OFF TOPIC: >>>Chaz; Smoking is a voluntary tax on the stupid. By definition only stupid people smoke. Look around you and it is obvious.<<<
You are only able to take this attitude today because of the effects of two generations of antismoking activists.
In the 1960's 75% of men smoked.
In my first serious job, as a programmer and ER xray technician and lab technician at a hospital, I was occasionally allowed the priviledge of eating in the doctors cafeteria. One ate in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Most doctors and nurses and emergency personnel smoked at that time. Including me. I have three siblings and 4 in-laws that are doctors, nurses, biochemists or geneticists. They all smoked at one time or another, and withdrew from the habit after great personal cost and with great difficulty.
Why did these people, whose IQ's probably averaged 130 or 140, smoke? Two reasons: First, the habit was heavily advertised. Second, the drug is highly addictive, by some acounts, more so than opium, and far more so than cocaine, based on the ease of getting people to quit and stay quit. Many an intelligent person has thought he/she was "smart enough to control my habits."
I see that you favor heavy penalties for the transport and manufacture of other drugs. Since tobacco is more addictive than most, and far more deadly than cocaine (cocaine deaths in the US last year were a few thousand, cigarette deaths around 800,000), why not outlaw it if you would outlaw the others.
Or in contrast, since we now spend more than 100 billion a year on health care, enforcement, incarceration, welfare for the families of men in prison and so on resulting from the use of cigarettes and other drugs, why not control all these trades in a standard fashion and put perhaps 50 billion a year into anti-drug training and withdrawal centers and the like, and just save the other 50 billion?
I believe William F. Buckely is right about this. However, the trade in tobacco and alcohol should be as closely regulated at least as the trade in less dangerous drugs. I believe the Oregon model for liquor sales, with state stores for sales and ID checks, and the tracking of extreme abusers, combined with a ban on advertising, would be a good first step.
Chaz |
