Pipe Smokers Intelligencer

This is another fine mess we’ve gotten into.

You may not have seen this. Not many newspapers and other news outlets  ran the story, but the Food and Drug Administration says it wants to visit tobacco manufacturers to “learn more about the business.”

Huh?

The FDA has had since 2009 to learn the tobacco business. It has been spending your tax dollars on who-knows-what and now they need to visit tobacco plants to learn from the horse’s mouth the ground floor operations.

Here’s how The Associated Press wrote it the other day:

“The federal agency’s 2-year-old Center for Tobacco Products is asking tobacco companies to invite it to tour farms and factories that grow or process tobacco.

“It says the visits are meant to help the agency better understand how each step in the process — from field to package — could influence the final product.

“The FDA wants to tour large and small cigarette factories, a smokeless tobacco plants, tobacco farms, a rolling-paper factory and a tobacco warehouse.

“The agency won the authority to regulate tobacco in 2009. Although the agency has the authority to visit most tobacco facilities, the tours are not official inspections. It said in its request that better understanding the industry ‘may be helpful.’

“Some of the people they’ve hired certainly know a lot about tobacco, (but) the odds that many or any of them have actually been on the inside of a manufacturing facility is probably pretty low,” said Ira Loss, an analyst with Washington Analysis who has covered the agency for three decades.

“The nation’s second-largest cigarette maker, Reynolds American Inc., intends to take the agency up on the request.

“‘We certainly think it’s important the FDA understand the practicalities of tobacco manufacturing,’ Reynolds spokesman David Howard said.

“Altria Group Inc., owner of the nation’s top cigarette company, Philip Morris USA, said it plans to respond but wouldn’t say whether that meant it would extend an invitation.

“Tobacco companies, in essence, will foot the bill through user fees the FDA charges them.”

Say, isn’t this a little like letting the fox in the hen house?

It also looks to me that some enterprising newspaper reporter somewhere would like to ask the FDA what they have been doing with all the tax money that has rolled in from tobacco revenue the past couple of years.

Has the tobacco tax revenue gone to salaries and to fix up nice digs for the tobacco czar, Lawrence Deyton, director of the Center for Tobacco Products?

The Center, you recall, oversees the implementation of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act signed by President Obama in June 2009.

The FDA’s responsibilities under the law include setting performance standards, reviewing premarket applications for new and modified risk tobacco products, and establishing and enforcing advertising and promotion restrictions.

Seems to me that coming up on two years now, some enterprising reporter would like to ask some questions about what has the Center for Tobacco Products (CFTP) has been doing and why just now going to tobacco manufacturers for insight?

How many people are sucking off the taxpayer teat at the CFTP and what are their salaries? What have they done in the past two years besides hold “webinars” and send out notices? What about a little transparency, as people in Washington like to crow.

Show us the money and results!

I’m just saying.

You are going to love this. Trust me.

For all the fire, fuss and fury of the recent budget show in Washington, the so-called $38 billion cuts made by the House and Senate, which President Obama sanctioned, amount to little more than $300 in real money sliced from the pork barrel.

Now, here’s the kicker: Of that $38-plus billion, guess where a few paltry billion or so come from?

Try the CHIPRA column. CHIPRA is the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009.

The political thugs in Washington jiggered the budget  numbers, whispered some hocus pocus and incorporated $3.5 billion in unused children’s health insurance funds on the cut side.

This is classic Washington smoke and mirrors. Not only did the thugs include unspent children’s health insurance money, but they also pulled in $1.7 billion left over from the 2010 census; $2.2 billion in subsidies for health insurance co-ops (that’s something the president’s new health care law is going to fund anyway); and $2.5 billion from highway programs that can’t be spent because of restrictions set by other legislation.

I found this story on CBS.com.

And you thought these guys were working hard, trying to squeeze every last fat dime out of the budget?

Come to find out, part of the smoke and mirrors includes the extra taxes you pay on tobacco to help fund health insurance for children. So, without the tobacco tax for CHIPRA, the so-called phantom cuts would be $3.8 billion less.

Imagine that? The pols who voted for the creation of smoking bans, the family smoking act to put all tobacco products under the thumb of the Food and Drug Administration, have now added stupidity to insult.

They are trying to balance a trillion-plus deficit budget partially on the backs of smokers, the very people they supposedly want to eliminate.

If you fail to see the hypocrisy in this, let me lay it out for you: Your tobacco taxes are going to balance the trillion-plus deficit at the same time you are under siege from anti-smoking groups, who also get funding from the federal government.

That make any sense to you?

It doesn’t to me, either.

And all the while, these guys in Washington wanted America to think they were working like little beavers whacking fat from the deficit, when all they really came up with is some $350 million, which is so miniscule as to be laughable.

You got to be kidding me. Who elected these yahoos? I must have been asleep at the switch when these guys rode into Washington.

Listen up: The nation’s debt ceiling is a staggering $14-plus trillion. The deficit stands at $1.4 trillion. That, my friends, is a lot of money, even for Washington.

The U.S. is going broke. You talk about national security? A national debt of that magnitude is going to eat America’s lunch.

And the numbskulls in Washington are trying to find money in tobacco taxes to help balance this runaway economy?

This is just unbelievable. I don’t think anyone in Washington has the foggiest notion of what they are doing, or how to go about running a business such as the nation’s now-busted economy.

Think of it this way: The next time you light up, and see all that wonderful pipe or cigar smoke curling above your head, you can feel secure in the knowledge that that isn’t the only thing going up in smoke.

So are your tobacco tax dollars.

Here’s an odd juxtaposition of values: Federal and state politicians were quick to jump on the bandwagon to vote for smoking bans across the nation. Now comes the news that the U.S. Congress is sitting on its hands while natural gas companies do something called hydro fracturing.

That is a fancy phrase for deep well injecting into rock formations of all kinds of chemicals to get the gas to expand and rise to the surface, or something like that.

Some of those chemicals are known as big time carcinogens. And some have been pumped into the ground in amounts that exceed safe levels.

The fear is that the fracturing will cause the chemicals to work through rock formations to groundwater and water reserves. That would be our drinking water reserves.

Oh, so, it is all right with the pols if our drinking water is polluted with cancer-causing chemicals, but, uh, we better ban smoking because some bad science has told us that it ain’t healthy.

And cancer-laced water is?

Here’s another little item to make give you whiplash as you double take: A recent scientific study (I now distrust all things that claim they are scientific, but here goes, anyway)  in San Francisco has concluded that pipe and cigar smoke has no cancerous effect on the pancreas. First-hand, second-hand or whatever-hand. No effect!

No doubt, the antis will get gobs of grants to prove this wrong. Guess the normal sources of grant money? Your pocket and mine.

Now, this is probably not what pols will pay any attention to. They have squandered away America and now they need to pay the fiddler. Any revenue that isn’t nailed down will head into the great void to bail out the pols who spent all of our tax money.

And now at a time when the Baby Boomers are retiring, Washington thinks it is going to jigger Medicare and Social Security.

I got only one thought on that: they need to watch the Mid-East a little closer. Those folks are fed up with runaway government and two-bit dictators. America’s streets could be filled with upset voters and taxpayers quite easily. Just like the Mid-East and Libya.

I rattle on, but the message is, taxing a minority group, such as smokers, to the point of no return is not the way to balance ill-spent budgets. I’m not real sure of the answer, and even if I did have an answer, no one would listen.

So, here is my advice on the subject: tax and ban at your peril.

Selah

The Pipe Smokers Intelligencer is proud to add to its writing family Dr. Michael Siegel.

Dr. Michael Siegel, a professor in the Deproducts.partment of Community Health Sciences at Boston University’s School of Public Health, in no way supports, encourages or condones the use of tobacco or the smoking of pipes or any other tobacco He has 25 years of experience in the field of tobacco control. He previously spent two years working at the Office on Smoking and Health at CDC, where he conducted research on secondhand smoke and cigarette advertising. He has published nearly 70 papers related to tobacco.

In addition, Dr. Siegel testified in the landmark Engle lawsuit against the tobacco companies, which resulted in an unprecedented $145 billion verdict against the industry. He teaches social and behavioral sciences, mass communication and public health, and public health advocacy in the Masters of Public Health program.