Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we're back after only a few hours! Trust me, this isn't going to be indicative of how often I'll be updating, so don't go checking me every two hours.
But since I just can't help myself, here's a bit of fun for a second post. This one's coming to you from the Associated Press:
“After more than a decade of efforts by smoking opponents, Congress prepared to take a final vote Friday on legislation giving the government far-reaching powers to regulate tobacco and limit tobacco industry marketing and sales practices that lure young people into smoking habits.
The House was expected to give overwhelming approval to legislation that for the first time gives the Food and Drug Administration authority to ban tobacco ingredients deemed dangerous to health, prohibit use of candied and flavored cigarettes popular among young people and prohibit use of words such as "mild" or "light" that give the impression that the brand is safer.”
Now, most of you are smart folks and can do a Google search to find out more information about this topic. Trying going to Google News and typing in government plus tobacco and you'll get a nice assortment of articles. CBS News has a nice article with the headline “How Much Should The U.S. Regulate Tobacco?” I suggest you all give it a read and develop your own thoughts, but I'd like to focus on a bothersome little paragraph yonder that reads:
“And anti-smoking advocates have a powerful argument in favor of the bill: It appears to offer an opportunity to save some of the more than 400,000 lives that are lost to tobacco products each year. Americans may instinctively chafe at government intrusions into their lives, but they have long been willing to accept certain limitations in service of the greater good.”
The greater good? I have some concerns about this.
Sacrificing personal freedom for safety and the sake of “the greater good” is something that any good Reality Deviant should be concerned about. Now, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a man, woman, or child that isn't aware that tobacco is bad for your health. Aside from the warnings splayed all over everything in existence in plain English, this can be arrived at logically from an observation of your own body and how it responds to extreme tobacco use.
If you claim to be somehow unaware or deceived about the toxic nature of tobacco products, you may wish to try a form of suicide that is more extreme so that society can carry on without you.
Neo-prohibitionists such as the anti-tobacco lobby are very fond of of citing the hundreds of thousands of deaths each year in this country “from tobacco use,” because it makes it look like we're fighting a war of attrition, and death sells headlines. For the moment, though, my fellow Reality Deviants and Deviantettes, let's forget the arguments about just how accurate those statistics are. Let's forget how easily manipulable statistically-based studies are, let's forget that tobacco-related death is more than likely due to a mixture of genetic predisposition plus overall usage and environmental factors instead of the mere existence of tobacco products or second-hand smoke.
Let's play up to the prohibitionist crowd and accept their statistics at face value. So, 400,000 tobacco deaths in this country per year—who are these people? School children? Clearly, if we are doing this with the motivation to save the children there must be a veritable smorgasboard of child-related deaths occurring every year, right? Well, no. No, that doesn't make sense. What does make sense, is older people suffering because they have been abusing tobacco willingly for a very long time.
Oh, I forgot to mention! Rick Bender, the fellow in the stomach-churning link above was on CNN today to talk about the “horrors” of tobacco use and what it can do to your body. We'll give him a little bit of gentler treatment because it really sucks to have only part of a face, but it's important to note that he is being used as a symbol to both legitimize and sensationalize the fight against tobacco. Reality Deviants, I submit to you that this is an appeal to emotionalism, a manipulation of our fears for the purpose of curtailing an industry and squeezing more blood out of the rock that is tobacco.
If you don't believe me, look at the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009. Look at the increases contained therein and ask yourself why they would spike taxation on small market tobacco products like filter tubes, rolling papers, bulk tobacco, cigars, snuff, and so on. How on earth is this going to affect Big Tobacco? Wait, isn't Big Tobacco tacitly in support of the new legislation that allows the FDA to have control over tobacco products?
Well, Virginia, it isn't going to affect Big Tobacco as much as it is going to affect local tobacco retailers and small tobacco producers. With the new floor stocks tax, a lot of retailers in the online sphere and elsewhere have either been forced to repurpose or shut down for good. So, we have lost jobs, lost money, broken business, and a government bill that acts as a revenue vacuum. This means that government is attacking small markets that don't have the political clout to resist new legislation. Sticky wicket, don't you think?
Then there's the FDA, which is a regulatory government body that regulates and supervises the “safety” of food and drug products that are to be released on the market. It is absurd to posit that this body will do anything less than further marginalize tobacco products and form a strict control of the product, because the very nature of tobacco is in direct opposition to their organization's goals.
But wait, there's more! You can find it in any store!
Legitimized drugs, friends! The FDA is in the business of legitimizing drugs for the market! See, there have been just a few objections raised in regards to how the FDA has handled itself over the last few years, and we might do well to consider that it isn't exactly that just like any government body, it's extremely vulnerable to market pressure from major drug manufacturers like Forest Laboratories, the manufacturers of Celexa. Celexa coincidentally is being applied currently to treat repetitive behaviors in autistic children, and it isn't doing too well. But there's a substantial amount of pressure from of drug companies on behavioral psych analysts to go ahead and use it anyway.
I think I've gone on for more than long enough this time, and I think I've left you folks with more than enough food for thought. But before I go, I'll leave you with two more questions to tease your Reality Deviant brains.
One, did you ever get the sense that this “let's go after tobacco" shtick might be designed to draw the media's attention away from something potentially far more important?
Also, do you wonder why drugs might, I mean just might, be presently used as a method of control and revenue that is used against us and for us simultaneously?
Maybe they're just trying to get us to swallow the Happiness Pie.
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