Happy Feet from the Amen Corner
-
Kevin Godbee - Aug 6, 2015
- 5 min read
Fred Brown
Would it really blow your skull into giblet bits if you learned that your FDA (they work for us, you know) in all of its wisdom created a real boogie man monster within the deepest regions of their tobacco regulations? Oh, to be sure. Let me explain.
Back in 2009 when the FDA issued its regulations for The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, the agency had to satisfy a law put in place during the Reagan presidency. This Regannomics law stipulated that any new regulatory stricture created by the bureaucracy had to define the cost-benefits of such a law. Well, holy tobacco leaf!
Buried in the body of the tobacco control act was the required cost-benefit analysis of a smoker (pipe smokers included) losing his or her favorite smoke. Moreover, that analysis proclaimed that a smoker’s "happiness quotient" suffered immensely when they had to lay down our evil habit.
I quote from a New York Times story on the issue concerning the "cost-benefit calculation. . . assumes that the benefits from reducing smoking – fewer early deaths and diseases of the lungs and heart – have to be discounted by 70 percent to offset the loss in pleasure that smokers suffer when they give up their habit." Uh, oops. Say, what?
In plain English, the FDA estimated a smoker would lose 70 percent of his or her happiness by giving up tobacco in any of its forms. This gave the anti-smoking crowd apoplexy.
Was it possible the FDA overestimated the benefits of laying down your pipes and tossing out your precious tobaccos you worked so long and hard to acquire? Awww, they wouldn’t do that, would they?
Yes, says the economists who studied the FDA tobacco regs and wondered about the "happiness quotient" and why it was so high.
The web page tobacconomics.org is no friend of tobacco. But here is what some of those serious economists say: "We concluded that the analysis of the impact of GWLs (graphic warning labels) on smoking substantially underestimated the benefits and overestimated the costs, leading the FDA to substantially underestimate the net benefits of the GWLs. We hope that the FDA will find our evaluation useful in subsequent analyses, not only of GWLs but also of other regulations regarding tobacco products. Most of what we discuss applies to all instances of evaluating the costs and benefits of tobacco product regulation and, we believe, should be considered in FDA’s future analyses of proposed rules."
In other words, the anti-tobacco economists want the FDA to lower that happy 70 percent to what they consider a more reasonable number.
Now this little bit of news about the happiness quotient has been very, very slow in coming to light.
Ahhh, as my old newspaper logo once supposed: "Give light and the people will find their own way."
Another way of thinking is to let a little light shine in, and it will disinfect the bugs.
Imagine the FDA having to admit that when one of the demon smokers (read "pipes" here) gives up the dreaded habit that is killing flora and fauna, causing tsunamis, ruining crops the world over, the practitioner of tobacco gives up 70 percent of his or her happiness quotient.
In essence, when you lay down your pipes for good, you are reducing your happiness by 70 percent.
Holy pipe tools! Did the FDA know what they were doing?
This cost-benefit analysis has caused the anti-tobacco zealots to require resuscitation and emergency heartburn medication.
In fact, many of the antis have now uncorked criticism at the FDA for even burying this nugget in its report, saying that it might give smokers the idea that they do not really want to give up 70 percent of their daily happiness quotient.
The anti-zealot line is that the "happiness quotient" is rated way too high at 70 percent and could indeed influence a pipe smoker not to toss out his or her favorite briar with the bath water.
The antis would like to see the happy feet chopped off at the knees and be reduced to nubs.
Why not just ignore the "happy" thing for smokers? They don’t really care about being happy in the first place, and they make the rest of the world miserable with their pipes and tobaccos and all that second-third-fourth-and-fifth-hand smoke.
Besides, all that off-hand smoke causes the house to collapse in on itself after a while. All that pipe and cigar smoke infuses the walls with nicotine that produces ravenous super termites drunk on tobacco that then eat the house away.
Think how happy the world would be without smokers (potheads excluded, of course)! The globe could pick up another 70 percent of happiness in a world in which there were no smokers.
Of course, governments would have to open up more looney bins in which tobacco-deprived nuts would be in charge.
Imagine a world with no pipes, no really cool tobacco blends, no cigars. No cigars? That is what I said.
You can forget cigarettes. They are toast. However, losing a favorite pipe tobacco blend or a La Perla Habana Classic Maduro registers more than a 70 percent hit on the happiness scale.
That’s like taking it all, creating a world without art or sunshine, or a beautiful sunset, or a Blue Moon over Kentucky.
Did I just say cigarettes are toast? Well, it depends upon the type lens through which you are peering. Many of the top cigarette manufacturers have noted quarterly increases in what British American Tobacco calls a "tough environment."
It seems then that not everyone is willing to give up his 70 percent happy times.
So, here is the bottom line as they say in the biz world: The antis are gonna go crazy whether our happy feel is 70 percent or 7 percent. Their view is that smokers should be taken out and shot at sunrise (I jest, but you get it).
Pipe puffers want to sit with their buddies, think about all the ramifications, philosophize and just get along.
Cigar chompers, the blue beards of the tobacco world, are likely to tell the antis to shove it, they are never going to let go of their precious sticks, or their 70 percent of the happiness quotient.
As for me, I like what Mark Twain had to say on the subject of smoking: "As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep and never to refrain when awake"–70th birthday speech.
Can I get an amen?
Good. Now I am happy.
|
|
Written by Kevin Godbee
10 Responses
Recent Posts
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 636. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Barry Kane. Barry started smoking a pipe in 1961 when he was 14-years old. Back then it seemed like everybody smoked, and you could buy pipes and tobacco just about anywhere. Barry is a true old-school pipe smoker, sticking to just one blend. See if you can guess which one before listening. At the top of the show Brian will give his take on Scandinavian Tobacco Group’s purchase of Mac Baren and Sutliff Tobacco and their announcement that they will be shut down.
There’s a pipe in my collection that I cannot bring myself to smoke, though I’ve had it for more years than I care to recall. It’s old, or shall I say, well experienced; that experience, that oldness came to it long before it was in my possession. The pipe is an old Comoy’s Grand Slam from the 1940s. The shape (#93), a slightly canted, stack billiard (sometimes referred to as a Belgian) is right up my alley, and it’s a beautiful example of it. It came to me with some wear and tear; nothing unusual for an old pipe, but more the signs of one that has been well loved, smoked a lot, treated as a favorite tool, cherished, in a sense, by frequent use. It’s the pipe equivalent of a vintage car that’s been driven a lot, enjoyed fully and maintained adequately, rather than one kept in a spotless garage, dusted and detailed weekly, brought out only for leisurely Sunday drives, or to be ogled behind the ropes at the next Concours d’Elegance. When it arrived, those uncounted years ago, it wanted a little restoration. Nothing dramatic needed to be done to it, but the stem was oxidized, the finish a little dingy. The cake was even and fairly thin, and the airway was relatively clean, both signs that its previous owner cared for it, but the bowl’s surface was a little drab and dull. It took little effort to reveal its beauty, to show the lovely contrasted stain and interesting grain beneath the old wax. I often think I should do before and after photos of pipes that I work on, but those thoughts always come after the work’s been done. This one would have been a great illustration of how years of handling that can sometimes make a pipe more beautiful, can other times make it just look grungy. Once I’d cleaned up the externals, it was time to address the inside bits. I approach this a little bassackwards, I realize. It would be more sensible to take care of the inside before addressing the outside, but it’s how I roll. If an old pipe isn’t pretty to look at, it’s unlikely that I’ll care much about it, and cleaning is usually the hardest part, or at least the most boring part of any restoration for me. Alcohol and pipe cleaners. Lots of pipe cleaners. That’s why I leave it for last. Sometimes, I’ll even give a pipe a test smoke before a deep cleaning, just for a point of reference. I gave it a sniff to get an idea of what I was up against, and it stopped me cold. There in that bowl was an aroma that I had not smelled in decades. My head was instantly filled with memories of being in the back room of a fabled Berkeley tobacconist’s shop where I stumbled upon a few jars of long discontinued blends. One of them, a blend called Forty and Eight, had the most engaging and unusual scent of any tobacco I’d stuck my schnoz into. It was sweet, but not in a candy store way. There were none of the usual vanilla, cherry, berry or anise notes of typical aromatics, nothing that could be compared to aftershave or deodorant soap, but something almost musky, a little earthy, something exotic. The shop’s owner couldn’t tell me what was in it, how, or where it had been produced. The old blend had been retired before he’d bought the place. The printed catalogue gave no clues, either, other than being overprinted with the word “DISCONTINUED” in bold, rubber-stamp type. (And, I don’t recall it as being “highly aromatic” as the description indicates.) There was still quite a bit in the jar. Being, at that point, an intrepid explorer of all kinds of tobaccos, whether I thought I’d like them or not, I had to give it a try. It was burly based, but also comprised a good measure of virginia leaf, and maybe some other varieties; I didn’t have enough experience at the time to really pick it apart. But, that aroma was unlike anything I’d experienced before or since. It was something now completely lost to time. Until it wasn’t. Memories are powerful things, and there is no sense more tightly bound to memory than our sense of smell. One whiff was all it took to carry me back in time, conjuring a vivid recollection of something long submerged in the inky depths of a subconscious mind. Look, I know as well as anyone that pipes are meant to be smoked, and that many feel it almost sacrilegious to have a pipe and not set it to its intended task. In this case, I simply can’t. I won’t. Ever. Rationally, I am fairly certain this pipe would probably be a great smoke. It was too well loved by its previous caretaker to be anything less than that. My choice not to smoke it is an emotional one, not something rational. Of the thousands of pipes that have passed through my hands over the years, this is the only one to create such a singular and vivid, almost Proustian recollection of temps perdu, of lost time. It revivified a long dormant memory that is mine, and mine alone, and that’s enough. I keep it in a drawer with other old English pipes. In some ways, it’s nothing special, just a nice old pipe. I don’t lavish it with any particular care that arguably befits the hidden treasure that it holds. It’s not in a special box, or displayed preciously in a glass cabinet. Every once in a while, I take it out, point my nose bowlwards, and every time, those memories return just as powerfully as they did the first time. I have no idea how long it’s been since its last owner smoked it, but in the years I’ve had it, there seems to have been very little degradation of the aroma, and that’s […]
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 635. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with James Ravenwood. James is the boutique tobacco blender of Ravenwood Blends. His blending started out as a fun hobby, and he now has professionally packaged commercially available products with some great tin art. Part of his interest in pipe smoking goes back to fond memories of a retired Navy Veteran that lived on his street while he was growing up that would sit in his driveway smoking a pipe all day. Later, in 2011 he began smoking pipes and soon after started experimenting with mixing different tobaccos. His other hobby, that he has been doing for 30 years, is photography. He takes wonderful photos of outdoor spaces, and still life pictures of pipes and tobacco. You can see them on his Instagram @thebriarfellowship. At the top of the show we’ll have an Ask the Pipemaker segment with renowned pipe artisan Jeff Gracik.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 634! Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Warren Ertle. Warren is an extremely accomplished musician with a PhD in music. He started early as a percussionist in sixth grade. Later his grandmother got him a cheap Casio keyboard which he taught himself to play. He started playing in blues bands in high school, and has been a pianist with jazz big bands for years. Even though he was already a professional musician, he took his first real piano lesson when he enrolled in college with his studies in classical music. He is of course a pipe smoker. At the top of the show we will have an Ask the Tobacco Blender segment with Jeremy Reeves. Jeremy is the Head Blender at Cornell & Diehl, which is one of the most popular boutique pipe tobacco companies in the USA.
Soon now, supposedly, our neighborhoods will shift from grinning pumpkins, skeletons in various assortments, and zombies dashing about to pretty reindeer, angels, and flashing lights illuminating homes with sparkling stars and laughing, scurrying Santas. But, lest we forget, there is the turkey season, fancy pie aromas wafting from kitchens, and a national pardon of a big Tom Turkey. Remember, now, that only one of these holiday personalities is a pipe smoker. And that is the hefty, bearded fellow in a bright red suit sitting in a sleigh with a herd of deer hitched up and ready to streak across the globe, bringing tidings of joy and many presents. Ok, the scene is set for the next couple of months, right? So, before we get too far off the beaten path, let’s just take a deep breath of fresh autumn air, shall we? Ahh. That’s better, isn’t it? What’s got the Pundit in a snit is not all the Halloween spooks who came a-jostling for candy. Or the wild turkeys gobbling in the backwoods or all the fuss and feathers over the big one—Christmas. No, it is that we might need to take note of all the little things that mean so much to us. Like a good sunrise (seriously, Pundit has not gone all Pollyanna.) Mayhaps we need to appreciate more of what we have than what we have not. Or something like that. Like, a good pipe in the morning with coffee as the dawn brings us coolish weather now that we have flipped the calendar to autumn. But it also brings beautiful leaves that have become a spectacle of technicolor in the wind. It is the little things. The rereading of an enjoyable book and finding something you did not see or learn in the first go-round. Or a stunning phrase you commit to memory with the re-read, while smoking that favorite pipe. And you notice a superior puff that just seems to be different. It’s in the air and the seasons of meaningful little things. It’s aromatic! Or perhaps it is that sense of satisfaction knowing and appreciating you made it to another day. With the world in a kind of rinse-and-repeat history, reminiscent of a Shakespearean play, it is perhaps a good moment to remember some of Pipedom’s philosophers whose cogent thoughts brought light to clear a path in the mists of confusion and confounding opinions. Ok. No gloom and doom. Just some down-home thoughts. Think of times in the past when history was running off the rails. It took our pipe-smoking thinkers (the mind workers of the world) to speak of better pathways to more light. Think for a moment, with a pipe in hand, these wizards of the world and word: Albert Einstein, J. R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edwin Hubble, Bertrand Russell, C. S. Lewis, and Jean-Paul Sartre. All learned and enlightened. They offered wisdom instead of storms of meaningless roads to nowhere. All while smoking their pipes! Maybe especially with the help of their pipes in the art of thinking and philosophy. Recall the words of Mr. E=MC2 when he said, “I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs.” Amen and amen! Dealing with world-rattling events takes a calm and objective view of things, to the Pundit’s way of summing it up. You just don’t go messing around with quantum physics without a calm and objective approach, methinks. Or as the extraordinary physicist Robert Oppenheimer said after he and a team in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Labs developed a way to split atoms into bombs during World War II. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” said Oppenheimer referring to the development of the first nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. It must be pointed out that Oppenheimer was more of a cigarette smoker than a pipe smoker. Nonetheless, pipes were part of his personality. Now, if you have read some of the great authors of the past and present, their pipes were always nearby. Reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle can be a three-pipe problem at times. S. Lewis and Jean-Paul Sartre require time with your pipes to reflect on the existential problems and solutions these authors provide in learned novels and other narratives. Or take Edwin Hubble and Bertrand Russell, philosophers of another world. Pipes are required for reading. The quantum lode of ideas Pundit is attempting to sort out is that our pipes are relaxing and stimulate our thoughts and creativity. Especially in these last months of the year. Many times Pundit has had that light bulb flick on while smoking my beloved pipes. And friends in Pipedom, it ain’t easy to turn on the lights in Pundit’s rock pit head. Now it’s time for a quote from a Pipe Smoker of the Past. Shelby Foote was born Nov. 17, 1916, in Greenville, Miss., and died June 27, 2005, in Memphis, Tenn. A fact is not a truth until you love it—Shelby Foote. A parting thought: It is said that famed Southern author William Faulkner carried a packed pipe in a coat pocket wherever he went. That’s one effective way to deal with workday conflicts and confusion. A calm and objective judgment in our everyday human affairs, as the quantum man said.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 633. Our featured guest tonight is Jon David Cole. JD is the Owner/Tobacconist at The Country Squire in Jackson, MS, and the accompanying online store. We’ll have JD and Brian talking about what’s new at the store and in the business in general. At the top of the show, Brian will discuss tobacco growing, what happens to the leaf, and provide updated information on where tobacco is being gown today. Tobacco production originated in the United States and we were once the #1 producer. It’s quite different now.
I saw the news on this when it was discovered in an FDA report a while back and was intrigued that some inquisitive soul had entered a bit of philosophy and anthropology into the usual drum of statistical calculation. Imagine that. This goes well beyond the smoking discussion to all kinds of judgements made in the public good that looks at only one narrow aspect of any given issue, to the purposes of the current popular thinking, without wading into the vast rest of the thinking on any given subject. I is likely a fluke, a wild and whimsical fluke, but we all need to pay attention and see if we can’t summon similar unconventional clear-headedness into the public discourse from all side. We can amaze ourselves every day.
Glad you found something positive in all of this, Fred. It’s refreshing to know that there may not be a tobaccolypse.
Indeed.
Now I am wondering what other FDA studies might include a happiness quotient?
FDA: Please don’t take my happiness away!
I don’t understand what this is trying to say: the benefits of reduced smoking have to be discounted by 70% to offset the resulting loss in pleasure.
Anything that causes that antis consternation delights me!!!! But in the end I’m convinced the money (taxes) will rule the day. Cigarettes are now almost $10 a pack and guess who is reaping the windfall? It sure isn’t the tobacco companies!!!! The health issues with cigarettes are widely recognized but they are still available at any convenience store. Wonder why that is? Surely the government wouldn’t put the public at risk for a few tax dollars.
But personally I think the 70% happiness factor is a bit low. At my age I don’t have that many vices left.
I’d Love to see the antis have their heads twisted around their necks.
LOL, I love this!
When I was 16, I was informed of the unusual diagnosis of type ALL leukemia, which usually happens (when it does) to younger children. With no family history of any sort of cancer, it was even more difficult to explain. But wait – my father smoked at least two packs/day all my life, and in the house. I got sick, and my younger sister didn’t. So then, was the cause 2ndhand smoke?
There also happened to be an enormous coal stove which heated our farmhouse, warming the bedrooms upstairs through vents in the ceilings. The vent to the room where I slept was directly over that stove, directly under the not-airtight smoke shaft, and large disk covers on the stove probably allowed the diversion of odorless, colorless fumes directly out into the room. I slept over that stove for years, I was sick more often than my sister who did not sleep directly over the stove, and then I got leukemia! She never got any form of cancer.
A couple of decades later, I decided that cigars and pipe smoking may be pleasurable, and I found out that they are. The treatment which saved my life was harsh, and I would hate to have to go through that again, but I would also hate to live unhappily! I have been drinking less since I’ve been smoking more, and alcohol is far more damaging, and to far more people who consume it. During the days before tobacco was first imported to Europe, were people happy then? No, they were the Dark Ages, and the trough of human misery! Give them tobacco, and then they all get happy and rise to greatness in the world.
Ain’t got no love
Ain’t got no wife
But what I’ve got makes me happy
And I ain’t got no strife!
And when I am dead
I don’t want no fool’s stone
No good Christians shall mourn
As I drift off alone
Through the stars toward the gas clouds
Where it all began
And my golden pipe will not
Be filled from a can
But the golden dust from long dead
Original stars
Which upon their own passing
They gave rise to ours
And it gave us tobacco
For us on this earth
So that we may enjoy it
Relaxing in myrth
This must be the source of the FDAs opinion;
“1903-08: The August Harpers Weekly says, “A great many thoughtful and intelligent men who smoke don’t know if it does them good or harm. They notice bad effects when they smoke too much. They know that having once acquired the habit, it bothers them . . . to have their allowance of tobacco cut off.”