I am a former cigarette smoker. To be more precise, I smoked a pack a day for more than 25 years. I was in my early teens when I tried my first cigarette, and went through the same psychological progression that most young smokers do: from feeling cool and grown up — quite a feat for a 13 year old — to being just another addicted slave to nicotine before I was even old enough to vote.
Somewhere along the way, though, society changed in its attitude toward smoking, or at least toward smoking cigarettes. Over the years, I went from being able to light up just about any time and any place I felt the urge, to literally feeling like a drug-crazed criminal having to hide the fact that I had a socially disreputable habit.
I finally quit smoking about 15 years ago because I figured that I had pushed my luck, healthwise, about as far as I could get away with. I was tired of being treated like a social outcast and, besides, at age 40, I was now at the same age as guys I knew who had suffered strokes.
Nowadays, I can smell cigarette smoke a mile away, and I don’t enjoy it a bit. In fact, I find it just as noxious as did those anti-smoking weenies who used to torment me during my “Marlboro Country” years. I am not a fan of cigarettes and, to those who argue that nicotine is not addictive, all I can say is that you sure couldn’t prove it by me.
| It’s one thing for businesses to face the constant threat of class action lawsuits from the private sector. It’s quite another to have elected officials salivating over the prospect of billions of dollars in “found money” and ganging up on a legal business as if it were a giant piñata at a birthday party for a six year old. |
I’ll go one step further. I think the product should be banned, especially if it is as harmful as the evidence seems to indicate. I am not a fan of Big Tobacco.
However, if there is anything I like less than Big Tobacco, it’s the Godfather-like shakedown scam that the vast majority of state attorneys general have participated in.
I know, I know. The money from the tobacco settlement goes to pay the cost of the medical and social wasteland left behind by tobacco. It goes toward youth smoking prevention programs, medical research and other feel good efforts designed to mitigate the adverse effects of tobacco smoking.
Yeah, right … and nicotine isn’t addictive either.
Why, then, do I keep running into more and more economic development programs that are funded, at least in part, by the anticipated proceeds from the tobacco settlement? What do business attraction and retention efforts have to do with smoking cessation? The answer, at least in my mind, is absolutely nothing. It’s just another source of revenue for states to add to the general fund, and a dishonest source at that.
Why do I care what happens to tobacco companies? I don’t, or at least not in terms of tobacco as a product. I do care, however, that a group of state attorneys general can sue a company — whose product is legal — based upon the past, present and future harmful effects of that product (i.e., tobacco), and then drop the case in return for a huge, and I do mean huge, cash settlement.
The fact that many states would then use that money for things like work force training only lessens what was already a thin veneer of legitimacy to begin with. If government wants people to stop smoking because it is dangerous to their health, then it should outlaw the practice. What they shouldn’t do is treat a legal business as if it were a roll of twenties they found just lying on the sidewalk.
It’s one thing for businesses to face the constant threat of class action lawsuits from the private sector. It’s quite another thing to have elected officials, salivating over the prospect of billions of dollars in “found money,” ganging up on a legal business as if it were a giant piñata at a birthday party for a six year old.
Today, it’s the tobacco industry. Tomorrow, it could be your industry.
Means the article is accessible only to our magazine subscribers.
