Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our names, Ben, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys.
Hey, check it out.
I got Sheldon Richman on the line.
He's my partner at the Libertarian Institute.
Hey, Sheldon, how you doing?
I'm doing just fine.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing great.
Every Friday, you write an article.
Well, every, I guess, Wednesday and Thursday, you write an article and publish it every Friday.
TGIF, the goal is freedom.
That's the goal.
Also, thank goodness, it's the weekend.
Yeah, now this one is interesting.
The FDA's assault on tobacco consumers.
Well, you must be a special interested party in this case.
What are you trying to do, get subsidies or something?
No, I just want to be left alone, which I think everyone should want to be, by the government at least.
No, I want to be left alone.
But you're right.
I will concede right up front.
Amy, you know this.
You're smoking me out here.
No pun intended.
I am a pipe smoker.
I'm not a cigarette smoker.
I don't like cigarettes.
I never was a cigarette smoker.
I mean, as a kid, I, because my friends smoked cigarettes.
As a kid, I mean, I was a teenager, early high school, stuff like that.
I did dabble in cigarettes, but like, like, and I say this with all sincerity.
Like Bill Clinton didn't inhale marijuana.
And of course, we all laugh when we hear that.
I didn't inhale cigarettes.
And I, but I mean it.
I didn't like inhaling.
It made me cough and irritated my throat.
But I did like, you know, I wanted to be with my friends.
And I liked the menthol cigarettes, which are about to be outlawed, by the way, because it was minty.
And I had like a fresh taste.
So I did dabble with cigarettes, but I never became a cigarette smoker.
However, my father was a pipe smoker and a cigar smoker.
And as a teenager, he set me up with a pipe to keep me from getting interested in cigarettes.
How do you like that?
Yeah.
And it sounds like it helped to work.
Because there's no peer pressure on you to inhale when you're smoking a tobacco pipe.
That's right, huh?
Right.
Most pipes.
Everyone else looks at you as kind of a wimp.
If you don't inhale your cigarette, you're smoking.
That's right.
And I had to fake it.
I was a fake.
I'm a fraud.
I admit it now.
Many years later, I'm a fraud.
I remember seeing kids like swallowing it just so they could have a way to blow a little out their nose.
So it looked like they inhaled, you know, weird.
Well, you know, pipe smokers do expel the smoke from their nose.
It's called exhaling.
Sorry, it's called retrohaling.
But you don't need to, you don't inhale to do it.
Well, I smoked from the time I was 12.
It goes right from the mouth.
I smoked from the time I was 12 to the time I was 35, and I quit cold turkey seven years ago.
Well, that's really early, 12.
You know, I must have already been 15.
And I smoked camels.
That was my thing.
I was like 15 or 16, so I was a late bloomer.
All right.
So anyway, you like smoking the tobacco pipe.
But then here comes a great white father from the east to tell you what you got to do.
Well, yes.
The FDA, under 2009 authority of Congress and, of course, President Obama, who enacted a bill called the American Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which gave the FDA for the first time authority over tobacco to control tobacco, including smokeless tobacco and including e-cigarettes or vaping, which is not tobacco.
And now you're not talking about the subsidies.
That would be under the Department of Agriculture.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And those have been ended.
I think they bought out the tobacco growers.
Yeah, the FDA was not given authority, specifically not given authority over the growers, because that's the USDA obviously didn't want to give up its jurisdiction over farmers.
So, no, it's only over manufacturers of what the FDA deems, and that's their term, deems tobacco products.
And weirdly, and I'm going to discuss this in a future column, so let's not talk about this part of it today.
They have deemed tobacco pipes as a tobacco product, which is really funny because pipes are not made out of tobacco.
They're made out of wood, mostly briar.
They're made out of some material that makes the stem, you know, the mouthpiece, vulcanized rubber or acrylic, and maybe some bamboo and other kinds of wood, and sometimes there's a metal band.
So there's no tobacco.
And yet the FDA has now deemed it, deemed a pipe, a tobacco product, and the manufacturers of pipes as producers, manufacturers of tobacco products, which is weird.
But we can get into that in future weeks.
Well, and by the way, I was supposed to say this in the beginning, but I spaced it out.
Hobbynothabit.blog.
That's your new blog, your separate new interesting website that's all about smoking a pipe.
Yeah, Meditations on Pipe Smoking.
I think it's about a year old now, maybe a little, not quite a year, so it's not brand new.
But, yes, I haven't been as active lately as I want to be, but I will be.
And so, yeah, all things about pipes and tobacco, if anybody's interested.
Cool.
And, again, that's Hobbynothabit.blog.
That's interesting, .blog.
I don't think I've ever seen that.
Yeah, I didn't know until I set that up.
I didn't know there was such an extension as blog.
But when I was talking to WordPress originally, I did .com, and they said, oh, you know, there's .blog.
So I got them both.
Very cool.
And so, same thing here.
The FDA's Assault on Tobacco Consumers.
Yeah.
Also at LibertarianInstitute.org, of course.
And so, yeah.
And now, I guess there's no limit, then, to the extent to which the FDA is claiming jurisdiction over any kind of tobacco paraphernalia of any kind?
Well, you're partly right.
There is a limit.
The 2009 law doesn't let the Department of Health and Human Services or the FDA, which it somehow supervises.
I'm not quite sure of the legal relationship.
I always thought the FDA was an independent regulatory agency.
But the secretary of HHS does have jurisdiction, some kind of jurisdiction over the FDA.
They have been forbidden from outlawing tobacco or mandating that the nicotine content be reduced to zero.
Now, they can reduce it if they want.
And Gottlieb, who's Trump's head of the FDA, has talked about this.
They can order the nicotine content of tobacco lowered to just a hair above zero, so it's not zero.
And that way, they're within the law.
So, there is some limit.
They can't make it zero, and they can't totally ban tobacco.
Hey, and I'm sorry.
I don't think you have to be an Austrian school economist to see that all that means is people are going to smoke even more to get the nicotine fix that they need and die of cancer even younger than before.
Which is what happened with light cigarettes.
Remember the low-tar light cigarettes that were so popular, which are now not allowed to have on the market anymore?
You know, that didn't – people just – you're right, and people write about this.
They just – they smoke more or they breathe the smoke in deeper or, you know, some of the – Pinch the little holes in the filter.
Yeah, so you could cover those up with your fingers.
I mean, sure, you're right.
I mean, look, people are people, and they're going to react to these things, and they don't usually like government telling them what they can do when it comes to their own personal, quote, vices.
So they take action, right?
They take adaptive action to get what they want, and we know this.
We know about black markets.
We know about untaxed cigarettes.
And about bureaucrats with no accountability for their actions at all.
So if you came back to this guy after 10 years and said, great, pal, you just made it where fewer people are smoking, but the ones who smoke are smoking way more and getting heart disease sooner or whatever, he would just shrug, right?
It's not like anybody's going to do anything about it.
In fact, if anybody did try to sue him and say that this commissar acted irresponsibly, he would just hide behind sovereign immunity.
It's the democratic process.
If you don't like it, change the law or run for the state house or something.
And if we want to judge their sincerity, first of all, they – of course, the authorities put high taxes on tobacco, and they count on that money.
So if everybody stopped smoking tomorrow, I think there would be a panic in some of the fiscal circles because all that revenue would dry up.
But as far as judging their sincerity, if they really wanted people off of – and cigarettes, look, cigarettes kill people.
I'm not denying that.
But here's the thing.
It's not – and this is kind of a secondary point, but it's not nicotine that kills people.
Nicotine may be quote-unquote addictive, depending on how you define that.
That's a tricky concept.
But it's not dangerous to health.
That's two different things.
What kills people from cigarette smoking long term are the tars and like hundreds of chemicals, some of which are added by the tobacco companies, the cigarette companies, to keep it burning evenly and stuff like that, and the paper.
The paper is treated in a lot of cases.
So that's what kills people.
But if we really wanted people to get off cigarettes, the government wouldn't be giving the e-cigarette makers and the smokeless tobacco people a hard time.
In other words, there's this movement called harm reduction, which is a group of people, lots of doctors, physicians are involved in this, who say, look, some people don't want to give up nicotine because people get benefits from nicotine.
They have from time immemorial.
It's relaxing.
It's pleasurable.
And they also enjoy the taste of tobacco.
So there are people who don't want to give up cigarettes.
But there are substitutes, namely smokeless tobacco, snuff, moist snuff, you know, those little packets you can put in your jaw or between your cheek and your gum, your skull, you know, skull bandits, which give people who want nicotine the satisfaction of that, plus a tobacco taste or a mint taste.
They come in different flavors.
But the establishment is against those things, including e-cigarettes, which I say, as I said, are not made from tobacco.
They're made from nicotine, but there's not tobacco and it's not smoke.
It's vapor.
You're not burning anything.
But that's being discouraged in favor of what big pharma favors, namely patches and gum.
And see, the approach of the patches and gum people are to get people off nicotine forever, right?
You use that to step down and then you're supposed to be through with it forever.
The smokeless tobacco and even the vaping products aren't so much intended that people will use them for a little while and then stop.
Instead, it's just something they might use for the rest of their life in order to have satisfaction from the products, like I've mentioned.
And yet there's a Puritan lobby, basically, that doesn't want people to go on to some sort of, quote, maintenance program.
In other words, methadone versus heroin is an analogy here.
Some people who use heroin and have trouble stop using it will go on to methadone.
And that's a maintenance program.
They can do that for the rest of their lives.
But there's a school of thought, and it's true with alcohol, too.
There's a school of thought as, no, you shouldn't engage in a sort of a lesser form of this habit.
You should kick it all together.
And then they oppose the methods, the substitution methods, like e-cigarettes and the smokeless tobacco.
So there's a real fight going on.
And Gottlieb, Scott Gottlieb, who is, like I say, Trump's FDA head guy, commissioner, well, on the one hand, he's looked a little more kindly on e-cigarettes, saying, look, if somebody wants nicotine or can't give up cigarettes, let's at least hope that they shift to that.
At the same time, he's also putting restrictions on e-cigarettes, which may induce people to keep smoking the real thing, you know, real cigarettes.
Scott Horton Show is brought to you by The War State by Mike Swanson.
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Yeah, but, you know, the question that you're avoiding is really, I think, who do you think you are?
You want to make these choices for yourself.
Shouldn't this be up to the experts to decide for you, Sheldon?
They're really smart.
I didn't really think I was avoiding that question.
Well, this is a point I make early in the article.
A doctor who may be the most eminent authority on what the tars and chemicals of tobacco do to your lungs has no special qualifications when it comes to the question, should government outlaw these things or penalize use of these things or highly tax them or whatever, you know, whatever the case may be.
That's not the expertise of a doctor.
The doctor's expertise is, OK, here's what happens when you inhale cigarette smoke over a long period of time.
Here's what it will do.
He may be a total expert on that.
And I might accept everything he says because that's his field.
What he's not an expert in is ethics or politics.
That's within all of our expertise or any, you know, thoughtful person.
And so all of us have a right to judge whether even if you grant that tobacco is risky, because lots of things are risky.
But even if you grant that it's risky, health risky, it doesn't follow from that that therefore the government should act.
You know, people can just give out the information.
The American Cancer Society or whoever can give out information to people, say, hey, if you're going to smoke, if you're thinking about smoking, you know, here's some information you should read first.
OK, fine.
That's what people do in a free society.
But then each of us can look at the information or not look at it.
And if we look at it, we can then decide, OK, is this do I think that's a good enough reason not to engage in the behavior?
And that's up to me.
Now, some people will say, oh, but smoking, what about secondhand smoke?
Well, it's not an open shut case that secondhand smoke kills anybody.
But let's leave that aside.
First of all, it doesn't instantaneously kill people.
So it's not like spraying, you know, cyanide gas in a closed room where nobody can do anything about it because they're going to die real fast.
But.
So so the question of secondhand smoke is is is easily handled through contract and other forms of consensual relationships.
So why can't a restaurant in Arkansas?
We actually have this.
Why can't a restaurant say we're a smoking establishment?
Don't come in here if you don't want to breathe smoke.
I mean, I go to a couple of places in Arkansas and Little Rock, Arkansas.
Now, by law, they can't let kids in under 18.
But it's there's a clear sign on the door for adults saying if you don't want to breathe any kind of smoke, you know, don't don't come into our establishment.
But that consent consenting adults can or why can't an airline have special smoking flights where.
You're told in advance, we allow smokers and then, of course, smokers can use it, but then non-smokers who may not care about secondhand smoke may decide they want to fly on that airline.
So that can be handled through contract and other consensual relationships.
So the idea of secondhand smoke is not an answer to the point I'm making, because some people say, OK, it's not just harming yourself, you're harming other people.
But but that that kind of harm, that form of potential harm.
And, you know, some people get headaches just breathing smoke.
It may be may not be a long term health issue, but they just may be uncomfortable or allergic.
That stuff can be handled through, like I say, through consensual relationships.
They extend the same restrictions to vape pens when the whole point of a vape pen is it's not smoke.
And so that's right.
That's right.
But you notice how all these laws were quickly amended to say not only not can't smoke, you can't vape.
But, you know, what about smokeless tobacco?
There's no smoke there.
And smokeless tobacco doesn't require spitting.
It's not like the old chore that the old pitchers used to have bulging out of their cheeks.
No, it was just like a big wad of leaf tobacco stuck in their mouth.
And that's not what people do these days.
I mean, some people make farmers and some types may do that, which required a lot of spitting.
That's where the spittoon came from.
But these new form snus is another big one in Europe that's apparently got a lot of people off cigarettes.
I think John Stossel's written about this.
That produces, you know, little to no little to no extra saliva.
So people don't have to be, you know, running to the bathroom to spit or spit on the floor or spit in the in the spittoon.
That's a non-issue, too.
So why aren't we accepting smokeless tobacco?
Why aren't we welcoming smokeless tobacco?
Yeah.
I mean, the problem is we're so far gone on losing the conversation about why are any of these things up to government?
Although, I mean, I guess in this case, as you're saying, this really is a new invention.
Is the FDA regulating tobacco in this way compared to how it was?
So, well, I don't know, I guess two things.
Where is this headed?
How badly do you think they're going to restrict whatever pipe sales, tobacco pipe sales, whatever it is they're doing headed down this direction?
And then if you want to get back into the larger question of how the hell it ever got this way.
And tell us about your friend Thomas Saws and all that kind of thing, too.
Yeah, well, on where it's going, there was a good article in November when some new regulations came out from the FDA outlawing menthol cigarettes and stuff like that.
Jacob Greer, who's described as a writer and a bartender, had an article at Reason magazine, which was very good, where he set out a scenario, an ominous scenario, where if Gottlieb does what he's talking about and mandates that the nicotine content of cigarette tobacco be reduced to what he calls the sub-addictive level, assuming you could even define that.
But let's say you can.
In other words, they'll bring it down so low, his goal is to not have people get hooked on cigarettes.
So what's his answer?
Let's lower the nicotine content to below.
They can't do it to zero, like I said.
But let's have it low enough that it's not enough to addict people, you know, get people into the habit.
And he thinks that's a good thing.
Now, what Greer points out is if you do that, current cigarette smokers, like you say, are going to want that.
And what will they do if they can't get cigarettes to satisfy them?
Well, they're going to the black market, but they also might start adding to their cigarettes pipe tobacco and cigars.
And if they do that, will the FDA then turn to lowering the nicotine content of tobacco and cigars, pipe tobacco and cigars?
They may well turn to that because they'll see that their first measure didn't accomplish what they want.
And we know how governments work.
That's very likely what they'll do.
They don't accomplish their goal with what they see as one step.
They're going to then say, OK, what's the next step we can take?
And now we're starting.
Now we'll start to see the content of pipe tobacco and cigars tampered with, which will just stimulate the black market.
And then, you know, we'll have organized crime, you know, trafficking and cigars and pipes and pipe tobacco.
So, you know, where is it going to stop?
Where is it going to stop?
Once you're on this crusade of trying to rid.
It's like Carrie Nation and the old, you know, busting into saloons.
Once your goal is to rid society, they wanted to make, you know, America alcohol free.
Once you want to make it tobacco free or nicotine free, because like I said, e-cigarettes don't have tobacco.
They have nicotine.
Some of them have nicotine.
You don't have to have nicotine in them.
But once your goal is to make, you know, make the country substance free, you are really starting to march down a path that will have wholesale violations of civil liberties.
Because, you know, if you're committed to your goal, you're going to stop at nothing.
Yeah.
Well, and just the lack of imagination there when, you know, if somebody ever handed me a Camel Ultralight, I would just break the filter right off and just smoke it.
Like, you know, hey, how could people not think that other people have a say in their social engineering plots or whatever, you know?
That's right.
Most people, luckily, at least in this kind of thing, are not just passive sheep.
Unfortunately, people act like sheep in a lot of other things.
But when it comes to their own personal habits and things they like to do, they really don't like being opposed on.
And they take measures to evade, you know, those impositions.
And it's always going to happen.
Look, how many times do we have to point to alcohol prohibition of the 20s, which gave rise to organized crime and violence and, you know, lots of bad stuff, including a government that wholesale violated civil liberties in the name of going after manufacturers of alcoholic beverages.
We saw that thing the other day, too, where it said just outright alcohol consumption, never mind all addiction problems and whatever, but went through the roof during prohibition, that there were far more speakeasies than there ever had been, bars, and people were getting drunk far more than ever before.
And more potent stuff, drinking liquor instead of beer for the price and that kind of thing, too.
That's right.
There's the iron law.
I think Mark Thornton calls it the iron law of prohibition, where you're going to get more potent, more compact forms.
Crack cocaine is a product of the drug war.
The other thing you get is more dangerous, not just stronger, but more dangerous forms like lethal bathtub gin, where we have, you know, heroin that's cut with battery acid or fentanyl or, you know, diluted with really deadly stuff.
None of which would happen in an open above board marketplace where there was competition for brand names and there'd be, you know, private certification, probably be government certification, but there could be private certification of purity and dose, you know, so the dosage would be checked by some outside agency, privately, private preferably, and people would then know what they're doing.
We know that any substance, we know this from a great book by Jacob Sullen called Saying Yes.
That's a book I urge people to look up.
He wrote a book, this book a few years ago.
He's a Reason magazine editor and writer, syndicated columnist.
A very well documented book about how any illegal drug you can name, any drug, heroin, ecstasy, you name it, cocaine, is being used responsibly by people in all walks of life, including like lawyers, judges, doctors, who have families who pay their bills, who have homes, they're not lying in an alley somewhere, their teeth aren't rotting.
But the reason you don't know about those people is because it's an illegal activity, so they're not exactly talking about it publicly, and you don't ever see them covered in the news because you don't know who they are.
What you see is the person who ODs or who dies because of impurities in black market drugs.
In other words, it's how you use something, not what it is per se.
And he includes all of the so-called dangerous drugs in this, which ties into the Thomas Sass point.
Sass, quick background here, Sass is one of the underrated libertarians.
He died in 2012, sad to say.
He was a great man.
He was like 90-something.
And he was, by training, a physician, a psychiatrist, a psychotherapist, and he was a professor of psychiatry at Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, New York, for many, many years, as well as a practicing psychotherapist.
He wrote tons and tons of books on the abuses of institutional psychiatry, of state-related psychiatry.
And as we know, you know, the state can lock you away for psychiatric reasons for, used to be longer, but, you know, 72 hours observation.
They can impinge on your civil liberties in the name of your mental health, even if you haven't done anything.
If they regard you as a danger to yourself, you know, that can be done.
Some of those laws have been reformed in recent years or maybe marginally better than they used to be.
But there used to be, you know, terrible atrocities committed against people, including electroshock, lobotomy, et cetera, all kinds of terrible things.
So Sass is the greatest critic.
He was writing since the late 50s, early 60s.
His first book was called The Myth of Mental Illness, which is an amazing book, where he argues that behavior is not disease.
Well, behavior can lead to disease.
Some kinds of behavior can lead to disease.
You know, jumping off a building can hurt you, as we know.
So – but behavior itself is not a disease.
And so he – and he was a total civil libertarian as well as a libertarian.
He was a student of like – not a formal student, but a fan of Ludwig von Mises and Hayek and all the great liberal libertarians throughout history.
John Stuart Mill and total – an advocate of total freedom, but responsibility as well, freedom and responsibility for your actions.
And so he wrote a great book on drug wars, one of the best critics of the drug war, you know, beginnings in the 70s on this stuff.
And he wrote a book called Ceremonial Chemistry, which is still in print.
You can find it on Amazon.
Unfortunately, it's not on Kindle, but you can find it on Amazon.
And I recommend this book.
It's a very important book.
He points out there that, you know, you can study chemicals from a pharmacological standpoint.
In other words, a scientist looking at a chemical, what's it made of, what does it do to the body, can it heal or harm, you know, in various circumstances.
OK, that's a scientific aspect.
But there's another aspect to chemicals, which we see with wine, you know, liquor and other things.
Indian tribes have used peyote and tobacco, of course.
There's a ceremonial aspect to chemicals, which is why he calls it ceremonial chemistry.
In other words, we're not just biological beings.
We are psychological beings.
We are cultural beings.
We're social beings.
We're anthropological beings.
We have practices.
We attach ritual and practices to things.
And so if you're, quote, hooked on a substance, it's not the case that it's just simply some physical reaction, right?
You take it and, oh, my gosh, I'm a slave to this thing.
In fact, as we know, the first cigarette most kids try makes them sick.
And heroin addicts routinely report that their first dose of heroin was not a pleasant experience.
The question is, why do people go back for the second time?
And that's not a biological.
There's no biological answer to that or medical answer.
They do it because they want to be in with a crowd or this or that.
A hundred different reasons that relate not to biology, not to the physical, but to the psychological or ceremonial or, you know, that whole list of words I used before, cultural.
And that gets overlooked in all this literature about, quote, addiction and habit, including for tobacco, but also the hard drugs and the drugs that are outright illegal.
And we need to think about that because otherwise we don't understand the situation.
We just think people are sort of robots walking around and they catch addiction like it's in the air.
Yeah.
Well, they talk about, well, there's a switch in your brain and the drug flips the switch and this kind of thing.
It's all very mechanical and it all makes you not responsible.
But they can't explain why people have to, as one addict put it in a book that interviewed lots of drug users, as one heroin user said, you have to work at being an addict.
And, you know, anybody who's tried a cigarette as a kid, I wonder if there's even one person who ever thought, wow, this is really cool.
I like this.
Thanks, Sheldon.
Great talking to you and good luck with your pipe smoking.
Thanks a lot.
See you, bud.
All right, you guys.
That's a great show.
The Richmond Libertarian Institute dot org, of course, for the FDA's assault on tobacco consumers.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute dot org at Scott Horton dot org, Antiwar dot com and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot U.S.
