KICKING THE CIGARETTE ADDICTION
A follow-up to my last entry.

Everyone knows cigarettes are bad, even those who smoke them. Many politicians can get huge brownie points for attacking smoking itself, Big Tobacco or both. So why is it that they just don't ban cigarettes?

Except for elected officials in a few states, it's not loyalty to Big Tobacco. That loyalty went out the window with the big lawsuits initiated by states' attornies general. It's not that they're afraid to impose their big government morality on what's essentially an exclusively self-destructive vice. They have no compunctions about banning marijuana.

Why won't anyone ban cigarettes? The answer is simple: it's an addiction thing. States are ADDICTED to the revenue that sales tax on cigarettes generates. Huge amounts of money pour into the states' coffers because of this tax. If cigarettes are illegal, then their buying and selling is unregulated and thus untaxed. That's the cruel irony of these public health, anti-smoking campaigns. If the campaigns actually fully succeeded and everyone stopped smoking, states would suffer financially.

Remember the lawsuits against Big Tobacco. The propaganda justifying them was that states had to recoup costs associated with tobacco's ill effects. One would logically assume that the settlement money would go into anti-smoking campaigns, quit smoking programs and other stuff related to... cigarettes. But as we all know, the money is going into the general fund to get spent on whatever pork projects legislators want. I think our county is spending some of its tobacco money on improving the bike trail.

If states filed a lawsuit alleging that a product was so INHERENTLY damaging that it required billions of dollars in compenstation, then it should logically follow that this product should either be made safer (which isn't really possible in this case) or made illegal.

Instead, states filed a lawsuit saying that product is inherently damaging and after they got their money, states let the industry continue to produce, unchanged, their inherently damanging product.

But we all know that banning tobacco won't happen, because states are unable to kick the cigarette habit.