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.

The New York Times reported earlier this month (I may have missed this because of the pressure of outside circumstances) two of the pols tapped for the FDA federal advisory committee for tobacco product safety, are consultants for drug companies that make smoking cessation products.

That’s sort of like the federal judge who re-opened business as usual in the Gulf of Mexico for oil drillers. He has stock in Big Oil (BP especially) and some of those who service Big Oil (Haliburton). It’s all one great big ol’ boy game out there.

That’s what we call politics as usual. Check out Cigar Rights of America for the complete skinny on this and other important FDA news on ethics and the lack thereof.

We passed a milestone the other day, and not a single trumpet went off within my hearing range, which is dropping.

June 22 was the one-year anniversary of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (Tobacco Control Act). It also is the date that important tobacco regulations regarding youth access as well as sales and marketing restrictions take effect.

The CDC is touting this piece of news, but makes no mention of the tax revenue produced and the businesses lost due to this foul act.

The way I see it, smokers of all stripes are paying a very heavy price to be marched toward a one-size fits all America: increased taxes, lost jobs due to cutbacks in the tobacco industry, lost jobs with retail restaurants closing due to departed customers who refuse to eat in establishments that ban smoking, and lost tax revenues from those lost establishments.

In other words, what the CDC and the Obama Administration have approved and foisted off on the American smoking public is a lose-lose proposition.

Selah

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 also hope that you picked up a new pipe or a new blend of tobacco to sample. It is nice when the family recognizes that Dad has rights, too.

In preparation for a speech I have to give this week on the Civil War, I ran across some interesting research about the South and its antebellum history.

The three big agricultural products (outside of hogs, horses and mules) in the South were cotton, tobacco and rice, and just about in that order. Without those staples, the South would not have had a chance to even start, let alone fight a protracted war, which as we all know now, it couldn’t and shouldn’t.

Anyway, I just thought that in 150 years we have seen the fall, rise and fall again of those commodities, especially tobacco, once a cash crop for an entire region of the country, which it sold to the world.

Now, most of our clothes, tobacco and rice are grown and produced offshore, helping someone else’s economy.

We get the likes of Big Oil and the Big Spill (yes, I am mad as hell about the South’s Gulf Coast and what is unfolding there), for our economic health. You think Big Government is watching out for your economic health? Ask the folks on the Gulf Coast. They might have a slightly different viewpoint.

We, this nation, have allowed a minority of loudmouth politicians and anti-everything people to lead us by the nose down a path to economic depression for the “small people.” (These are not my words, but those of  BP’s chairman,  Carl-Henric Svanberg, who said his company cares about the “small people” who have been wiped out by the Big Spill. Yeah, right.)

I saw no fields of cotton in my trip to South Carolina recently. I saw only one field of green tobacco. Rice, I suppose was being grown in a different part of the state, for I saw none in the fields.

Point is, we are losing our souls, our character, our heritage because of people who have large money agendas to make us a nation of followers and not leaders.

I want to see concrete evidence from the scientific community about first-hand, second-hand and third-hand smoke. I am not talking about numbers. I have had all that I can stand. I am talking about scientific fact, not fiction, not numbers. I want the details of the science that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that tobacco, pure tobacco, once lit causes the diseases ascribed to it. I am not talking about what is added in cigarette factories or in unscrupulous manufacturing processes. Give me the straight facts about tobacco.

Pipe tobacco, of course, comes in various shades of blends, some with approved commercial food additives and others just plain, old, straight from the field tobacco like your grandfather popped into a grocery store-bought pipe.

You had to be as tough as iron ore to smoke some of the stuff my grandfather put in his pipe. He lived to reach his late 80s, working every day in his peanut, cotton, tobacco and sorghum fields. He worked from sunup to sundown, taking a lunch break, which was cooked by my grandmother and her daughters. He didn’t ask any quarter, and he didn’t give any. No handouts. He worked for everything he acquired, and he took care of his family on his own, along with the help of my grandmother, of course.

My grandmother, who always said Grandpa was a fool, but her fool, which meant she was the only one who could say that and live, smoked a cob with Grandpa’s tobacco.

When she was not smoking her favorite cob, she popped a big dip of Tops or Rooster snuff between her bottom lip and gum.

My grandmother lived to be 93. She had all of her teeth and the day she died her mind was better than mine will ever be.

The point to this is, there is always more to an issue than hits the surface. You have to look beneath the noise to find out what is really going on and today we are only skimming the surface on the issue of tobacco and smoking.

If you think the anti crowd is in this because they are interested in your health, you are looking only at the surface. If you think the medical community is in this because they want the entire nation to be health nuts, you are looking only at the surface.

There is money to be made on being anti-tobacco. Great amounts of money in fact. Check out the money trail and you will discover that large pharmaceuticals are backing the antis, many of the anti-smoking politicians are also receiving money from that side of the street.

This is not a black and white issue. There are many shades of color here. Look through a different lens.

You might be surprised what you will discover. Why, the medical community once supported use of tobacco as being medicinal!

Fancy that!

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

I like South Carolina, the state where I also earned a degree in English Lit back in the dark ages, and later during the Vietnam era found out about manhood at Fort Jackson, S.C.

South Carolina was once a big tobacco state, but now it is better known for its exotica in politics. Doesn’t matter whether or not the politics involves the old governor or somebody new who wants the job, it’s all pretty sexed up.

Anyway, I will be blogging about what I see from the Palmetto State as it relates to tobacco, smoking and the lack of both.

The trip is to be a little RandR mixed in with work before returning to the grind.

As always, please stay tuned. I’ll also be working up new stuff from the political and legal corners of tobacco and smoking.

Selah