If Only Tobacco Had a Voice

There are many differences between tobacco and a government. Tobacco never lies, deceives or robs people. It does not tax or regulate and it cannot fight as well. It does not shoot at people and it doesn't insult anyone. It cannot protect and defend itself and it has no means of having anyone do that job for it. What a shame!

And why should you care? If tobacco is so defenseless, it's obvious then that we should stand up for it and defend it with all honor, for it is being attacked all them time. Government keeps throwing around ugly images about what tobacco does to us all the time. We see pictures of black lungs, they try to frighten us about what tobacco will do to us with photographs of yellow teeth and fingernails. We find dire warnings on cigarette packs and billboards. Something must be done to stop these atrocities tobacco is committing, the government warns us! Likewise, the government forces bar and club owners to ban tobacco from being used on their premises. Even the World Health Organization tells us that "[t]obacco caused 100 million deaths in the 20th century". How on earth tobacco managed to kill all these people when it cannot even pick up a gun is a bit of a stretch for my reasoning. But whatever, my aim is not do dispute this number. Quite the contrary, I believe it likely to be accurate. I do not smoke myself and obviously, if you are going to be a smoker, you are increasing your chances of slashing a few years off your to-do list. I just want to put this number into perspective.

I cannot be perfectly sure, but if tobacco had a voice, I think it would wish to tell us these two things:

1.     I don’t kill people. Some people seem to have higher time preferences than others. They want to enjoy the present and are not too much worried about increasing their chance of an early death in the distant future. It is their choice to roll me up in paper and set me on fire, and who is anyone else to be the final and objective judge on what is right or wrong with that.

2.     I may have indirectly caused the death of 100 million people in the 20^th century, but governments around the world, who are constantly trying to warn you abut me, have very directly murdered 262 million people in the same 20^th century. And this is just in times of “peace”. In wartime, an additional 34 million perished at the hands of government sponsored wars. In the 20^th century alone then, governments around the world gave a blood bath to nearly 300 million people. This is the entire population of the USA completely wiped out, off the face of this planet.

If you’ve managed to read this whole piece, you probably either feel better about smoking or worse about your government. I wish it wasn’t the former.