THE LOGIC OF THE NEW PROHIBITION

The spirit of the times is hysterical, accusatory, and informed by cynical media bandwagons and the goverments and special interest groups that feed them. Signs of the times include an edition of the Sally Jesse Raphael talk show where a woman walks before the cameras and before the jeering studio audience to take one of the "guests" backstage for a paternity test, the results to be announced on national TV. The spirit of the times is captured in a recent Center for Media and Public Affairs survey which reported a 20 per cent drop in the U.S. homicide rate that corresponded with a 721 percent rise in the coverage of murder. The same survey noted that coverage of health issues rose to the second-most-covered media topic area, up from fifth place in 1993. No word on the proportion of those stories devoted to tobacco issues, but even the most casual observer knows that it's very high.

The spirit of the times sees government looking to the past -- to the times of Prohibition and "decency" crusades against Hollywood. At a time when parents from a huge middle-aged generation feel angst over their failed marriages and the time they do not spend with their kids, the cry for "protecting the children" against a whole assortment of "influences" grows louder and louder.

The spirit of the times is a restless spirit looking for someone to blame.

The obvious question surfaces: "If tobacco is so bad, why don't they make it illegal? Why all the mumbo-jumbo?"

Good question. The answer, however, turns out to be extremely complex. In the next few pages, we will attempt some analysis of the situation and suggest a few answers.

SETTING THE STAGE WITH IMMATURITY AND PATERNALISM

Young people are usually insecure, and so are young countries. It was insecurity that gave rise to alcohol prohibition. Fear prevents a frank and fundamental rethinking of "drug war" policies that have led to civic disharmony and allowed a violent and predatory illegal drug industry to thrive. Instead of questioning some basic premises, society seems hell-bent on simply rounding up tobacco -- a legal product used by a large segment of the population -- and pushing it into the closet of prohibited items. This is a forceful, easy-to-understand, short-term reaction, a childish reaction, against a perceived threat. It will only produce big problems for society. It is no coincidence that as the crusade against tobacco picks up speed, tobacco smuggling becomes increasingly common.

Unfortunately for the neighbouring world, this North American "child" is equipped with a powerful economic, political, and nuclear arsenal, and its "tantrums" cannot go as unnoticed, as they should. Anti-tobacco activists are travelling around the world, peddling the idea of tobacco prohibition. Perhaps they believe that if a "global" attack on tobacco is coordinated, crime and smuggling won't be a problem once North American regulatory agencies begin to control nicotine and eventually ban it.

Unfortunately, the "child" never got spanked. North America was never defeated in a war. Even the Vietnam war, with all the suffering brought to the families of many soldiers, was not strong enough a defeat to really register in the mind of the American people.

America's military superiority has led its people to confuse that with the superiority of North American ways. Had North American experienced the horrible consequences of destruction resulting from certain politics -- as Europe did, for example -- the price of liberty would be still vivid today.

The moral/religious component is also a very important one. Protestant guilt and a corresponding contempt for those who are not guilt-ridden lies at the foundation of much North American self- righteousness , and of the perceived need to tightly control the pleasures of life. In contemporary times, this control is achieved through state regulation more than it is through the sanction of churches. The state in turn uses people's guilt, contempt, and insecurity as tools of induction and enforcement.

A basic immaturity is reflected in the way democracy itself is perceived, as well: majority rules, minority obeys. Period. Accommodation of minorities on important matters has been reduced to lip service, unless decisive force, political or otherwise, is used to make a point.

Being a minority means to lay low, and go with the flow, or the full weight of the state will be felt. The build-up of resentment, and other negative emotions is totally ignored. The human factor -- indeed the adult factor -- is not part of the equation. Politicians speak of policy as "the right thing to do" as if no further explanation were needed.

The concept of state as a paternalistic dispenser of liberties TO the citizens, as opposed to the safe-keeper of liberties owned BY the citizens is yet another indication of puerility.

One of the consequences of a childish body politic is that political conflicts become shouting matches, loud but devoid of any content or dialogue.

This carries as a consequence an accumulation of unresolved social problems. The abortion issue is one example. Unable to reach a modus vivendi, the antagonists grapple forever in an immobilizing grip. Two immovable principals collide without resolution: the idea of the right to life for the unborn, versus the idea of the right of choice for the woman. In Europe, this issue has been resolved -- as well as it can ever be -- decades ago through social negotiations and compromise. In North America, this has not happened. It is a pure coincidence that the two forces are more or less equal in power. If one side had been weaker, it would have been squashed out of existence without regrets.

A similar situation exists now with with The Tobacco Wars and proponents of a "smoke-free" society versus smokers who want to exercise their choice: will it get to the immobilizing grip, or will the smokers be squashed out of existence because they fail to stand up for themselves? In our immaturity, we can't seem to imagine a reasonable modus vivendi.

The Vietnam war was just being settled, when the two energy crises of 1973 (and 1979) wiped out the big cars, and set in motion the first chain of hysteria of the last quarter of this century. Remember the frenzy about gasoline, with prediction from "experts", "proving" that there would be no gasoline left in the 90's?

Colossal campaigns were launched to persuade people to insulate and seal their homes, to the point that somebody died during the night for lack of oxygen! The media propaganda was overwhelming. People still driving big cars were looked at with contempt (one of these writers among them), and told: "Don't you feel guilty driving that gas-guzzler? If you don't care about depriving ME of my share of gasoline, at least think about your children!" (it is fascinating how children are always used as an instrument of pressure).

President Carter was crying about the terrible dilemma of U.S. energy dependence. Of course, the Prime Minister of Canada was parroting from Ottawa, even though Canada has never been an energy-dependent country.

Then it all wound down, and today nobody talks about it anymore. The truth is that there never was an energy crisis: 25 years later, gasoline is more abundant than ever. But well-priced big cars have disappeared, replaced by expensive computerized shoe boxes, while oil companies have multiplied their profits.

But government had demonstrated that it could successfully create a public hysteria (and then mute it) to serve immediate political ends.

In the following years, the erosion of our buying power became more visible, and taxation was heavier and heavier. Reaganism started the neo-puritanical wave that is currently being played out by the Democrats of the Clinton administration, and again echoes in Canada.

Today the baby boomers are getting old, and the 60's generation that fought for personal liberties has turned into the worst kind of politically correct, hysterical, and repressive generation.|

We have created monstrous social support systems that we can no longer sustain, but have learned to depend on. Super-expensive, life-prolonging technologies are available, and everyone wants them of course. Medicare can't handle it anymore. The longer after-retirement life of modern times overtaxes and kills the pension system. Many of our social experiments are in great danger; some have already failed.

In this climate, both mother and father are now forced to work to make ends meet, and that is at the genuine expense of family life. We are now inundated by babbling about "family values" and "family protection", in a clear indication that we are trying to make up with propaganda what we no longer do in fact.

The delegation of family values and personal responsibility to the nanny state is partially due to financial stress.

There are no quick fixes. In such a situation, the temptation to find societal scapegoats becomes great.

Suddenly, we begin to hear the claim that smokers (with their shorter lives) are a cost to society!

In an irritated environment of reciprocal intimidation, political "correctness" flourishes like a weed in grass. Governments no longer can afford to use the "tax" word, yet more revenue is needed to compensate for political incompetence, and lack of leadership and clarity of direction.

It is therefore necessary to find new "formulas" for the acquisition of funds needed to keep the state running above its means.

A solution has been found in the health crusades.

Fortunately, for a long time, these people were brushed aside with benign non-chalance. That was a mistake, for the signs of fascist mentality were crystal clear. In the last ten years in fact, as the financial structural collapse became more acute, the health nazis became more active, and proposed interesting vehicles of potential revenue as they were grasping for power. Among the health nazis, the most prepared were the antismokers. They also had available all the necessary "ingredients" for a mass-hysteria blitz:

• smoking can be considered a "vice", thus it appeals to the neo-puritan, Protestant mentality
• smokers are everywhere, and highly visible
• smokers as a group cannot by identified with any political force
• in times where civil rights are considered less valuable, smoking is more difficult to defend as a right
• some basic scientific evidence of the health hazards of primary smoking was already available
• smoking was being given up by the upper classes of society, and those are the classes with political and financial power
• a large portion of the population smoked, thus making it possible to collect huge amounts with small, but steady increases in taxation
• the attribution of respiratory and cardiovascular disease to smoking was more intuitive for the layman than other more important and politically "difficult" contributors to disease, such as severe atmospheric pollution due to industrial super-productions
• the end of the Cold War left ideological emptiness, and the search for a scapergoat to play the role of the "bad guy" was on
• The tobacco industry was wealthy, powerful, and the perfect candidate to become "the bad guy"

The invention of the dangers of secondhand smoke was brilliant. THAT was the triggering element! Now all it took was to create the evidence. Grants were available from federal governments, and then tobacco tax legislation was put into place so that smokers themselves would finance the "studies", as well as the persecution against themselves. Case in point, California's Proposition 99.

A network of antismoking organizations was set up across the land, while the necessary evidence was quickly manufactured, and a true lynching campaign was launched against the tobacco companies.

Any voice pointing out that the evidence was either questionable or plain false was silenced through intimidation of any kind: political, professional, and otherwise. The ones who could not be silenced were labelled as muppets of the tobacco industry.

The Clinton government gave the first shot of credibility to this immoral spectacle by sustaining the 1992 EPA report on passive smoke while ignoring congressional reports that called the flaws of EPA. The Agency also departed from accepted standards for evaluation of risk just for incriminating second hand smoke. More grants were immediately made available for more "studies", while the media fell in line with the White House by saying that there was no more scientific debate about second hand smoking anymore: it was a given that secondhand smoke is harmful, it even KILLS.

Requests for databases for verification of the solidity of antismoking claims were ignored, ordenied. In this apparently confused orgy of lies and misinformation there was a constant direction, however: get the tobacco industry to the negotiating table. That was accomplished in early 1997.

By going after tobacco manufacturers, two important objectives have been achieved with a single action: the removal of individual responsibility/choice -- and its transfer to the central power, where it can be easily controlled -- and obtaining new revenues without calling them taxes. These revenues are now called COMPENSATION.

The return on investment of this extortionistic adventure is staggering, and it can be compared only to revenues from illegal operations, much similar in intents to the anti-tobacco manoeuvre.

Estimates are that the anti-tobacco effort in the USA has so far cost 6 to 8 billion dollars from taxpayer revenues. If the U.S. federal tobacco "deal" goes through, the return on investment will be $368 billion over 25 years. The $8 billion capital investment will be amortized in about ten months.

Can anybody think of a better investment than that? And this is kosher with the tobacco industry as well, as they will pass the costs along to smokers, who will support society even more in exchange for ostricization.

During the aggression of the private sector, the health nazis have anchored themselves very well to the government machine in both Canada and United States. Like the cancer they say they fight, they have spread their cells in every fibre of the state, the media, and the health professions. It is now politically incorrect to criticize the antitobacco crusade, and unthinkable to take any action against it.

During the First Prohibition, booze manufacturers, brewers, and their supporters were totally silenced with both law enforcement and media lynching. Similarly, today's New Prohibition is silencing opposition through rapid legislative change and intimidation. Emotional hysteria is such that any reason, argument or evidence, no matter how irrefutable, which opposes the current "credo" is ridiculed and considered insulting, even illegal.

But in the New Prohibition the government does not forbid tobacco. This Prohibition must be successful, and therefore it must not be readily imposed so as to provoke a backlash It must instead be allowed to evolve -- hopefully so successfully that a final legislative coup de grace won't even be necessary !

Instead, the system vomits all kinds of lies, perjuries and tactics to persuade smokers to quit, and claim success in its crusade... not too fast though, because the money can't be allowed to stop flowing! First, it's essential to go after other industries where the "take" may eventually compensate for the phasing out of smoking.

Success leads to complacency, and now the antismoking industry doesn't even care about being consistent, because both a consensus of media and public opinion has been "secured". Here are a few examples of absurd and contradictory statements, often popularized by anti-smoking activists, complicit media, and once respectable "non-profit" organizations, such as Canadian or American Cancer Society, Lung Associations, etc.

• parental smoking kills 6,200 children a year in the United States [1]
• 50,000 Americans die annually from heart attacks alone due to secondhand smoke annually [2]
• 37,000 Americans die annually from heart attacks alone due to secondhand smoke annually [3]
• 3,000 Americans die annually in total due to secondhand smoke [4]
• mothers who smoke produce delinquent children [5]
• smokers are radioactive (Polonium 210) [6]
• smokers put lead into the atmosphere [7]
• inference of "indirect" link between smoking and HIV [8]
• smokers are a financial burden to society [9]
• children are asked to "educate" their parents and report to the school if parents smoke [10]

Having perfected a newfound extortion mechanism, it is now possible to go after more industries, and extend the pillage. Alcohol is back as a target, and so are fatty foods, coffee, and dairy products.

It is very much in the spirit of the times that Dow Corning recently offered to settle a lawsuit over health damages allegedly caused by breast implants, despite a lack of evidence that the health problems were caused by the implants. Hysteria prevailed where proof was wanting.

The flight attendants have filed a class action suit against the tobacco companies claiming that lung cancers contracted by some flight attendant are due to secondhand smoke. Never mind that a 1989 study commissioned by the US Dept. of Transport has demonstrated that a person exposed to second hand smoke in a non smoking section of a plane must fly non-stop 5.5 years to inhale the equivalent of a cigarette. Never mind that the same study proved that exposure to cosmic rays in a plane is over 1,000 times more likely to cause lung cancer than second hand smoke: the study has been buried.

No one mentions the extremely high ambient air pollution levels, both indoor and outdoor, that exist in the airports where flight attendants spend much of their careers.

Keeping in mind that the Florida trial is a trial by jury, we might ask ourselves these questions:

• Is there one individual in the entire United States who has not heard or read the one-sidedfanfare against secondhand smoke?

• Isn't a big coincidence that the release of the Harvard study (6,200 children killed by passive smoking) and the CAL-EPA study (3,000 people killed by passive smoking) occurred just weeks before the beginning of the trial? Why have NONE of the newspapers and media has commented about the inconsistency between the two studies?

• Is there a newspaper where there is unbiased coverage of the trial?

• The tobacco industry is now under the "lure" of the proposed U.S. federal settlement, yet another deception of the system to project the impression to the tobacco companies' stockholders that this is the end of their troubles. It is logical to assume that under these premises the industry is unwilling to push its "luck" by responding in a forceful way to even the most far-fetched attacks.

Many contemporary people see liberty, constitutional rights and due process as an obstacle in the path of "health", both social and physical. The starving North American beast has begun to feed on itself.

A few cases in point.

• In the proposed British Columbia anti-tobacco law (BILL 37 -- 1997 Tobacco Damages Recovery Act), the law has been changed so that evidence that would normally be thrown out of court is now admissible because it will help boost the case against tobacco. This includes epidemiological and sociological evidence (whatever that is).
• Canadian Federal Bill C-71 allows public health officers to search the premises of any organization suspected of, or known to promote the use of tobacco -- including, of course, the tobacco companies but perhaps not limited to them.
• Antismokers are rumoured to have said that the tobacco companies should not have the right to cross-examine witnesses in the Florida flight attendants law suit.
• paid activists under contract through the U.S. Project ASSIST recruit children to stage apparently "grassroots" anti-tobacco protests for the consumption of the media.
• The Mayor of Vancouver, B.C. has proposed that a different, more limited constitutional standard be used for people charged with a crime. The resolution was passed unanimously by the city council.
• Social engineering is going full bore in San Francisco, where "The Sustainability Plan for San Francisco", supported by all major health organizations, clearly indicates its intention to change and control (sorry: "educate") San Franciscans on their habits. The Plan seeks to regulate or bring public pressure to bear on a host of matters ranging far beyond the normal scope of city government -- including behaviours such as smoking, drinking, food consumption, physical exercise, even the wearing of perfumes. Its food and nutrition provisions seem so far-reaching that it almost amounts to a restructuring of a large portion of the city's economy. In San Francisco's supermarkets it is now impossible to find Mozzarella cheese made from whole milk; only from skimmed milk. Is this the city -- or should we say the City State -- of the future?
• special warning labels and new regulations are being proposed for beef products.
• special taxes are being proposed for junk foods.
• regulation of caffeine as a drug and the labelling of caffeine containing beverages with health warnings is being proposed.

All this would have been inconceivable only a few years ago in this continent. The erosion of education, moral values, and civil liberties is accelerating exponentially. Soon the tobacco issue will be a minor tile in this floor of fire.

When the American Civil Liberties Union gets to the point of APPROVING passive eye-scan technology for the detection of drug usage on the basis that it is "not invasive", where is the right of privacy gone, and where are the very entities who are supposed to protect it?

Ah, but this is for the people's "protection"!

What is happening in North America is an enormous experiment in social control.

What makes such developments more pernicious is the poor quality of public education in the United States and increasingly in Canada.

Popular ignorance and controlled information are always indispensable tools of control, and the technological power for programming public opinion with impressive audio-visual long distance communication is now available.

It is far from clear that young people are equipped with the basic intellectual tools, and the requisite understanding of history and habits of reflection that will enable them to critically examine the programs that are being thrust at them.

Will today's youngsters be content to graduate from MTV to CNN while passively permitting a vague "Them" to govern -- with an imaginary democratic consensus that TV projects back at them?

If so, conspirators and accomplices disguised in white coats will be able to compel a compliant Hygienic Generation in the years to come, and woe betide those who don't fit in.

CONCLUSION

But OBD III, while smoothly running your engine and almost driving your car, will continuously transmit information to a sophisticated satellite tracking system that will allow a central computer to exactly know the location of your car, its speed, heading, how much fuel in the tank, even where, and how long it will be parked.

The computer will know even who the driver is, since to start the vehicle, you will have to enter a code that is unique to you ... a hell of an anti-theft device!...

Oh, one more thing: it will be mandatory (OBD I and II, the first phases of computerized environmental control were made mandatory for cars manufactured in Canada and the U.S).

Offended by photoradar? You ain't seen nothing yet. And the tired old line will be trotted out: "If you won't have anything to hide, what worry about your privacy?"

The only defense against the erosion of individual rights and freedoms is to stop any concession that may limit rights and liberties, regardless of how convenient, socially useful, or harmless it may appear. Especially, we have to stop routinely trading personal liberties in exchange for state protection.

North America is virtually the only place on Earth where there is still the perception that the state is a friend of the people after all, and has to be believed, especially when it comes to matters of health and safety.

A few years ago, the definition of addiction was modified in the U.S. in such a way that just about anything can be considered addictive with the appropriate spin-doctoring. And for the first time in history, last year the U.S. Centre for Disease Control has added a behaviour to the list of diseases, implying the necessity of a cure.

The love affair of North Americans with the health professions, safety and security, and its spin-off manifestations must end, and must end now, for it is clear that certain science and medicine have become a means of behaviour control. While the function of the medical profession in a society is essential, it is no more important than any other endeavour.

It is time that we rid ourselves from the Voodoo spell of the Medicine Man and his political cohorts.

There is no urgent, compelling reason to be adopting programs and technologies that tag, label, track, "behaviour modify" and ruthlessly propagandize citizens.

Compared to other peoples at most other times in history, we are educated and healthy. We are also resourceful, dignified and capable of creating a society of responsible, free, individuals -- but only if we believe we are, and only if we are able to tolerate, even celebrate our individuality, complete with "quirks" and imperfections.

Without such a belief in ourselves, we will build a new century where physical health, cost- effectiveness and social conformity are gods -- and we'll hand our all-too-human children the world that their great-grandparents fought to save them from.