This time the state’s lawmakers voted to increase taxes on a pack of cigarettes by $1.60, raising the overall tax per pack to $4.35, the highest in the nation.

The minimum price for a pack of cigarettes in New York City, beginning July 1, 2010, will be $10.80. Now, that’s a nice, round figure, don’t you think?

And, that’s not all the “good news” from the antis. When you add in all the federal and city taxes, the cigarette retail customer will be paying more than $7.50 in taxes for every pack they purchase in New York.

State lawmakers expect the increase in taxes to raise some $440 million.

See, Bloomberg and all the other anti-nuts believe that by raising taxes to extortion rates, it will eventually stop smoking, cease it all together.

Antis like Bloomberg and his ilk should check out their history. Prohibition in the wild 1920s not only didn’t stop the outrageous behavior of drinking alcohol, but also increased it, and set up some notable big time crime bosses, i.e. Al Capone.

There was more than one grizzly public shooting, murder spree, gangland style gun-blazing lead spraying over who got what in those days.

So I have many doubts about Tobacco Prohibition, but the larger picture is that the tax increases on tobacco is also spicing up the state’s coffers. And at the moment, New York needs some hefty tax spicing.

It won’t be too long, friends and neighbors, before Bloomberg and company return their attention to pipe tobacco, which has already been hit with the Bloomberg tax bomb, as have cigars in New York City.

Now, here is a curious conundrum: New York wants you to refrain from smoking, right? It has banned smoking in bars, restaurants and the workplace.

Another New York group, calling itself “Smoke-Free City,” which receives its funds from the state and from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is looking at stopping New Yorkers and its visitors from lighting up in the city’s parks and on its beaches, too.

That would mean you could never ever again take a walk in Central Park with your dog and smoke your favorite pipe. Or sit on a peaceful bench people watching as you gently puff a luscious cigar.

A headline in Sunday’s New York Times put it succinctly: “No Smoking? Or More? We Can’t Quite Decide.”

Once again, we have a governmental authority legislating social engineering, a one size fits all mentality: Tobacco Prohibition.

Balancing a governmental authority’s books on the backs of the people who can little afford it is, of course, politics as usual. But to be so flagrant! That’s some kind of arrogance.

Oh, I get it: New Yorkers are arrogant. But hizzoner also said in the Times piece that “If you want to do something that’s injurious to your health, you have a right to do it.”

Ahhh, what a nice guy! And he wants to be U.S. President, too. You can bet he won’t ever get my vote, not even for doggie scooper poopy upper.

Let’s see now. No, we don’t want you to smoke, but yes please keep up the practice because my city and the state budgets have enough holes in them from propping up a bloated bureaucracy, overspending on projects that benefit the few, like criminal landlords, and howling to the winds when a big bank needs some ready tax dough on Wall Street.

The Times story also said, and I quote: “The idea here is not to save people from their own bad habits, but to keep them from hurting the rest of us. Secondhand smoke contains more than 250 poisonous substances, of which 11 are Class A carcinogens.”

Mind you, the story did not back up that claim with a single solid scientific fact. Not one. Instead, it shifted that duty off to the CDC.

It went on to say that secondhand smoke, according to the CDC, kills 50,000 people a year.

The article says about 15.8 percent of New Yorkers smoke today. New York has a population of about 20 million people. So, that translates, if my math is correct, to about 3.160 million people who smoke in the Big Apple.

Now if those 3.160 million people pay $7.50 in taxes that will generate $23,700,000. Again, check my math and let me know if it is wrong. I am an English major and math just never enters my mind and comes out in a straight line.

So, if the $23 mill is correct, then that’s not a big figure for a big city, but it’s not chump change either, not when you consider that number is based on just one pack of cigarettes.

A million here and a million there and pretty soon you are talking real money. My apologies to the late U.S. Sen. Erv Dirksen, who coined that phrase.

The story went on to say that a new essay in the New England Journal of Medicine says that smoking in apartment buildings, where most New Yorkers live, also has a bad effect.

NEJM is asking the federal government to halt smoking in public housing because “tobacco smoke can move along air ducts, through cracks in the walls and floors, through elevator shafts, and along plumbing and electrical lines to affect units on other floors.”

Let’s hope this news stays just between us smokers. You can mull that one over for a minute and come up with what’s between those lines.

But, uh, please leave your smokes at the door. We don’t want tobacco attitudes in our restaurants or bars, especially where children and alcohol are present.

You didn’t hear? Well, the Tennessee Legislature just passed a law that lowers the requirements for bars and restaurants that want to serve booze. Yeah, and bring your guns along.

If a bar, say, can show that it gets 15 percent of its revenue from food, then, by golly, it can serve booze all it wants. And you can bring your guns with you as you hoist your haunches up on a stool and order a round.

If a restaurant, say, which already gets more than 15 percent of its revenue from food service, it can add alcohol to the menu. And, you can bring your sidearm with you as you chow down on that steak and fries. Bring the kiddies for the kid’s menu. They can also pop off a few rounds of their cap pistols as they begin the evolution of gun slinging.

Are you following this? Tennessee would rather have you bring a gun into a bar or restaurant and mix that in with live ammo than smokes! Imagine that? I suppose that tobacco is just more potent than lead poisoning.

I’m not sure about you, but I’d rather have a sod buster sitting beside me smoking than twirling a pistola. I don’t think he can shoot me with a cigar, cigarette or a pipe, although I’m sure there are plenty of anti-tobacco zealots out there who would say that tobacco is more lethal than a gun.

If we are returning to the old Wild West days, then I want to bring back tobacco. It was big in those days, too. In fact, it would be a nice touch to recall the spittoons.

With the Tennessee Legislature in all of its alleged wisdom re-inventing whiskey laws, I sort of feel like the guy standing before the firing squad and asking for a final smoke. One more puff on my pipe before the guns blaze away.

If you are a bit squeamish about guns and alcohol, you might want to rethink your visit to Tennessee.

Else wise, come on down and bring your guns with you. Sidle up and order a Jack Daniel, straight up, pard.

But, leave those smokes at home. Too dangerous, doncha know.

I have been in South Carolina now for a few days. I don’t like what I see. In the trip from Tennessee to here, I saw only one tobacco field, but I did see planted field upon field of what appeared to be sorghum or some form of switch grass. That will be used to provide more “bio fuel,” for our inefficient transportation system, which uses the internal combustion engine.

That’s forward thinking, right?

South Carolina says it is legal for one to smoke in restaurants in this state with a big, honking IF. If a city government has not banned smoking, you can light ‘em up in restaurants and bars here in South Carolina.

That cowardly ruling is a big loophole.

So, it depends on where you are visiting in South Carolina, a state that has a very large tourist industry. A quick way to check that out is to go to here and look for yourself.

What appears to have happened in South Carolina, one of the nation’s largest tobacco producers, is that it has succumbed to the antis in a small but significant way. The South Carolina Supreme Court has given cities and counties the power to ban smoking. Most of that ruling is aimed at fast-food joints, which makes sense, I suppose. In Charleston, good luck on finding a restaurant or bar that allows smoking.

I saw a sign the other day over the front door of a South Carolina restaurant in big red letters that read: “We Are Now Smoke Free.” How about that. Non-smoking has become a bragging right!

I love the reasoning of some websites on smoking. Here’s one at the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control. This site talks about the “4,000 toxins” you can pick up by sitting in a smoking restaurant, or one that has a “smoke free” section. The second-hand smoke, it claims, gets in your clothes, hair, skin, blah, blah, blah. The site doesn’t offer proof. It just states the “4,000 toxins” as fact.

Now, I did not read one sentence on that site that said anything about the toxins sprayed on the food the various restaurants use to feed its customers. Nor did I see anything about a cleanliness record for said restaurant.

In other words, you don’t know where the food originates, and thus won’t know if the food was sprayed with, among other chemicals, DDT, or other bug-killing toxic soups.

You have no idea how healthy or clean the cooks are. You don’t know if roaches and rodents inhabit the building housing said restaurant. You won’t even be able to determine if the people handling the food are wearing protective gloves and hair coverings!

Uh, I found a hair in a meal the other day.

But, we do know that smokers are bad for you.

Give me a break! If we are going to crack down on smokers of all stripes, then I want someone cracking heads on the food I am ingesting and checking on just how sanitary the place is. Don’t give me the argument that state and city health departments watch over that sort of thing. I don’t buy it, not when these sorts of things can be bought off. Yes, that is the cynical view, but at this point, I am very cynical about how life is now structured in this nation.

I have eaten in some places in South Carolina on this trip that smelled like a sewer. The restaurant will go unnamed but the bathroom reminded me of some beer halls I visited in Scotland. The urinal was one long trough. I took a deep breath before using the facility. It was that bad.

Other places I visited seemed to have forgotten to keep the restrooms clean and in good working order. Which made me wonder, too, about the food I was about to eat.

In the trough eatery, I could not light up my pipe, which just might have helped the air we were all breathing! The whole thing reminded me when I was in New Orleans writing stories about Katrina. The garbage had a definite foul and rotting fish smell.

This now takes me to the Big Spill spewing and killing the Gulf of Mexico. What is unfolding there is a crime against humanity. I want to see a ban on that. I am not against drilling for oil, but I am not in favor of unfettered drill baby drill by big companies that view the rest of us as “small people.”

I may be a “small people” (in name, not in girth), but you can bet that I believe if the government can tell me how to live my life for “my own good health,” then it can tell a large company such as BP that it has to be safe, has stiff regulations it must follow and then support that with backbone, which I have not seen up to this day.

We live in strange times, my friends. In fact, it is as if we are strangers in a strange world (with apologies to Robert A. Heinlein, one of the great writers of any century).

The link above to Wikipedia will give you a jumping off place to find restaurants in various states that allow smoking. You won’t find many. But there are some.

The smoking bans, of course, represent another tool in the hands of big, runaway governments, to pry money from one group to satisfy a loud-mouth minority, which aims its vitriol at “small people,” most of whom can ill afford added taxes that are not voted upon by the rank and file of the nation.

My view is that there are more “small people,” than big shots. Or, as Willie Nelson says, there are more old drunks than old docs.

We “small people” need to rise up and demand our rights as citizens of this free nation and make tax and spend governments and the politicians who practice that form of unjust representation and boot them out of power.

We “small people,” have the vote, we have the power. It is a matter of getting mad as hell and not taking it anymore.

Selah

Posted in Like the Dew Website

U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, the misguided politician who wants to raise your pipe tobacco taxes to the astronomical level of 775 percent, has shot his mouth off again.

This time, however, he has some company. Seems that Cohen and Daniel Morris, who tracks tobacco production data at the Oregon Department of Health, can’t tell the different between pipe tobacco and roll-your-own (for cigarettes) tobacco.

Funny that. Pipe smokers and RYO guys don’t have that problem.

Here’s the latest: Morris says there is a “loophole” in the new federal tax law that sends tobacco taxes to the Children’s Health Insurance program, as CHIPRA or SCHIP as it is known.

All of a sudden, the Obama Administration has awakened to the fact that the RYO industry repackaged its products as “pipe tobacco,” in order to dodge the tax increase from $2.83 per pound of tobacco to $24.78 per pound.

You can’t really blame the RYO fellows for trying to wiggle around a law that singles out a manufacturer in such a harsh manner. That sounds like profiling to my way of thinking, but what do I know?

And now that the Os are wide awake, they are re-thinking how to close the loophole and make up for what Morris says has been a $250 million mistake in the first year of the tobacco tax law.

Some of us in the pipe world have been saying for months that there was a hole big enough to drive a truck through in the law, but that was coming from the dark side, and nobody wants to hear us.

In fact, it is not a loophole. It is a scam by the RYO industry. They are packaging RYO, or loose tobacco basically for cigarettes, and retailing it as “pipe tobacco.” That way, they duck the taxes. And the RYO folks get a good laugh on pipe smokers and the federal government.

Soon now, pipe smokers can get ready for the big tax ax to fall. And some manufacturers have said that with an increase that large (the $24.78 per pound variety), they will go out of business.

That’s precisely what the Big O administration wants. Hey, as long as the pols can get their illegal Cuban cigars, who cares, right?

And then wouldn’t you know that our boy from Memphis, Cohen, chipped in his two cents’ worth on this story, not that his two cents are worth a nickle:

“With the money we’re losing, the deficits we have and the priority this administration and Congress have put on health care, to not find that revenue is just wrong,” said Cohen, D-Tenn., who wrote the bill to close the loophole.

Oh, ah, uhm, has Cohen or anyone else for that matter thought of enforcing the law on the RYO fellows? I mean, there is a law that passed and was signed by the president, loophole and all.

The law specifically refers to “cigarettes,” and “cigarette tobacco” and Roll Your Own is definitely not something you do with a pipe, just in case you don’t know!

And, by the way, if you have any friends in Memphis, Cohen the Conehead is up for re-election in November. It is time for him to go!

Stay tuned to this “loophole” effect. It could grow.

Here’s where to find tobacco loophole.

The news from Kentucky’s burley tobacco growers is that new proposed regulations coming from the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) could lead to a worldwide ban on blended, American-style cigarettes that contain burley tobacco.

You can read the story on the BusinessWire.

The scoop is that the WHO (no, that is not a band from the 1960s) has declared war on burley tobacco growers.

I can hear the arguments now: “Oh, not to worry. This is burley for cigarettes.”

Burley, my friends, is one of the key ingredients in pipe tobacco. It is a building block. Get rid of burley and you have seriously damaged tobacco manufacturing as we know it.

Here is a quote from the story you need to read and understand:

“The proposed guidelines originating from the FCTC extend to all ingredients, and would for all intents and purposes, eliminate blended products from the marketplace.”

Note the wording “all ingredients” and “eliminate blended products from the marketplace.”

That’s powerful stuff. If burley tobacco is taken away from manufacturers, you might as well start cutting out the lights on pipe tobacco.

If big n’ burley falls, can it be long before other ingredients, such as latakia, Virginia, Perique, Cavendish, etc., follow?

Get a grip on this one. It is big and it is bad.

The Food and Drug Administration, the huge federal bureaucracy that sets and gauges standards for our foods and drugs, has been working overtime to destroy the tobacco manufacturing industry.

During this time, the FDA has been more than lackadaisical in watching over the pills we buy over the county in our friendly drug stores.

Now comes the news today that a few weeks ago when the FDA informed the nation that we should not purchase several popular over-the-counter (OTC) name brand painkillers, they have now missed the same problems with generic OTC (read House Brands) painkillers.

I mean, who is watching the store, here?

It is okay to crucify tobacco, but let the general public find metal shavings (uh, you read that right, metal shavings) mixed in with pain killing capsules, there is barely a squeak.

You talk about slipshod quality control?

Don’t know about you, but I don’t want metal shavings or tiny metal shards coursing through my body, lodging in my kidneys or liver or wherever riding in on the back of some sort of pain capsule. It might cause more pain and damage than I am trying avoid.

Do you get it? While the Gulf of Mexico is being destroyed right before our eyes, with the Obama Administration sitting on its hands (don’t give me the crap about putting on moratoriums) the FDA flexes its muscles against tobacco manufacturers and lets some really bad guys off the hook.

The people of Louisiana don’t need moratoriums. They need the Corps of Engineers with dredges; they need a criminal investigation; they need somebody big at BP going to jail for a good long while; they need bazillions of dollars for the fishing industry that has been wiped out; they need bazillions of dollars for the coastal shorelines and the wetlands that have been befouled and more than likely killed for generations to come.

The greatest fishing grounds on earth might just be dead for eons, not to return in several lifetimes. Think about that the next time you take your family to one of the seafood restaurants for a night out with the family.

You want that shrimp with an oil cocktail?

At last count, 70 miles of Louisiana shores and wetlands has become a parking lot for oil sludge.

I think I am beginning to get it. I have never been a supporter of conspiracy theories. But, maybe the federal government is attempting to do in all small business, the mom and pop backbone, in this country in order to foster a more global economy.

Or, maybe Big Brother O is trying to wipe out a certain segment of society. Who knows what is going on in this country today?

One thing is for sure: Tobacco in its various forms can in no way be more toxic than the foul chemical soup being cooked up in the Gulf of Mexico. No way. And you can say you read it here first: serious health problems are on the way for the people who live along the shores and wetlands of Louisiana.

And don’t forget about all those shoreline, waterfront property owners. Suddenly, that million-dollar property is not going to be worth a gas fill up.

Millions of people will be affected by this and then I’d like to see the Centers for Disease Control figures the death statistics by oil pollution.

Oh, there is one more piece of bad news today. You know that health bill that passed Congress not too long ago and was signed with pomp and circumstance by your President?

Yeah, well don’t count on that program having enough money to cover pre-existing illnesses! Congress didn’t lard the kitty with enough funds for that just yet.

And, don’t you reckon that if you come down with some sort of Gulf of Mexico Syndrome from breathing oil fumes and whatever that oil dispersant chemical is that has been sprayed across great swaths of the Gulf, that will be ruled a pre-existing disease!

Selah

Big Slime on the move in Gulf