A beautiful blue sky met me as I was drinking my morning coffee on my deck. The air was beginning to nudge toward cool autumn temps almost demanding a light sweater until the bright sun coaxed me into a lighter t-shirt.
Glancing about the yard, I noticed the falling leaves gathering around fading green bushes and piles of mulch surrounding my fig trees. I knew they would soon need attention in order to convert the decaying leaves into compost to augment next years’ garden soil.
It was a routine that annually began roughly the time college football returned to the radio; those broadcasts were important because it permitted my time to be better used for time management allowing raking, mulching, pruning, wrapping, as well as catching-up on collegiate athletics, simultaneously.
Meantime, my sainted wife was indoors gathering and purging stuff we haven’t used – or even seen – for years. “Downsizing” is the appropriate term for ridding oneself of treasures.
Hours later, we met up in the garage to commiserate. While listening to her tales of woe, I was combing through her boxes of exiting goodies. There were precious hats, old kitchen spatulas and tongs, various flatware, along with a handful of cookbooks.
The next box contained VHS tapes, two cigar cutters, three ashtrays, a couple of Zippo lighters, plus a silver plated cigarette case. It was at this point my mind wandered away to days of yore – times when everything was different. Sane. Simple.
Years ago, commercial airlines permitted smoking cigarettes, cigars, and pipes on all flights. No kidding.
And smoking was also allowed in grocery stores, hospitals, malls, on buses, trains, and sidewalks. “Sidewalks,” you say?
Sidewalks. Office buildings had open cigarette smoking policies, too. That was until some whiner insisted everybody cater to them and their whims. Push back was fierce because then, just as now, tobacco products are subject to something called a “sin tax.”
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| Sin tax: Palm grease for politicians |
Sin tax is a tax applied to anything that appeals to morally suspect, harmful, or costly to society products. Included in this list are gambling, smoking, and alcohol. Since we’re talking about cigarette smoking, this is the fork in the literary road we’ll take.
I smoked ciggies since I was in my teens. Quitting was the hardest thing I ever did in my life, and I’m old. In fact, I’m old enough to remember when the Dead Sea was just sick. Now that’s old.
Throughout the years I was able to smoke anywhere because of the sleazy relationship between the anti-smokers and the guvment. Anti-smokers hated anyone puffing on a cigarette, while the guvment loved anyone buying tobacco products.
Anti-smokers delight in making smoker’s lives miserable; they encouraged statutes to penalize smoking indoors within offices, businesses, or anywhere that was previously a sanctuary to smoke. Airports used to accommodate smokers in ‘smoking lounges,’ until the antis felt unable to use that space to conjure up new ways to ruin smoker’s lives.
Suddenly, no smoking signs were erected near offices, airports, in airplanes, and stores. Seems pretty complete, right?
Wrong.
To further exercise their newfound muscle, anti-smokers ‘allowed’ smokers to puff outdoors but in all weather – inclement conditions such as excessive heat, cold, wind, and pestilence included – but 50-feet away from the entrance doors.
It didn’t take long to realize the smokers were on the ropes in this fight. Soon thereafter, that fifty-foot range was increased to 500 feet; a sleazy ploy to make going outside to smoke an opportunity to punish smokers into taking vacation time to get their smoking fix.
You see, smoking is an addiction – not unlike the addiction associated with ‘protected’ addicts now wrestling with cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines – all of which are now guvment-approved addictions subject to special protection against discrimination.
The glee from the anti’s incremental victories to summarily punish anyone with a tobacco product in their pocket was clear. And this crusade was just the beginning.
Realizing the power of whining, in conjunction with the media, these self-anointed do-gooders turned a simple complaint into a cottage industry. Witness the climate change fictionalization.
All these efforts created a giant chasm in society. If someone disliked the words “Merry Christmas,” they could be outlawed. “Columbus Day” was equally spited, as was the definition of specific sexes.
But rather than having a sensible discussion about things, agendas, ideas, or beliefs, a knee-jerk response seemed in order to demean others not aligned with the cause du jour.
Under the smokescreen of personally-perceived pain and suffering from any- and everything, the legalization of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), aka.: marijuana, weed, reefer, Mary Jane, among others, was implemented in many states and municipalities.
Hyping the recreational and medicinal benefits of marijuana with the complicity of the media created an avenue virtually guaranteed to shoe-in the decriminalization and eventual legalization of this drug. Touting the additional bonus of adding more sin tax monies to the coffers encouraged greedy politicians to approve any pro-weed legislation.
Soon, weed shops were popping up everywhere like, uh, weeds; how appropriate. Those guvment run or regulated businesses were gleefully opened, albeit with caveats. Some of the more “fair” and “equitable” municipalities were quick to offer marijuana vendor licenses to only minorities. No discrimination there.
Of course once open, many of these guvment regulated dispensaries became targets for thieves in the form of armed robberies, and smash and grab capers, largely because drug users are unable to carry firearms to protect themselves. Can you say, “Gun-free Zone?”
The good news, though, is that a variety of these newly-created sin tax collectors were found to be unable to sell enough product to make good on their promises of additional revenue and the elimination of illicit street sales.
It seems as though once again, guvment greed forced its way to the consumers. “The multitude of approaches makes any apples-to-apples rate comparison difficult. New York and Connecticut are the first states to implement a potency-based tax per milligram of THC. But most states levy an ad valorem tax on the retail sales price of cannabis sales – ranging from 6 percent in Missouri up to 37 percent in Washington,” according to taxfoundation.org.
There’s an old saying from Milton Friedman about the guvment’s ability to handle money: If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.
Because of the dollar sign tax greed, guvment-approved cannabis operation is clearly unable to compete with illicit street corner sales making turning a profit for the dispensaries and guvment unlikely. Underground sales, on the other hand, appear to be vigorous.
But how are these drugs – legal or otherwise – being used?
I’m glad you asked.
Largely smoking them. Rolling papers, pipes, hollowed-out cigars, and hookahs are all ways folks ingest weed. More industrious pot users chemically transform their products into edibles that take the form of gummies, brownies, and cookies – all are efficient means of getting a buzz.
Remember the cigarette smoking from the first part of this essay? Countless people were treated as lepers who, overnight, became banes of society because the smoke encroached on the fresh air space of others.
Whether on the street or in an apartment building, cigarette smoking was summarily outlawed because of the health and feelings of our fellow humans.
Why is cannabis smoking seemingly exempt?
You know the answer.
Taxes.
