Today was the day that my home state of Minnesota became the latest to impose a mandate that all cigarettes sold in the state be "fire safe". As with so much of the monstrously cynical policy lawmakers at level have passed regarding cigarettes and tobacco products, this benchmark is likely to come and go with little fanfare, save for the smokers grousing about how awful the new cigarettes taste. But it seems I'm the only one who hasn't missed what seems like a head-smackingly obvious issue here. The only way to make burning paper and tobacco leaves self-extinguishing is to add more chemicals, and presumably those chemicals when inhaled many times per day would be cancer-causing chemicals. In other words, the likelihood is that the long-term return on the investment for "fire-safe cigarettes" will be an increased smoking-related body count. Are the government regulators insisting upon this mandate really oblivious to this premise? Or is increasing the tobacco-related death toll exactly what government wants?
There are two reasons why it's in the interest of government to grow the ranks of Americans killed by tobacco products. The same governments who today insist upon filling cigarettes with more toxic chemicals to make them "fire safe" will tomorrow be looking at figures showing the rising cancer rates among smokers and exasperatedly shriek about the need to further raise the tax rates on cigarettes and to take the "evil" tobacco companies back to court for rising "smoking-related health care costs"....even though much of that artificial cost will be accrued by the very government regulators who insisted upon putting more deadly chemicals into cigarettes to make them "fire safe".
Secondly, contrary to conventional wisdom, every smoker runs up lifetime health care bills 20% lower than nonsmokers. Factoring that in with the demographic crunch that threatens the solvency of Social Security and Medicare and it is decidedly in the interest of government to kill off as many smokers as possible before they hit retirement age. Mandating that all cigarettes be shock of new chemicals to make them "fire safe" would seem to assure that the pace at which smokers are wearing toetags will be hastened.
Am I missing something here or is this mandate by government to put MORE chemicals in cigarettes to make them "fire safe" tantamount to state-sanctioned genocide? Once again, it strikes me that the always-gullible scolds in the antismoking community are being played like $10 banjos as they so frequently are. If our government has us believe that AIG and Citigroup are "too big to fail", then Philip Morris and RJR are Citigroup times 50. Even if PM and RJR don't have the same amount of assets as the financial companies, government at every level is literally being mortgaged on massive tobacco taxes and expectations for even more robust tobacco revenues in the future. The same state governments collecting hundreds of millions of dollars from the tobacco settlement are reinvesting that money in tobacco futures for their state pension funds. The only reason one would invest in any futures market is if they believe tobacco sales will continue to be bullish despite their winking insistence that they want us to quit smoking.
As much as our lawmakers wag their righteous fingers at Big Tobacco, they are connected cheek and jowel and become more connected every year, and "fire-safe" cigarettes is just their latest transparently cynical ploy. It would be nice if Big Brother's foot soldiers in the quixotic "antismoking movement" would come to realize that there's a common denominator in every battle government prods them into fighting in the antismoking war....every battle allows government to walk away with fists full of cash.