Email of the week
Saturday, February 13, 2010 Hello Forest,
I'm delighted to hear of your existence. But dismayed that such friends are across the pond and not closer to home. Such an organization as yours is much needed here in the US. The US is ground zero, where the anti-tobacco campaign all got started years ago.
Very shortly after Obama was elected, Henry Waxman, from out here in prissy California, got a major tax hike on tobacco through Congress so fast, nobody had time to hear about it, let alone organize any resistance.
And it's not just on cigarettes. The tax about tripled the price of a pouch of the roll-your-own stuff, popular with veterans and low income people - a tax on simple comforts of the poor. It also significantly raised prices of pipe tobacco.
I've been a pipe smoker for years. I'm concerned for the economic survival of my tobacconist. The venerable establishment of Iwan Ries has survived many things, including the Chicago Fire and the Great Depression, but this combination of selective taxation and the economy has got to hurt.
It would take a while, but the price gets to putting off those who might otherwise enjoy pipes also, resulting in a diminishing new customer base. They're out to kill the industry.
I grew up in farm country. There were several pipe smokers around. I'd miss it. It's gotten to be very difficult even to find good pipes here in the States anymore.
Health without happiness is merely existing, not living.
The statistics I read seem so skewed. They list huge casualties for tobacco and negligible damage from alcohol. Funny that. In the past 20 years, I can recall hearing of one person who might have died of tobacco related ailments, maybe, but I can count a score off the top of my head of people who have died and many quite young, quite specifically as a result of alcohol. Including such things as young kids getting run over by drunks, friends getting drunk at a party and one of 'em shoots another, stuff like that.
Not that I'd be out to wage a war on alcohol so much, just the hypocrisy. I'd actually considered opening a chain of stores, sell cigars, high end alcohol and handguns; call it ATF; the one thing the government got right here - putting those three together in one department.
Here in California, I might add medical marijuana to the store's stock in trade, but I could see it leading to a bit of a culture clash among the clientele.
My grandfather chain smoked hand rolled Bull Durham cigarettes. One day, well into his 90s, he decided to quit. Two weeks later, he died. I suspect it was the shock to his system that did him in.
Enough stories for now. Just thought I'd say hello to some friends I didn't know I had until I found their comments mentioned in an article about some hysterics in Berkeley talking about 'third hand smoke'.
Matt K
Reader Comments (6)
Hi Simon, is it possible you could pass my email details onto Matt K as the US has a Freedom Of Information Act too which he could use as funnily enough I wrote to Waxman recently and posed this question which has a very simple yes or no answer. I have yet to get an answer.
Waxman is a virulent anti smoker who in November 1994 headed up the Congressional Health Sub-Committee report into SHS/ETS, its conclusions were:
"•the statistical evidence does not appear to support a conclusion that there are substantial health effects of passive smoking;
•it is possible that very few or even no deaths can be attributed to ETS;
•if there are any lung cancer deaths from ETS exposure, they are likely to be concentrated among those subjected to the highest exposure levels... primarily among those nonsmokers subjected to significant spousal ETS.
•‘Even when overall risk is considered, it is a very small risk and is not statistically significant at a conventional 95% level."
http://www.legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/oio50c00/pdf?search="crs report for congress redhead rowberg
Matt K.
Welcome to Simon's blog 'Taking Liberties'.
All of us who comment here are aware of the horrors of the Californian attitude to the enjoyment of tobacco, but at least you have decent weather to compensate to some extent!
It is probable that the reversal of the process of the smoking bans will only arrive in your State long after it has occurred elsewhere. We here in the UK hope that our innate love of tolerance will eventually win through, but we have no great expectations in the immediate future.
Keep on 'tuning in' here from time to time. As with the 'global warming' fiasco, it is only a matter of time before it becomes recognised that adult people have an absolute right to make their own life choices, which, at the end of the day, means that the existence of 'smoking pubs' must be tolerated by the powers that be.
It is only a matter of time, but there is a long way to go.
Matt K -
Yes - welcome, indeed !
There are MANY splendid individuals in the States speaking out against the Creeping Tyranny of our New Age - now manifesting itself in so many different ways.
On both sides of the Pond, the Resistance is as yet in its infancy, and fragmented.
But it IS growing.
And an AMERICAN branch of FOREST would be a happy development for us all.
(Virginia would be a good place to start !)
Remember: support is only a mouse-click and a millisecond away.
Please stay in touch.....................
Where did all the puritans go? America.
Give me liberty or give me, oh look! TV!
Addendum: Hopefully the creeping tobacco prohibition will last no longer than alcohol prohibition and marijua-- oh, never mind. I'm sure that the rights of the individual will... something something...
"I'm sure that the rights of the individual will.......................
.........be discovered by some enterprising archaeologist in the frozen tundras of North America or Britain - some several thousand years from now.
(Gosh, so 'Liberty' WASN'T a myth, after all.........)