C. R. S. Lyles
From the Editor: The opening photograph to this article is meant to be sarcastic parody. I’m sure our primary audience knows this, but with the anti-tobacco lunacy spiraling ever higher, I am forced to give an explanation up front to avoid a potential crucifixion.

New York City banned all flavored tobacco without an exemption for pipe tobacco. Effectively, almost all pipe tobacco will now be illegal there. The FDA is now considering following suit on a national level. The supposed reasoning is to save the children from the evils of tobacco. Ok, fine, but why not exempt pipe tobacco (and cigars)? Find me one “child” that actually smokes pipe tobacco in a briar pipe and I’ll give you a million dollars.

They are potentially solving a problem that doesn’t exist while putting an entire industry out of business. - Kevin Godbee

By C. R. S. Lyles

Imagine the scene if you will.

It’s Christmas time, the bitter chill of the wind has driven all warm bodies into the glow of their light-strewn and Santa Clause-d houses, and as the youngest daughter of the family crawls up onto her grandfather’s lap to hear “The Night Before Christmas” for the very first time, Grandpa strikes a match and brings the flame down to the bowl of his pipe.

Now, while the various nanny-state and health crusaders of this country might portray this portrait as picturesque up to the point that Grandpa lights up, Paul Creasy, current Chairman of the Pipe Tobacco Council and General Manager of the Pipe Tobacco Division of Altadis USA, explains why this scene remains as Norman Rockwell as it gets from beginning to end.

“[When it comes to pipe tobacco], you can usually make the argument that ‘Look, do you really want to ban Grandpa’s pipe?’, and normally, people will say “Well no, that wasn’t the intent of this law — we were really going after something else.”

By C. R. S. Lyles
Tobacco could kill 1 billion this century.

That’s the headline of a heartwarming news article published in Reuters a few years ago which claims that "if current trends hold, global health experts said" that if we don’t lay off the smokes, then by 2100 we can kiss about 14% of the current population goodbye.

The report was gleaned from information published in the 2009 Tobacco Atlas by the World Lung Foundation and the American Cancer Society.

Here’s some of the numbers that were tossed in there for dramatic effect:

By C. R. S. Lyles
On June 11th, 2011, despite protestations from local business-owners and smokers alike, Springfield, Missouri passed Council Bill 2010-180, which bans any and all smoking activity indoors within the city limits.

“The City Council has determined that the adoption of this ordinance furthers the public health and welfare of the community by prohibiting smoking in public places and places of employment, and by guaranteeing the right of non-smokers to breathe smoke-free air, and further determining that the need to breathe smoke-free air shall have priority over the desire to smoke.”

The above passage is taken directly from Council Bill 2010-180, which was filed over a year before the injunction took place and was sponsored by Council members Dan Chiles, John Rush, Cindy Rushefsky, and Mayor Jim O’Neal.

By C. R. S. Lyles
I saw a commercial today promoting some new show on Nickelodeon called Victorious. I have no idea what the show is about, nor do I have any interest in it whatsoever (as I presume, probably correctly, that it is merely the network’s answer to "tween wave" drivel that the Disney channel continues to spew out), but the marketing focus of the commercial held me riveted.

The commercial preceded to promote the "hits" from the show, songs which included "Freak The Freak Out" and "My Best Friend’s Brother". And you know what the really sad part about this is?

Its most-watched episode had 6.1 million viewers.

By C.R.S. Lyles
Dear Readers,

Vegas.

Long known for its "anything goes", "whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" attitude, it is more the entire state of Nevada that I am interested in relocating to. Adverse to the ham-handed legislature of its neighbor Arizona (which has caused quite a media riot over the last several months), Nevada has actually managed to pass a rather controversial piece of legislature without inciting the fury of the masses.

By C. R. S. Lyles
Just the other day, I turned on my television and ran across a commercial promoting an anti-acne product called Epiduo. Throughout the entire length of the commercial, the mantra of "don’t blame yourself; blame biology" was repeated multiple times, and I couldn’t help but see a parallel between this very phrase and the reputedly-negative health aspects which have always been synonymous with smoking.

But how negative are they really?

We as a society have always taken the inherent risks of smoking at face-value, confident that the authority figures and so-called experts know what they are talking about when they tell us how smoking will lead to disease and death.

But, as with all authority figures in a post-Nixon America, taking their word at face value is the surest way of ensuring that you’re going to be lied to.

By C.R.S. Lyles
Allow me to pose a question: If you were able to sacrifice the few for the many, throw a couple of people under the bus so that the mass majority would be saved, would you do it?

This question has been at the core of the utilitarian conundrum since the discipline’s inception, and yet the mass majority has still failed to see the relevance of the question or how it applies to modern life.

Therefore, allow me also to pose a scenario, a more specific example that has arisen from this age-old philosophical debate: If you were able to update children’s health care, ensure that the programs utilized to help pay medical costs for children in need continued for the next five years, but in exchange you had to increase tobacco taxes and indirectly encourage people to smoke so that the program could be funded, would you sacrifice the health of adult Americans for our country’s children?

By C. R. S. Lyles
As the author Madeleine L’Engle once said, "We are strangers in a strange land."

Welcome to Happy Town, the happiest place on Earth. The people of Happy Town are a clean, industrious people who live in the strictest sense to diminish their carbon footprint on the planet. The chief export of Happy Town is self-satisfaction, and the factories located in the capitol district of Happy Town are the world leaders in this clean, recyclable and renewable energy source.

by C. R. S. Lyles
As the old adage goes, the only two sure things in life are death and taxes. As smokers know, these elements of life are even more assured, since smoking can lead to early death and the current taxation on cigarettes has outshone any other taxable product since the Intolerable Acts of colonial times.

But now a third variable has crept into the mixture, a variable which not only exacerbates the previous two, but will inevitably lead to a poorer quality of life for all Americans who still continue to smoke: joblessness.

In a recent article published by the New York Times, hospitals and medical businesses are cutting down on the volume of employed smokers within their facilities and turning away applicants who either confess that they smoke or it is found out later that they smoke.