Cogito, ergo sum

I think, therefore, I am.

In other words, I exist because I am able to think, to create ideas, to sort out the thoughts into logical sets. Maybe even attempt at making order out of a chaotic world.

Now, what has that to do with pipe tobacco you might ask. Good question.

If a thinking person works through the complex issues confronting pipe tobacco, and the tobacco industry in general, you might come to the conclusion that tobacco is a product that is about to become a thing referred to in the past tense, a product that we once knew, and many millions of us enjoyed.

Tobacco has a rich history in this nation. It helped win a war of independence. It was around to provide money during the nation’s Civil War. It helped scientists, authors, yes, doctors, lawyers, and a multitude of others work through thorny problems of the day.

Then an awful thing happened to tobacco. It became a victim of capitalism. It became a manufactured product, wrapped in paper, and laced with all sorts of evil chemicals. The paper product made people sick, even killed them. An entire new industry then grew up around cigarettes, linking the smoking of the product to health ailments of various severity. In the early 1960s, the nation’s top doctor, the Surgeon General, issued a report that said cigarette smoking was linked to cancer.

No mention was made in that report of pipe tobacco. But, perhaps it was a given that pipe tobacco was guilty by association.

After that report came other groups, who sought to make money from the tobacco industry threw high-priced litigation and federal and state laws that had taxing authority. Tobacco was now a taxable product, and a big source of revenue.

Pipe tobacco was tossed into that mix as well, because it was related to cigarette tobacco, in that both arrived from a leaf grown in a field. No thought was given to pipe tobacco, except that it was related to cigarette tobacco, and therefore it must be as harmful.

Pipe tobacco, however, is not laced with chemicals. It is not wrapped in a type of paper that has also been treated in order to burn quickly and evenly. Pipe tobacco by nature burns slowly. It is not doused with nicotine to increase its lethal addiction. It is as pure a product as products can be in this day and time of additives. If you read the labels on food products, you might stop eating all together. If you read the labels on pipe tobacco, you find it says tobacco, and perhaps food flavoring. Nothing else.

Once it was discovered that tobacco could be the source of unlimited money stream, it drew the attention of many groups–not the least of which were politicians. Lawsuits sprang up and large sums of money were set atop the cigarette industry, which is still paying in some cases.

Many cities and towns across the nation enjoyed the large-scale tobacco settlements, which were supposed to be used to help those addicted to cigarettes to stop smoking. Instead, many towns and cities across the nation chose to use the tobacco settlement money for their general funds. Tobacco money went to balance budgets, to pay for such things as infrastructure, parks, bridges and municipal debt.

Today, many cities and towns across the nation are finding that they can no longer balance budgets, that state unemployment insurance funds have completely run dry at a time when the recession is forcing more and more people out of work, that people are not only going without money, but if they smoke, they must pay outrageous taxes, and therefore have quit smoking, which huts the bottom line for cities and towns across the nation, since tax revenues are dropping. It is, perhaps, a Darwinian cycle: taxes have evolved to create more, not less, recession.

Taxes have become so onerous, so pervasive, that when combined with just one other aspect of life, such as health care, it is little wonder that the economy is grinding to a halt. People have simple been taxed to the limit, and when health care costs continue to jump at astronomical amounts each year, with little regulation over health insurance companies and drug companies, there is not much wonder about why the population is not only broke, but almost to the point of revolution.

And now comes a federal tobacco control act under the aegis of the Food and Drug Administration. The new law under the FDA umbrella is at the moment an unknown quantity, because it has not yet begun to enforce the act with its powerful and far-reaching authority over tobacco.

In my mind, this is taxation without representation. There are precious few Congressmen in Washington willing to stand up for pipe tobacco, other than to give lip service in order to please a constituency for their vote.

Dubious and wary pipe smokers, those who prefer to smoke their tobacco in briar or meerschaum, unadulterated in any way, except for food-grade flavorings, have asked Congress to at least look at the science on pipe tobacco and to separate tobacco used in pipes from that soaked and sprayed with chemicals used in cigarettes.

I don’t want to sound like a revolutionary. I’m not, except to say that I am descended from a Continental Line general officer who fought off taxation from Britain at a time when America was again at the wall of taxed limits. Tobacco from America helped fund the war against Britain, a colonial power exerting its will over what was considered a weak nation led by weak men.

But the idea of freedom and independence are two very powerful forces. It is absurd and un-American for one group to force its will upon another group, as long as the group being aggrieved is obeying the laws of the land, and not hurting anyone by the choices they make.

And then make the aggrieved group pay added taxes that are used in ways that are not provided in the legal codes that established the tax. That is against the rights of man, and revolutionary.

Remember, pipe smokers are the mind workers of the world!

Forcing them to act against their will is wrong and could result in a deepening of the recession, forcing more families out of work, onto the unemployment rolls, drying up more funds for cities and towns.

Already, pipe smokers are warehousing pounds of tobacco in the face of a Tobacco Prohibition under the new FDA authority, which could in reality stop the production of something we all thought was a right and a choice we enjoyed in a free and independent society.

Think about it.