Feds addicted to cig taxes

By Gary Dunford - Toronto Sun, 20 January 1999

WEED WHACKER:

Allan Rock's over-size cigarette warnings scheme is neither his best nor his brightest anti-smoking photo opportunity. A reader points out, it's just his latest.

Frankly, after you've warned folks This Product Can Kill You, what additional threat seems likely to scare smokers, frighten teens from lighting up? Penis May Not Operate As Intended? Stinky Breath Isn't Cool? Tumours in Mouth May Prevent Eating? Spontaneous Combustion Can Destroy Limbs and Loved Ones? Hacking Cough Phlegm May Contain Bits of Intestines?

If a bakery produced bread that was linked to 30,000 deaths a year, do you think the health minister would be nattering on so about labelling?

If chewing gum caused cancer or emphysema, how long would the health minister point at his charts, brag how new packaging will have larger warnings?

This is a country where pharmaceutical companies must now list every conceivable side effect a drug might produce in print advertising, even if that harmful effect is so statistically tiny it borders on impossibility.

Consumer goods even suspected of contamination are recalled en masse.

Bikes, snowmobiles, Seadoos, TV programming are regulated to the edge of absurdity.

Only one commodity moves relentlessly to market - life, disease and health care costs be damned. Does forbidding its use in planes and public buildings begin to address the problem? Have ashtrays disappeared from Toronto restaurants? Is it not instantly available at every grocery and corner store?

On this - yet another futile Weedless Wednesday - the health minister knows all too well how to make people stop smoking. So do you.

It's not by limiting posters in mom and pop groceries. Not by ordering sports and music events to give up sponsorship revenues, take down the promotional banners. Not by sloganeering. Spare us another public relations offensive to - in Rock's words - "make Canada a world leader in regulating tobacco labelling." At this rate, National Non-Smoking Week will be celebrated at the end of the next millennium.

Forget the poor schmoos who curse or defend their nicotine addiction. It's taxes Ottawa is addicted to. And when the biggest beneficiary of cigarette sales is the government itself, that's unlikely to change.

Smoking is either dangerous, unhealthy and wrong....or it's a nasty reality that makes government and industry a shitload of money and we should give up the phony crusade. For Rock to tip-toe around while the tobacco industry hints at legal challenge is the very definition of a waste of time. The stand-off is a pension scheme for lawyers.

Either call off the endless, multi-million dollar anti-smoking crusade or let the last day for legal sale of cigarettes in Canada be this New Year's Eve, 345 days from now. After that, tobacco is a banned substance. Will possession of cigarettes be like pot, with small quantities for personal use drawing fines, while a garage full of cartons produces jail time? Will advocates suddenly find amazing new "medical" and beneficial uses of tobacco? Will the disappearance of cigarettes from public sale increase or decrease the usage and health problems our politicians play at being so concerned over? Let's see. Smoke, or get off the pot.

THOU SHALT NOT:

"I never realized what a dangerous childhood I had until I read the Sunday Sun's Fun in Snow Can Turn Deadly," deadpans a reader who dubs himself Lucky to Be Alive. "Play forts plus kids equals tragedy! Don't tunnel in snow! Don't slide on hills on inner tubes or cardboard! Don't take your dog along if you toboggan! Watch out for snowblowers! Wonder what these self-styled experts would have said if they had seen my best friend and I put up our parka hoods and slide on our backs, head first, down a railway embankment?" As a man whose sledding career nearly ended at a metal culvert, I call for labelling. On snow, parkas, backs, heads, dogs, inner tubes and sleds. Maybe we could work in a warning about impotence? Allan Rock, please copy.

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