of wine in the evening. . . . Because let’s face it, this Government is doing its best to make our lives about as miserable as any pox-raddled Hogarthian whore’s. Utter the word ‘middle class’ in Whitehall and watch their greedy little pimps’ eyes light up with pound signs. Behold the British middle-classes - a docile, law-abiding army of tax slaves. Hurrah, let’s blow it all on some more social workers in Newcastle.”       As blessedly entertaining as all this is, some might wonder why the Brits are so exercised about a bunch of warning labels. After all, political correctness has been worse over there for quite a while. Police have been known to arrest school kids for insulting their friends. All of England is preparing for a smoking ban that will include “smoking police” making raids on establishments violating the law. The streets of Old Blighty are festooned with hundreds of thousands of closed-circuit television cameras. And, whereas once these cameras were used for anti-terrorism, police in some jurisdictions have actually outfitted them with loudspeakers so they can, like the voice of God, tell pedestrians to pick up their litter and generally behave like good “tax slaves.” You’d think warning labels on vino would seem as uncontroversial as adding green vegetables to the prison cafeteria menu.       One answer might be that this is merely the straw that breaks the camel’s already strained back. Another might be rage at a late hit from the exiting government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Another might be that the Brits can take “nanny state” intrusions in the name of law and order, but if you go after their booze, it’s time for a glorious revolution. Yet another might be that Britain’s underclass seems increasingly unredeemable and, rather than give up on it, the government feels the need to ratchet up the infantilization of the many in order to fix the few.       All of these, and many other interpretations, have merit. But there’s another explanation with some salience for Americans bemusedly - or enviously - watching Britain turn into a penal colony with whacky TV and a line of hereditary wardens called monarchs.       Britain still subscribes to a system where health care is for the most part socialized. When the bureaucrat-priesthood of the National Health Service decides that a certain behavior is unacceptable, the consequences potentially involve more than scolding. For example, in 2005, Britain’s health service started refusing certain surgeries for fat people. An official behind the decision conceded that one of the considerations was cost. Fat people would benefit from the surgery less, so they deserved it less. As Tony Harrison, a British health-care expert, explained to the Toronto Sun at the time, “Rationing is a reality when funding is limited.”       But it’s impossible to distinguish such cost-cutting judgments from moral ones. The reasoning is obvious: Fat people, smokers and - soon - drinkers deserve less health care because they bring their problems on themselves. In short, they deserve it. This is a perfectly logical perspective and, if I were in charge of everybody’s health care, I would probably resort to similar logic.       But I’m not in charge of everybody’s health care. Nor should anyone else be. In a free-market system, bad behavior will still have high costs personally and financially, but those costs are more likely to be borne by you and you alone. The more you socialize the costs of personal liberty, the more license you give others to regulate it.       Universal health care, once again all the rage in the United States, is an invitation for scolds to become nannies. I think many Brits understand this all too well, which is one reason why they want to fight the scolds here and now.

 

Free expression gets smoked Chicago Tribune - Steve Chapman - May 17, 2007

The 1st Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of the press, takes the view that the people should dictate to the government, not the other way around. But no one told a group of 32 state attorneys general, who have taken it upon themselves to instruct the film industry on the appropriate content of movies. This time, the cause is not raunchy sex, foul language or blood-spattering violence. It's cigarettes. Many experts think that when actors puff away, they cause teenagers to do likewise. One study went so far as to say that 38 percent of all kids who acquire the habit do so because of the influence of films. So all these state government officials want filmmakers to stop depicting tobacco use. They evidently have had an effect. Not long after the attorneys general sent a letter requesting action, the Motion Picture Association of America agreed to use smoking in determining each film's rating. "Depictions that glamorize smoking or movies that feature pervasive smoking outside of a historic or other mitigating context" would run afoul of the ratings board. Apparently it would be OK to show an unwashed lowlife taking a drag just before he drops dead of a heart attack. The MPAA didn't go as far as demanded by some anti-tobacco groups that want to slap an R rating on just about every film in which actors light up. But it accepted the basic principle that public health lobbyists and politicians should have a big role in deciding what people will see, instead of letting the industry merely cater to its audience. It's hard to fully credit the notion that kids start smoking just because they see Scarlett Johansson doing it. Steven Milloy, who is the publisher of the Web site JunkScience.com, points out that adolescent smoking has declined even as onscreen smoking has increased. If movies exert such a mammoth influence on impressionable youngsters, shouldn't teen tobacco use have risen? The studies themselves are not as damning as they purport to be. They indicate that kids who watch more movies with smoking are more likely to smoke. But a correlation does not necessarily show a cause: Just because there is lots of beer drinking at baseball games doesn't mean beer drinking causes baseball. It may be that kids see a star light up and rush out to imitate him. Or it may be that teens who are inclined to smoke anyway are also inclined to see the sort of movies that feature smoking. Michael Siegel, a physician and professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, believes the studies greatly exaggerate the impact of tobacco in films. "It is simply one of a large number of ways in which youths are exposed to positive images of smoking (which includes advertisements, television movies, television shows, DVDs, Internet, music videos and a variety of other sources)," he told me in an e-mail interview. "To single out smoking in movies as the cause of youth smoking initiation for a large percentage of kids is ridiculous." Putting an R rating on smoky movies probably wouldn't do much to reduce teenagers' exposure. Some 75 percent of new releases that feature smoking are rated R -- and a lot of them are accessible even to preteens. In one survey of kids in grades 5 through 8, only 16 percent said their parents never let them see R-rated films. Siegel points out that applying R ratings to films just because they feature full-frontal shots of cigarettes may backfire. Parents anxious about sex and violence may stop paying attention to the rating system once it factors in smoking. So you could end up with more kids seeing films with smoking. If the MPAA were responding to the clear preferences of parents, this change might be merely dubious. In this case, though, it acted only after getting overt pressure from state governments -- which have no more business determining what appears on movie screens than they do in deciding what goes into Judy Blume's next novel. In the minds of safety zealots, censorship in the name of public health is no vice. The MPAA's response validates the politicians in their intrusions and beckons them to find new ways to regulate art and other matters that are supposed to be exempt from their control. A shame it didn't give the attorneys general a simpler, better response: Snuff this.

 

Smokers should have some clout with big biz, politicians Hernando Today - John Herbert - May 9, 2007

I thought minorities were protected by the American Constitution. Not if you're a smoker, apparently. The latest to get fired up on non-smoking is Disney World in Orlando. Their 22 hotels and time-share resorts are going the clean-air route next month. Interesting that trucks all up and down State Road 50 continue to belch big black clouds of smoke.  So much for clean air. Disney cites "no demand" as their official excuse for introducing a 100 percent smoking ban.  I don't believe it.  Not when well over 20 percent of this nation of 300 million people smoke. Surely, there's good reason to set aside at least four or five percent of their rooms for smokers. We smokers are getting run over by political cheap shots from businesses seeking a free round of publicity and legislatures wanting to prove they are capable of taking some kind of action, any action. What politician or businessman wouldn't love to cushion his or her vote or bottom line by a few more percentage points? That 20 percent is a rather attractive target. Smokers, as far as I can see, are wimps. They've pretty much taken their lumps lying down. An English smoker interviewed at Disney World by the Tampa Tribune said he couldn't care less. Fine, but I guess that's why the British have now banned smoking in their pubs. They can get away with it. Another cheap shot. However, smokers should adopt some of the very same tactics the civil right movement employed more than a generation ago. Demonstrate for your rights. In county and state capitals. In Washington, too. Maybe even in London. There must be a case to be made against undermining the very British scenario of the burly rugby player in the pub with a pint in one hand and a smoke in the other. It isn't just the smoking bans that trouble me. It's the old question of what next?  Many observers are predicting that a new prohibition against alcohol can't be far behind.  Several big cities have already banned trans fats. Some 40 percent of Americans are overweight or obese. Too many tacos? My politically correct wife stopped smoking a dozen years ago and almost immediately put on 15 pounds. Her giggly sisters now toss insults like "thunder thighs" her way. I wouldn't be at all surprised if separate drinking fountains appeared for smokers and non-smokers. And the day may come when smokers are relegated to the back of the bus; their clothes allegedly reek of smoke. My guess is that a bucket of fried chicken is a bit more lethal than a carton of Marlboros.  Insinuations are about all the no-smoking Nazis can offer. The tobacco lobby, on the other hand, overwhelms us with figures on causes and frequencies of various types of fatality. A few years ago, the U.N. commissioned a study of, as the agency said, the "harmful" effects of second-hand smoke. When the study came up minus conclusive proof, the results were suppressed. That might be one of the burdens of so-called Big Tobacco. They've used too many statistics to defend themselves -- more than we could ever need or absorb. Of course we die more often as we get older. That's the course of nature -- not of second-hand smoke. No matter what doctors or insurance companies say. Disney and other big hotel chains like Marriott and Holiday Inn have to remember they are in the hospitality business. We, the customers (and smokers), are paying too much money for the hotels to dare tell us we can't do as we like. They aren't just being cruel; they are downright repressive. Isn't that illegal?

 

AS I SEE IT | City bans deny people their constitutional rights The Star - Michelle R. Distler - April 30, 2007 Michelle R. Distler serves on the Shawnee (KS) City Council

As an asthmatic, I initially thought smoking bans were a good idea. I still think they are, but not one that the government should implement. It is a decision that is best left to the individual owners and their customers through the power of the purse. Upon further thought on the matter, I remembered taking my oath of office and swearing to uphold the Constitution. Although there is nothing stated specifically to the rights of smokers or nonsmokers, the Constitution does speak directly to individual liberties and private property rights. I do not want to open Pandora’s Box and give the government undue power and control over our lives. Communities across the country are wrestling with the dilemma of whether to enforce smoking bans, and unfortunately we’re quickly losing sight of our obligation as a society to protect civil rights in the process. The constitutional purpose of our government is to promote commerce, build roads, protect us from foreign invasion and protect individual rights. This includes property rights. Any act to the contrary is an outright violation of the Constitution. A smoking ban is a violation of property rights, period. The Constitution was written in such a manner to specifically limit the power and scope of government to preserve our individual rights — rights that are being eroded daily with a variety of seemingly small encroachments, such as the smoking ban. Just as eminent domain started as a good idea and a means to acquire private land for the public good, it has become extremely problematic when untrustworthy government officials and self-serving developers define what is in the public’s best interest. Tax increment financing also began as an effective means to restore blighted areas until insiders began using it to increase their personal profits. Everyone has the freedom of choice to go into any building where people are allowed to smoke or not smoke. But no one has the inalienable right to go into a privately owned business and demand that it be smoke-free or demand that a smoke-free building allow smoking. No one should have the right to use government to force an owner to make his property smoke-free. In doing so, all our rights become easier targets for anyone disagreeing with, or who is offended by, the practice of our personal freedoms. In the long run, this is far more dangerous than secondhand smoke ever could be. Supply and demand drives free enterprise, and I think the best way to implement a smoking ban is to support those establishments that cater best to your desires. I think we must remember that whether as employees or patrons to businesses, we are the “guests” of the property owners. My concern is for the property rights of all Shawnee residents and business owners.

 

State of  Illinois Smoking Ban: Taxpayers Without Representation Letter to Editor - Ralph W. Conner - April 30, 2007 Ralph W. Conner, a nonsmoker Former Mayor of Maywood, Illinois Local Legislation Manager The Heartland Institute

The smoking ban that looms over the State of Illinois is a storm cloud of government control raining intolerance and  intervention into the private habits of citizens in the Land of the Lincoln.  Political correctness has reached new heights in its partnership with junk science. In our modern health conscious society,  the U.S. Surgeon General has engendered  the phobia that second-hand smoke kills. But problems abound in this oppressive scenario:   •                     despite the hyperbole of the Surgeon General, there is no scientific data which categorically proves without doubt that second-hand cigarette smoke (ETS) can actually cause cancer because it is virtually impossible to measure dosage of consumption of ETS to differentiate between what is a safe or a lethal dosage for a consumer of second-hand smoke. •                     Cancer prevention not for profits receive private foundation and government health department grants in order to promote non-stop the persecution of smokers at the level of schools and churches in our communities: there is a virtual anti-smoking cartel which is empowered to restrict individual behavior with a legal product. •                     smokers are not only persecuted, they also suffer the indignity of paying millions of dollars in excise taxes to governments in the name of  sin taxes to be utilized for dubious unrelated municipal projects or programs. Illinois will receive over $200 million of  the MSA tobacco settlement this year.   Recently, the Illinois State Senate passed SB 500 which bans smoking in all public places. The Illinois House has similar legislation pending in its Environmental Health Committee. The likelihood is that this year a bill will come out and be signed by the Governor making Illinois a member of that pantheon of nonsmoking states.  What about the children? Although Illinois residents dodged the bullet of “no smoking in cars with Children under 8years old as passengers” before the Easter break, this may backfire when these restrictive  tobacco policies encourage a new generation of youth to seek out and succumb to tobacco usage because it will be illegal to indulge in public tobacco use as long as it generates ETS. Imagine rebellious youth imitating cultural icons in R-rated movies who smoke to symbolize adventurous death-defying behavior in charismatic characters.  The War on smokers may be over soon, as weary tobacco users realize they have insufficient representation on either side of the aisle in the State legislatures of America. The nonsmokers have all the political clout so smokers will shrink away bearing the mantle of excise taxation without representation. And we used to call this the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. But there is certainly nothing brave about craven politically correct politicians eroding the rights of citizens to indulge in a legal activity in private property with the owners’  permission.  Nonsmokers can now use the hammer of governmental intolerance to force the free market to accommodate their whims and hysterias without recourse for employers and taxpayers who are law-abiding property owners. Please lower the flag half-staff.

 

Smoke ban inspires 'who's on 1st' routine Rocky Mountain News - Bill Johnson - April 28, 2007

The legislature's quest to outlaw smoking in Colorado fascinates mostly because of the sheer inequality involved. Then there's the stumblings and fumblings by elected leaders trying to salvage last year's poorly written, special interest-protecting law, and, finally, the quite avoidable human and economic toll the folly has exacted.  A smoker these days could go crazy trying to figure out where it is lawful to light up. Are casinos smoke-free now or not? Cigar bars? How come they smoke in that bar, but not in this one?  Over at the Capitol on Friday morning, the Senate was attempting yet again to decide whether to ban smoking in, of all places, cigar bars. Amendments were added; rules were changed. Not a single head went unscratched. It was kind of funny.  There was more huddling taking place than on a fall Sunday. "If you ban smoking there, you've got to allow it here," some murmured and others shouted.  Who's on first?  No, he's on second.  The bill to outlaw smoking in cigar bars and rid the myriad of exemptions granted in last year's bill finally went up in flames shortly before noon.  I think. It was hard to know.  I approached Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver, to ask why he had been so passionate only a month earlier in killing any bill that didn't exempt small mom-and-pop bars and taverns but had just voted minutes earlier to eliminate such an exemption.  He stammered. And then he sighed, shrugged and said something about too many procedural rules, of deals being cut, of different ideas being tossed around.  "No," he finally muttered, "I'm telling Sen. (Betty) Boyd, (the bill's sponsor) to forget it. I'm not voting with her."  Who's on first?  The legislature on Thursday did close perhaps the most unfair, logic-defying loophole in the so-called Clean Air Act when it outlawed smoking in the state's casinos.  Ah, but there is a catch.  Casinos have until January of next year to go smokeless, a sop the legislature would not even consider for less-well-heeled bar and tavern owners like Mike Broncucia, who has run Mickey's Top Sirloin on West 70th Avenue and Broadway for 45 years.  I visited him on Friday to see if he had again set out the ashtrays in the aftermath of Adams County Judge Robert Doyle's ruling two weeks ago that the smoking ban was unconstitutional because it denied bar and tavern owners equal protection.  The bar inside the Top Sirloin was sparsely populated, as it has been since the smoking ban went into effect. There were no ashtrays lining it.  "The D.A. has told us he is appealing the ruling and not to light up," said Mike Broncucia, 70, one of the most ardent opponents of the smoking ban. "I think they are still writing tickets in Adams County."  The ban arrived at the worst possible time for him. He had just torn down the original Top Sirloin and replaced it with a sprawling new restaurant.  In half of the building he installed state-of-the-art ventilators and smoke-eaters at a cost of more than $13,000. They sit idle today.  He pulls a stack of records showing he has been losing at least $3,000 a month from previous years, solely because of the smoking ban.