From CNSNews June 4, 2003: "U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a congressional committee Tuesday he would support a total ban on all tobacco products, insisting that they have no benefit to society whatsoever."
It is not enough that this dippy and (as far as I am concerned) criminal regime in D.C. should be mired in Iraq in a messy – nay lethal – and probably permanent occupation of a land it said it would "liberate." Now it indicates, through an apparently lunatic Surgeon General (I wonder if he has a classy banana republic uniform to wear of the sort that Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop use to affect back in Reagan's day?) that the administration would support "a total ban on all tobacco products," because "they have no benefit to society whatsoever."
That would be news not only to the millions who enjoy a smoke but also to that vigorous campaigner against nicotine, the late Leo Tolstoy, who, in his "Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?" said nicotine's chief "benefit" is that it soothes the guilty conscience. Else, he went on, "Why do all whores and thieves smoke"? You would not, based on that remark, classify old Leo as an utter enthusiast for the weed, but at least he never allowed himself to think, as does this really terrible man we appear to have as a surgeon general, that human beings are willing to spend millions (billions?) of dollars, and a good deal of their health into the bargain, to get no real benefits at all from consuming the major contribution of the New World to the immense armamentarium of global narcosis.
This is the tyrannical bureaucratic mind (I use the term loosely) at work. Look at the facts, by heaven, and deny them. We can change all that. Nothing is beyond us, we Conquerors of the World. Bring on the cops. Let's replicate our fantastically successful war on alcohol – whoops! I forgot, that one wasn't so successful, was it? Well then, let's add tobacco to the heroin, marijuana, cocaine, "speed," etc., war and drive tobacco into the underground market along with the rest of them, thus creating God alone knows what new and most welcome opportunities for the criminal and governmental classes (do I repeat myself?).
Of course, not really. The remark of the Surgeon General is just spin, baloney, hypocritical bushwah. The feds (and states) are not about to give up the stiff taxes they impose on cigarettes and other tobacco products in favor of conducting night raids on clandestine tobacco pushers. And somewhere in the dank, dark, and very deep recesses of their putative souls they indeed must recognize that the peeuhpul, intellectually sluggish and slow to revolt as we always are, do have some sort of boundary, which the "state" can invade only at grave risk to the parasitic classes that live by the "state."
That boundary was discovered in the case of alcohol. The "state" had to retreat and finally had to tell the raging, anti-alcohol puritanical interests that their Prohibition was a no-go; "everyone" was defying it: judges, cops, clergy, bankers, stockbrokers, gangsters (for whom it was a Godsend), and that nice little old couple down the street. And it made us the laughing stock of the world, as in some ways we still are for our unending and futile campaigns to enforce public "virtue," although since we are also the biggest bully on the block, the laughter is nowadays somewhat muted.
Speaking of drugs, what is sickening is the way the hypocrisy of the governing class joins forces with the evil intentions of the suppliers of illicit drugs, to make for a cozy deal to keep the trade going. The war on drugs doesn't make prices too high or successfully interdict the shipment of drugs altogether, either of which results would unduly anger the users and is anyway impossible to achieve. But the "war" does supply work for a huge cadre of cops and prison guards, not to mention big shot administrators and wardens.
And – certainly important side effects – it yields fortunes in captured drugs (what does become of them?) and a steady supply of seized property to fatten the petty cash and car pools of various levels of government. Also it maintains a robust and continuing enlargement of our truly record-breaking population of not-very-criminal criminals in jails and prisons across the land.
Old Leo Tolstoy was right. Men (meaning everybody) will stupefy themselves, from time to time, one way or the other. Only an insanely invasive, crudely moralistic, and tyrannical government will much concern itself with that propensity as distinguished from real crimes with real victims.
The one thing all this government propaganda does that sets out to prove the devil is resident in substances and therefore the substances are real baaaaaad in themselves, is to throw up a huge cloud of squid ink around the whole matter of substance abuse. Thus we almost never get to hear any common sense about the reasons and the ways people do drugs and how much harm is really caused by them. The whole thing proceeds at the level of a discussion of arson that starts with the axiom that matches cause it.
June 6, 2003
