Myth and Mythconceptions

John Constantine

"This is another fine myth you've gotten me into" - Stan

So, we seem to have won the fabled war against the hated tobacco companies. Those evil demons of that addictive weed seem to be backed against the wall of science. Every Attorney General worth the paper he generates has joined the battle. Holy water, wafers of Christ's body. All the stops are being pried from their fossilized holes in anticipation of the bloody fray.

What the heck. I mean, everyone wants to be on the winning side of a popular battle.

Where on earth would we get the next crop of war heroes? The Persian Gulf war? Gimme a break. One sided battles rarely generates the bevy of heroes we need for stocking the political machine with.

George "my main man" Bush, Robert "I can't get no satisfaction" Dole, the list goes far back into the past. War heroes twiddle our dials.

"Granddad, tell us about the tobacco wars" I can already hear the dulcet sound of my future children's pleas.

Seriously. We be screwed. The tobacco companies don't give a whit about the United States market anymore. I mean, sure, there's money to be made. People don't give up addictions very easily, and lord knows we have enough smokers in the good old U S of A.

But this money is fairly old, and you don't become a major seller of an majorly addictive substance by being stupid. You plan ahead. You scope the lay of the land, and you adapt your strategies. You put your B people in charge of established, niche markets.

America is what? Somewhere between 250 and 300 million? The tobacco companies get, say 10% of that market. Pretty good numbers. Imagine what they could get in a country that wasn't fighting them tooth and nail.

For instance, China. Let's say they had a market of a billion or so. Ten percent seems downright obscene.

And a highly conservative estimate. Send in the A team.

All the libertarians out there (and you know who you are) have suddenly stopped reading. Their free market hairs are standing on end.

I understand. Life's a bitch, and we all make bad decisions. Evolution happens.

True enough. But consider this. Money is power. Money buys mind manipulators. Money freely converts to brain share. We here in America can sell caffeine free diet coke, and people will actually drink it. We can't directly control minds, but we can definitely confuse the hell out of the issue.

Evian anyone?

Some things in life are dangerous, and I don't think anyone has an unbridled right to make money off of dangerous things. Market forces alone are not nearly powerful enough when pitted against addiction.

We're talking apples and oranges. Apples win hands down.

So, think about it for a few minutes. Here's something (tobacco) that's been proven time and time again to be an extremely dangerous substance, freely sold to minors. Whoops. I forgot. We card under 29.

But the point is that tobacco lawyers argued for decades that tobacco was a harmless weed. A sweet plant, cultivated by the honorable slaves plantation farm workers. Think of those jobs. What would those people do if they didn't pick tobacco?

Any rational analysis can see what is going on.

But it's very hard to prove. Law is like that. Purposefully so.

Reality is defined daily -- especially in days like these where your email program gets updates via Castanet. We need slippage to accommodate for the fact that we don't know everything. Reasonable humans can disagree on some basic concepts.

Sometimes circumstances are extenuating.

But we've managed to create a hole in reality so large we can drive a truck through it.

A truck the size of the planet Jupiter.

I certainly don't know how we're going to solve this mess we've gotten ourselves into. It's complicated, exceedingly sticky, and there's lot's and lot's of money.

There is no simple solution to messy problems. Sometimes we create entirely new messes in the attempt to clean up the original problem.

But I don't think unleashing American tobacco companies on an unprepared population numbering in the billions is very ethical. There is no counter balance.

And without a counter balance, things tend to swing one way.