The Elephant Has Landed
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Kevin Godbee - Apr 2, 2014
- 8 min read
Fred Brown
A Second Front has opened in the Tobacco Wars. And if you are a conspiracy theorist, you might see this latest assault as one that could make pipe tobacco harder to find, harder to sell, and harder to purchase. Why? A major reason is that all of these issues result from the heavy tax burden waiting in the wings to be levied against Lady Nicotine, the beloved brown leaf of pipe smokers.
If you have been following the Tobacco Wars for a while, you know that once the States Attorneys General enter into the fray, all the furniture in the room gets rearranged.
Consider this the debut announcement: The elephant has arrived.
The states AGs are already in to the Tobacco War Room, legal pads in hand, red rope folders bulging with files, ready for civil action.
The CVS Caremark decision earlier this year to stop selling tobacco products was the impetus the AGs needed to pick up where they left off with cigarette tobacco manufacturers and take dead aim at pipe tobacco producers. They now have a chair at the table.
In early February, CVS Caremark, the nation’s largest drug store chain in terms of sales, said it would stop selling cigarettes and other tobacco products by October 2014. It’s a "pharmacy," see, a place where you are supposed to get your "health products."
On the heels of the CVS action, on March 16, more than 24 states attorneys general posted letters to five of the nation’s largest retail chains "encouraging" them to refrain from selling tobacco products in its stores that also have pharmacies. Initially, the AG letters went out to Rite Aid, Walgreen, Kroger, Safeway and Walmart.
It’s obvious that if you are targeting the likes of Walmart, you are taking on the King Kong of retail. And, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realize that these retail outlets are in the business of making money and selling product, not in courtroom litigation.
Hold on. There’s no litigation, you say.
Ah ha! But the mere fact the AGs sent letters "encouraging" the behemoth retailers to follow CVS Caremark’s action to voluntarily remove tobacco products from its shelves is enough incentive for the suits in those big box chains to cave early on and to quickly appease the AGs. And then, the cynical view would be, that the box retail suits then call a press conference to extol their overt, heavy-handed actions for the good of their customers. They are, after all, really interested in your well-being, doncha know.
So, let’s take a look at this unfolding Second Front line facing pipe tobacco.
In 1988, the attorneys general in 46 states settled the tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) and "related state legislation" for an astounding $365.5 billion against the then major tobacco manufacturers of Philip Morris Inc., R. J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson and Lorillard. The companies had to pay out the gargantuan sum over 25 years. And due to "related state legislation" clauses, the companies also had to comply with terms of settling lesser claims, compensating states for costs incurred in treating people with smoking-related health issues.
If you are wondering why only 46 states settled, that’s because four other states—Mississippi, Minnesota, Florida, and Texas, made separate agreements with the major tobacco companies to the tune of about $35 billion.
And as the wise ol’ Sen. Erv Dirksen of Illinois used to say, "a million here, a million there, and pretty soon you are talking real money."
Only now, the states were looking at billions, not millions. And suddenly, the states had money gushing like oil wells.
It was a revenue stream windfall for the states and the attorneys! Oh, yes, the attorneys had their hands out and in the pie as well.
Prices for cigarettes exploded. In the Southeast, where farm families depended upon the tobacco crop for that extra cash needed for children’s school clothes, shoes and other staples, saw their lives changing in front of them.
Today, there are no tobacco auction houses, once a staple of Southern life, a community culture of sorts, now gone.
Tobacco barns, once bristling with poles of hanging tobacco stalks, have dwindled to near extinction. Tobacco auction houses, once a colorful place bristling with youngsters and storytelling old-timers alike, are now dark.
So, what is in store for pipe tobacco?
Action by the AGs of the late ’90s is a template for the future of pipe tobacco. The picture emerging from the AG letters to the big box retailers is that if you don’t remove tobacco products voluntarily, then there could be litigation to force you to remove the product. But the implied threat will be enough to finish off the retail outlets.
Then, pipe smokers will be down to a dwindling supply of B&Ms, or bricks and mortar stores that strictly offer pipes, pipe tobaccos, cigars and other tobacco products.
Should the AGs ever turn their guns toward the B&Ms, a significant signal indicator implied in the "Second Front," healthy inventories of pipes and pipe tobacco could be a thing of the past.
There are some other noteworthy details that need to be reviewed here.
For example, many, if not most of the states, used the tobacco settlement money to balance state budgets.
Many of the attorneys handling those state suits became billionaires via the settlements. In fact, the late Ron Motley, who was a leading attorney in the lawsuits against tobacco companies, earned billions for his law firm. He died last year in Charleston, S.C., from what was described as "respiratory complications" resulting from a long illness.
His firm earned fees in the billions and Motley became "wealthier than many of the executives he sued," according to the New York Times obituary of his death. He owned a private plane, a palatial home on the South Carolina coast and a 150-foot yacht. Name of the yacht? "Themis," the female titan of law in Greek mythology.
Many attorneys across the nation have already become or will become multimillionaires from the lawsuits to recover health care costs from cigarette manufacturers.
As bad as that is, the worst part may be found in a report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation entitled Broken Promises to Our Children: The 1998 State Tobacco Settlement Fifteen Years Later A Report on the States’ Allocation of the Tobacco Settlement Dollars.
The opening paragraphs of the report’s Executive Summary states the case: "In addition to the billions of dollars they receive each year from the tobacco settlement, the states collect billions more in tobacco taxes. In the current budget year, Fiscal Year 2014, the states will collect $25 billion in revenue from the tobacco settlement and tobacco taxes. Since the 1998 settlement, our public health organizations have issued annual reports assessing whether the states are keeping their promise to use a significant portion of their tobacco dollars to attack the enormous public health problems posed by tobacco use in the United States.
"Fifteen years after the tobacco settlement, this year’s report finds that states continue to spend only a miniscule portion of their tobacco revenues to fight tobacco use. The states have also failed to reverse deep cuts to tobacco prevention and cessation programs that have undermined the nation’s efforts to reduce tobacco use."
The Robert Wood Johnson Report says that "States are falling far short of recommended funding levels for tobacco prevention programs set by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The $481.2 million the states have budgeted this year amounts to just 13 percent of the $3.7 billion the CDC recommends for all the states combined. It would take less than 15 percent of total state tobacco revenues to fund tobacco prevention programs at CDC-recommended amounts in every state."
You can read much of the legal minutiae, history and intricacies of the tobacco settlement at the National Association of Attorneys General.
The outcome all of the above tells is that a lot of lawyers have become very wealthy in prosecuting the tobacco manufacturers. The suits put many southern farmers out of business, as well as closing at least one of the major tobacco companies.
In addition, states are not using the settlement revenue for its originally intended purpose. Once again, those paying onerous taxes on tobacco have been taken for a ride with the shades pulled. Why, then, is it right for states to ignore the rules when the lowly tobacco user must obey and pay the price?
The action of the AGs also shows another dark side of the equation: Why is pipe tobacco—which has been proven to be treated differently by pipe tobacco manufacturers than cigarette tobacco in its altered process—viewed with such disdain and being removed from pharmacy shelves when the ingredients for methamphetamine are allowed to remain?
And, in case you have been on another planet, meth is an epidemic, especially in the South. Meth labs spring up like mushrooms. However, meth is no longer the biggest problem. Prescription drugs (uh, which you have to get at "drug" stores) are out of control in most counties in the U.S.
Why are some products, such as computer air dusters, candies (the hard, colorful tabs in long packages), and other common products found on pharmacy shelves allowed to remain when it is known that children are "snorting," or "huffing" them, if the aim is to protect the public from itself?
As for the cans of common aerosolized computer keyboard cleaner that contains compressed gas, or computer compressed air dusters, the practice of inhaling the air is called "dusting." They are right there for the purchasing at your local office supply store. It can kill, of course, and they also can damage the lungs, brain, heart, kidneys and liver, and even cause death.
The computer cleaners contain Freon gas, which is a fluorinated hydrocarbon. It is very dangerous to snort or huff, since it fills the lungs and blocks out oxygen.
So, if the AGs are going to single out tobacco, especially pipe tobacco, why not go after the big chemical manufacturers, big pharma, and others who produce these "over the counter" products that kids can walk in and purchase without restriction and without their parents’ knowledge.
Would it have to do with big money made quickly?
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Written by Kevin Godbee
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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! 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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.
Fred, your article hits a nerve here. Living in and out of North Carolina in the 80’s I had a close friend who’s family depended on 120 acres of tobacco crops. If I remember right, 1988 was their last crop that went to market in a Kingston auction house. I had the wonderful experience of helping to hang tobacco in the barn and learn how everything was done, right up to shipment. The big money settlement certainly didn’t help family’s, nor did it help communities. Even the states have piddled it away through mismanagement!
I’ve never seen a better reason for building a personal cellar than this story….
Should we also ban beef because of the chemicals that are injected into it. How about banning all air traffic because of the fuel dumps. We can dump oil in the oceans and kill every other life form but no smoking because it is bad for you.
Most of these lawyers and AG’s are probably all closet smokers anyway.
Just my two cents
The sad truth is that the AG’s don’t care about facts or reality, they only care about money and votes.
CVS will never get a nickel of my money because dropping tobacco wasn’t a “health” reason it was an economic reason due to slumping sales. You can still buy twinkies, chips as well as get your oxycontin prescription filled. The “health” scam is typical of people who put “feelings” in front of facts.
The nanny state mentality is possibility the worst thing yet to hit our country but freedoms erroded are freedoms denied.
Great article!
My confusion lies in the dichotomy at hand: They raise our taxes and say it’s for our own good, to protect us from ourselves. Then the states and feds get hooked on those great fortunes we provide them by paying such outrageous tax rates.
Are we not more valuable to them smoking away to our hearts content?
Dot
Whatever happened to the Land of the Free?
Living in Washington state, it’s fine to be a pot smoker, but shameful to smoke tobacco. Our hospitals are full of “legal” drug shoppers on the weekends, and Meth labs are all over the place.
Money is the driving force here.
The cold hard truth is that they (goverment) WANTS you on drugs! They do not want tobacco around because it is to simple. If you get hooked on the hard stuff, you are controlable! You turn into the SHEEPLE! And then they can do what ever they want without anyone keeping them in check.
So, what, if anything is to be done? I push the button that sends a form letter to receptive govt. officials. They in turn push a button to send me another form letter assuring me how very important my feelings and opinions are.
If there is something to do? Please count me in.
I’m completely disenchanted and thoroughly discouraged.
Government needs to leave the people alone and stick to what it was meant for, roads and security.
I’m like most of you: confounded, confused and upset at how things are going in my old age.
I once interviewed the great Southern author Shelby Foote. We were discussing the Civil War, of course, and he said because of so many fools and dunderheads not only nationally but in the South as well, he felt as if we would lose most of our icons, emblems, flags, etc., etc.
I now believe he was right, and you can add to that list many of the rights we have today that we take for granted.
I don’t want to think this way of the country I served I hope honorably, but I’m afraid I do.
In the research I did leading up to my Pipe hobby acquisition, I could only conclude that taxing cigarettes out the wazoo is probably a good thing.
It’s a bizarre, crazy thing to say that excessive taxes can be good, I know, but in the end cigarettes are for stupid people. If you’re insulted, good, if insulting you saves your life I can give you some more.
If everyone stopped buying cigarettes tomorrow the controversy would be over. It is the association tobacco has with cigarettes that gives it a negative connotation.
There are plenty of things far more hazardous that people do on a regular basis, and are viewed positively or even encouraged (like motorcycles, as Jeremy Clarkson likes to point out so much), so what’s the deal with tobacco? Cigarettes. Without those your tobacco stash is viewed no more negatively than a cupboard full of coffee.
Note to my text above: “There are plenty of things far more hazardous”-than Pipe smoking. Which in moderation is a low risk activity.
My only answer at this point is to stock up, especially of all your favorite blends. I am and have been for some time.
Things will not get any better. At any rate, tobacco use will either become illegal or will become so highly taxed as to be difficult to afford.
I’m a pessimist? For sure and have been for some years now.
In the UK, the NHS makes a profit from smokers. The money collected in levies combined is significantly more than the cost of care for those dying of lung cancer. In Scotland they came out with a huge propaganda war before banning smoking in pubs and restaurants, even bus shelters, claiming that second-hand smoke killed tens of thousands of people a year. But in fact, the gvt’s own doctors told them there was “…no quantifiable way to determine how many people [were] affected…”
They lied.
Nor was there any way for a pub to only employ smokers or to put up a sign stating that the establishment allowed smoking.
They didn’t care.
The biggest health crisis in The UK right now is from the sugar and fast food/convenience food industries causing widespread obesity. One doctor’s consortium recently stated that obesity has become so common in The UK that the majority of the population simply does not know what a healthy person looks like anymore.
The UK gvt set up a commission on Preventing Obesity and Promoting Healthy Eating.
One of the ‘most trusted and valuable’ members is MacDonalds.
So Westminster is
Profitting from our deaths while making us social pariahs
In partnership with the biggest promoters of ill health on the planet.
Neither is there any distinction made between cigarettes from actual tobacco- a cigarette is to tobacco as Sunny Delight is to freshlly squeezed orange juice. The fact that the only study on pipe tobacco should a slight increase in longevity made certain there would NEVER be another study again.
They don’t know anything about it, nor do they want to know.
In The US, gun deaths are rampant, often completely against the wishes of the victim and cause utter misery to hundreds of thousands of different people each and every year.
Gun Legislation in the US is mere lip service to safety.
They will allow an American to buy a machine gun and 1,000 rounds of ammunition but are more worried about him having a bowl of pipe tobacco.
It is unconscionable, corrupt, malicious and disgusting.
[b]I’d HEARTILY agree with “frozenchurchwarden’s” statement on this…[/b]
Dear Fellow Pipefans:
Data’s Calabash here again…and as I’ve always observed that there IS an existing divide between “us” (the pipe/cigar crowd), who actually enjoy our tobacco, and “them” (the self-pollutionists addicted to those “damn butts”, and perhaps the oral/chewing tobacco users)…with that divide existing as far back to the time, 15 decades ago, just before the “damn butts” began to take over…that perhaps only one, OR a very few things, MIGHT need to be done in American society to convince (and perhaps even to “force”) the public in general to also acknowledge that divide, that we pipe and cigar fans see almost every week around us.
I feel that “frozencurchwarden” put it right on the nose when he wrote back on the afternoon of April 11 in this thread…I quote:
[i]”In the research I did leading up to my Pipe hobby acquisition, I could only conclude that taxing cigarettes out the wazoo is probably a good thing.
It’s a bizarre, crazy thing to say that excessive taxes can be good, [u]I know, but in the end cigarettes are for stupid people.[/u] If you’re insulted, good, if insulting you saves your life I can give you some more.
If everyone stopped buying cigarettes tomorrow the controversy would be over. [b]It is the association tobacco has with cigarettes that gives it a negative connotation.”[/b][/i]
The idea of taxing those “damn butts out the wazoo” IS a decent idea, and SHOULD be done, especially with the presence of chemical POLLUTANTS like those found in petroleum-based adhesives (think the smelly, pale-yellow contact cement variety), paint stripper chemicals and even volatile petroleum distillate-base paint thinners found in the bulk of butt-brands made in North America and western Europe, that make those danged things stink like a smoldering oil well, and which I long ago decided [u]that I have to KEEP AWAY from forever.[/u]
The “underlined” text in the quoted statement exactly jibes with a statement I heard on a popular Boston radio talk show in the early 1980s (the late Larry Glick’s beloved radio show on WBZ-AM) from a former Western-movie actor who had thought about becoming one of the “Marlboro men”, until that Western actor asked a Philip Morris ad exec (both people on a PM Marlboro ad-shoot) in 1962 why [b]he[/b] never had anything to do with butts…that ad exec’s answer to the Western actor was summed up in four tersely spoken phrases: [i]Cigarettes? — Are you crazy? — Those things are for idiots — they’ll kill you.”[/i]
And for something that COULD (and I’ve long felt HAS to) be done to start to “diverge” public thought in considering pipes and cigars to be “different from butts”, as well as far less threatening to anyone’s health, well, the following paragraph’s contents COULD be said to be a controversial idea to say the least to make that very “desirable divergence” happen, but perhaps…
…what if the entire U.S. Armed Forces. someday finally broke itself away from its “cigarette-culture” forever, and ONLY allowed its uniformed personnel to smoke pipes (which have an “in the service tradition” going back to the Revolution) and cigars (going back to at least the American Civil War) ONLY, to ensure our troops are only enjoying natural tobacco in their pipes and handmade cigars, while going through a period, say of three to five years, for everyone in uniform worldwide to wean themselves off the “butts”, and afterwards either be “butt-free”, or a pipe or cigar fan, and nothing else?
“Just an idea”, I know…but one I’d heartily support in every respect!
Thanks and Yours Sincerely,
Data’s Calabash
I wonder what sickens and kills more people each year: tobacco, or the high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oil laden junk foods and drinks the “pharmacies” continue to stock on their shelves?
It’s tobacco now, then it will be rice next, then wheat, then non-GMO fruits and vegetables. It wont stop.
Can someone ask the idiots in the White House and Congress, hows their War on Drugs and Terror going?
Chris
“It’s a ‘pharmacy,’ see, a place where you are supposed to get your ‘health products.’ ”
Last I checked, most of the “health products” I can get at the pharmacy are either superfluous crap aimed at female image insecurities for the sake of capital gain, and drugs with dangerous side effects marketed to consumers for the same reason.
Sure, many people have serious issues and can’t live productive lives without medication. But, this is not always the case.
My tobacco is a better for my health than a palm full of pills.
“This one is for my heart, this one is for my kidneys, this one is for the side effects which that one creates, this one is so I can sleep after taking that one, and this one is so I can still take a shit after ingesting all of my ‘medicine.’ “