Don’t despair if you’ve failed numerous attempts to quit smoking cigarettes
2007 documentary, Sicko, an infuriating indictment of the corrupting power of money on politicians. Moore filmed Hillary Clinton, whose 1993 attempt to provide affordable healthcare went down in flames fanned by Republican obstructionists, as she accepted a 0,000 check from an umbrella organization of lobbyists for health insurance companies.
The cliché is sadly true: (Almost) everyone has his or her price.
A candidate for canonization by a Pope who was a member of Hitler Youth, Mother Teresa lent her moral imprimatur to right-wing Latin American dictators because they made massive contributions to her charitable organizations, according to a BBC documentary, Holy Cow. What’s a little torture and murder when their perpetrators subsidize leper hospitals in Calcutta?
One solution to a plague that kills more people than AIDS: Tax cigarettes out of existence. Or make it a luxury available only to rich and upper middle-class nicotine addicts.
As a liberal, or should I say “progressive” since the “L-word” has become almost as unmentionable these days as the “N-word, I normally oppose regressive taxes, i.e. taxes that burden the poor more than the rich because everyone pays the same tax rate regardless of income. But if there’s such an animal as a benign regressive tax, it would involve an exception to my opposition to taxes charge the poor the same tax rate as the rich. Federal income taxes are called progressive because wealthy citizens pay a higher percentage of taxes on their income than the middle class or poor.
Slapping an additional 100 percent tax on a pack of cigarettes probably wouldn’t stop a well-heeled nicotine addict from paying for his fix. A pack of cigarettes might, however, motivate many middle income and poor smokers to give up their fatal habit. Unfortunately, the tobacco lobby isn’t the only guilty party that prevents cigarettes from being taxed out of existence.
Federal, state and municipal governments are also addicts. They are addicted to the 0 billion annual revenue from cigarette taxes. You might presume that a 100 percent tax increase would turn government officials into big boosters of a new tax that would add another 0 billion to their coffers. But the decline in tobaccos sales after doubling the cost of a pack of cigarettes might give boosters second thoughts about the increased tax rate. And with the added douceur of a bribe, er, a large campaign donation, would turn tax boosters into tax busters.
Ironically, there’s a huge constituency that would support anything that put corporate tobacco out of business and cigarettes out of reach. This unlikely advocacy would come from the millions of unwilling addicts who make nicotine chewing gum and smoking-cessation programs a huge profit source. Twenty-something smokers who believe they are invincible eventually become 60somethings who have watched friends — or themselves — die of lung cancer or heart disease caused by the 60 carcinogens in their drug of choice.
For those who seem constitutionally incapable of abandoning a habit they hate but can’t escape, an extortionate increase in the cost of cigarettes due to confiscatory taxation would not necessarily end the problematic behavior smokers realize will eventually end their lives.
In fact, to their shock and humiliation, middle-class smokers who wouldn’t think of breaking the law under any other conditions might engage in the same white collar crimes or moral lapses — embezzling, check kiting, raiding their children’s college fund — that cocaine addicts from the same socio-economic class end up committing.
Current progressive thinking recommends rehabilitation instead of incarceration for drug addicts and alcoholics facing soft-time in country club prisons for DUI convictions. But “rehab” for many cigarette smokers just doesn’t work — as any dropout from expensive smoking cessation seminars will tell you. There is inconclusive evidence that hopeless smokers have a gene or genes that make it impossible for them to quit, just as some researchers believe that there is a gene that predisposes individuals to substance abuse — so-called addictive personalities whose genetic predisposition is suspected but as yet undiscovered.
Combining the two methods of fighting the use of a toxic drug — rehabilitation in prison — might be the double whammy that finally frees chainsmokers from the slavery of addiction.
There’s an even less likely solution that has the chances of a snowball in Haiti. Use the same weapon of the tobacco industry, advertising, against corporate drug dealers. Instead of criminalizing drug use, an ad campaign would stigmatize cigarette manufacturers as moral rather than statutory offenders.
Only a tiny portion of the extra 0 billion in revenue from increased cigarette taxation would be necessary to fund advertising campaigns endorsed by government