Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax 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 had.
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 their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, 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, I got Sheldon Richman on the line.
Of course, he's my partner at the Libertarian Institute and taking a break from the usual here.
The goal is freedom is the article every Friday, TGIF.
And this one is called The FDA's Assault on Tobacco Consumers, Part Two.
Welcome back to the show, Sheldon.
How are you doing?
Great to be back and I'm doing fine.
Guess what?
I'm no longer a smoker, but I'm all for a smoker's rights.
And also people who are involved in peddling smoking paraphernalia and so forth, too.
I don't think you should have to be a smoker to think that freedom is important, but maybe you do.
You have a special interest.
Thank goodness.
You have a special interest, so you're paying attention to this very important issue regarding freedom and liberty.
Even the people who want to give up smoking and turn to alternative products, which do not involve burning tobacco, are having their civil liberties violated by the government.
You don't say that, really?
That's the truth.
And that's amazing.
They tell you to quit smoking.
And there are products which people have successfully used in Europe and the United States to get off of smoking.
E-cigarette smoking is not good for you because you're taking three to six thousand chemicals into your lungs, you know, 20 times a day or 40 times a day, depending on how much you smoke.
And people want to turn to these products and have been using them successfully.
And the government wants to crack down on them.
And meaning these vape pens, especially e-cigarettes.
Well, vapes or vaping devices or e-cigarettes, there's a lot of words for them, which do not involve tobacco and they have flavored liquids and may or may not have nicotine extract in them.
You can buy them without any nicotine whatsoever.
But they can have varying degrees of nicotine if that's what people want.
Sounds like a great way to quit smoking, right?
Well, people have been doing it.
That plus smokeless tobacco, especially a very popular product out of Sweden called Snus, S-N-U-S, which, you know, you just place in your mouth and there's tobacco in those little packets, but you're not burning tobacco.
And so the Puritans, I mean, this is really fueled by Puritanism, which as Menken told us is that haunting fear that somewhere someone is happy.
And so it's not just that they want to protect your health.
They don't like you using a substance that relaxes you or, you know, that you use in a sort of self-medicating way.
It reminds me of where the little girl has this terrible epilepsy.
She's like three or four years old, this helpless tiny child.
And they're begging the judge, judge, you got to let us give her CBD, which we swear to God is, yes, it comes from the pot plant, but we promise it will not make her feel good at all.
It will only help to prevent the epileptic seizures, which at this point are so bad they could kill her.
But we swear to God she won't get high, Your Honor, which would be the worst side effect of any drugs.
Lord knows they sell arthritis drugs on TV where the side effect is cancer.
But we can't have this little girl's epilepsy drug make her feel the slightest buzz, because I guess I'm not sure if anybody ever finally articulates why that would be the very worst thing.
But that's how it works.
Yeah, that's right.
I'll quote another great sage, Mark Twain.
He said, nothing is more in need of reforming than other people's habits.
And that's, I think, what's going on here.
Because if the concern were really to reduce the harm from traditional cigarettes, then they would have welcomed with open arms these e-cigarettes, which produce a vapor, not smoke, because you're not burning a leaf, and smokeless tobacco and other things, which they've been going after in favor of what big pharma makes, namely nicotine patches and nicotine lozenges and gum and other sprays.
I knew it.
Those gangsters over at Nicorette are behind this.
Well, they're more expensive.
For a while, they required a prescription.
That's changed now for gum and for patches.
You can now get those over the counter, so that's changed.
But they're still the more expensive.
And here's the thing.
Here's the big thing, and it gets to this puritanism issue.
Those products, the way they're marketed, you're supposed to stop eventually using those products, right?
The gum and the patches.
You're supposed to use that in a prescribed way.
You follow their program, and then you're supposed to end it.
The thing about vaping and smokeless tobacco is you can use it quite safely, certainly relative to cigarettes, but even in an absolute sense, quite safely, for your lifetime, because you enjoy either the flavor you're getting.
Some people like the flavor of tobacco.
Or you like the effects of nicotine, which can be relaxing.
It can aid your concentration.
It doesn't make you high.
It doesn't make you spaced out or something where you're disoriented.
It's not like getting drunk.
It's just a pleasant sensation people get.
And you like to use it when they're working because it helps them focus.
Those products, like vaping and the others I mentioned, can be used just routinely, or, dare I say, habitually, in other words, you can build a habit around it, for your entire life.
The Puritans don't like the idea that you're going to use nicotine for life.
They'll tolerate you using it temporarily until you can get off it, so that's why they like patches and that stuff.
But they don't like these products that cater to people's enjoyment.
And I think that sort of strips them bare.
We can see what they're up to.
They don't care about the health of smokers because why are they throwing obstacles in the way of smokers?
I'll tell you what they'll say.
They'll say, but we've got to protect kids.
So, on the one hand, Dr. Gottlieb, who runs the FDA, Trump's commissioner of the FDA, says, look, I see that e-cigarettes have a role in harm reduction and helping smokers quit smoking.
He'll acknowledge that role.
At the same time, he's been either on his own or he's been stampeded into this hysteria about kids.
So now he's willing to put limits on e-cigarettes, even though they're going to stop his other goal, which was to encourage smokers to switch to them.
So they're talking about flavors.
You can't sell flavored e-cigarette juice in general retail stores like a Walmart or Walgreens.
They can be sold in specialty stores where if you're under 18, you can't get in.
But they're putting more and more limits on these things in the name of kids.
Now, here's the interesting thing about kids, teenagers, and e-cigarettes.
There's a reported increase in use.
I'll say something about that in a second.
But that has coincided with a dramatic fall in cigarette use by kids, school kids.
So, in other words, they're turning to a safer form.
Now, maybe you want to say, I don't want my kids to use any kind of nicotine.
Okay, well, govern your kids.
Don't call them a blunt instrument of the state, because if you're going to keep it from kids, you're going to end up discouraging adults.
And if you personally want them to get off smoking, I think that's a personal choice.
But if you want to go out there and reform smokers and get them to stop smoking, I don't know why you'd want government interference with the production and sale of these electronic cigarettes or vaping devices.
But that's what's happening.
Gottlieb is sort of treading this very fine line where he says, yeah, adults should be able to get it, but we've got to keep it away from kids.
And he threatened the other day, this is in the article, he threatened recently to take them off the market and subject them to a substantial, costly and time-consuming FDA review if he sees a continued increased use by teenagers of vaping devices.
Well, and that goes to the public choice part of this, where this guy, this is his big moment and all of that stuff, right?
Yeah, and he came in, people, when he first came in, the anti-tobacco lobby thought he was a deregulator.
They actually were afraid.
He came out of AEI, he's got some deregulatory background.
But once he got in, except for making this one remark about how, yeah, adults ought to have access to e-cigarettes because it is better than smoking, the lobby doesn't even like to talk like that.
But once he got in, he started making these moves against it.
He's talking about reducing the nicotine content of cigarettes to what he calls sub-addictive levels.
I'm not even sure he could scientifically determine what that would be since everybody's different, their body chemistries are different, and what may be, quote, sub-addictive to one person may be, quote, addictive.
I don't even like these terms very much.
I think they're very murky, they're not well-defined, and they're not purely physical terms.
So he's been making all kinds of noises in the direction of more stricter regulations, including saying that he will become an existential threat.
That's his term.
He will become an existential threat to the e-cigarette industry if he doesn't see a curtailing of youth, what he calls youth use.
Here's an interesting thing.
When one of the companies, Juul, put on its ads, this product is for adults only, the anti-tobacco lobby, the anti-e-cigarette lobby, attacked him for doing that because they accused him of actually putting on a subtle come on to kids.
In other words, if you tell kids this is for adults only, you're really telling kids this is really great, and we're going to try to keep it away from you, and that just makes kids want to use it.
That's the accusation.
So if they say it's adults only, they get in trouble, and if they don't say it's for adults only, they get in trouble.
They can't win.
What's the lobby want them to do?
I keep thinking of the great line from Goldfinger, the James Bond movie, when Goldfinger had Bond captured and strapped to a table, and a laser beam was cutting through him, was going to go to his crotch.
And Bond says to Goldfinger, what do you want me to do, talk?
And Goldfinger turns and says, no, Mr. Bond, I want you to die.
This is what they want the industry to die.
It doesn't matter what they do.
If they put warnings to kids on there, that's bad.
If they don't put warnings, that's bad.
They just want the industry to die.
I'm sorry, hang on just one second.
Hey, y'all, I was talking with Derek Sher from Listen and Think Audiobooks, and he agrees with me that it's so important that the Trump White House hears from large numbers of Americans who support his efforts to end the wars in Syrian Afghanistan, especially from combat veterans like himself.
The president must hear voices of support from out here in the real world to counteract the cries of the war party in D.C. and on TV.
Now, the phone lines are jammed, but they have a pretty good email system there at WhiteHouse.gov.
Email me, Scott at ScottHorton.org when you do, and Derek Sher if at Listen and Think Audiobooks, we'll give you two free ones for your effort.
All right.
So I forgot to say at the beginning here, HobbyNotHabit.blog.
That's your great extra separate blog that you're also writing for here.
A hobby, not a habit.
Meditations on pipe smoking.
Sheldon Richmond smoking tobacco out of his pipe, unlike most of us.
I'm not a cigarette smoker.
I never was a serious cigarette smoker.
But I am a pipe smoker.
I've been a pipe smoker for a very long time.
Too long.
I mean, longer than I like to admit.
And so you can call me a special pleader because I do believe these regulations are going to spill over onto cigars and pipe smoking.
And by the way, the health risks from those things are not anything like cigarettes because very, very, very few pipe and tobacco smokers inhale.
It's just not suitable for that.
The smoke is heavy.
It's very flavorful.
There's no need to inhale.
But these rules, when they see that the rules aren't accomplishing, these new rules, when they don't accomplish what the people who want them think they will accomplish, they'll then turn to other forms of tobacco.
And so as a pipe smoker, yeah, I have a personal fear that my rights are going to be directly violated.
But, of course, I'm also concerned in general about other people's rights even if I don't do what they do.
Right.
And, of course, because, I mean, for lots of reasons, but up to and including the lethal violence that can be deployed by the state in order to enforce these regulations against people.
And if you don't think the government ever killed anybody for selling black market cigarettes or something, you're wrong.
I don't have specific examples, but I'm sure it's happened in a lot of places before.
Well, I'll be telling a story in the coming weeks of a pipe maker, just a single artisan pipe maker, a guy who works in a shop in his home, hand carving beautiful pipes, who was visited unannounced by the FDA.
Three FDA agents flashing badges saying, we're here to inspect your place.
Now, I'll be telling the story in the future, so I don't want to give too much away.
But that's the kind of thing that's beginning to happen.
I found one guy.
Do they have guns?
Well, I do not know.
He did not tell me that the guns were flashed.
Well, you've got to follow up with that and ask him if they had guns on their hips or not.
Funny thing is, you know, they said, we're here to inspect you.
But as he talked to them, and by the way, it took like six and a half hours, as he talked to them, it became clear.
They basically admitted, we don't know what we're even looking for.
In other words, we were told by the FDA to come here and do this, but, you know, this is all brand new, right?
They're still working out the procedures.
We don't even know what we're looking for.
I mean, the guy doesn't make a product out of tobacco.
He makes a product that uses tobacco, but pipes are not made from tobacco.
He doesn't touch tobacco in the making of his pipes.
And yet, it's been deemed a tobacco product by the FDA, because the FDA in 2009 was given the authority by Congress, and signed by Barack Obama, to regulate, quote, tobacco products.
But it was also given the power to define what a tobacco product is.
And apparently, a wooden pipe, a pipe that's made out of briar wood, some kind of plastic for the mouthpiece, and that's it, has been deemed a tobacco product.
Not just an accessory, but a tobacco product under the regulation of the FDA, which is very bizarre.
There are people who collect smoking pipes who never smoke, because they're such beautiful works of art.
Well, you know, this sounds like it could be a problem for the pot industry, too, because various hedge shops have always been able to sell bongs and what have you by calling them tobacco water pipes.
And then, because they say it's for tobacco, that means that it's not regulated, and it's okay, they can get away with selling it.
But it sounds like this could creep into that whole side of the question really quickly.
Well, if they go after the manufacturers, the retailers wouldn't be regarded as a manufacturer.
Well, yeah, but, I mean, in fact, I think they at one point went after Tommy Chong.
The Feds went after Tommy Chong from Xi Jinping for having a brand of bong and selling it across state lines.
They put him in federal prison over it.
And that was already under the old regime, I guess, so I don't know.
Right.
It's the old regime.
The irony is the laws are loosening up on marijuana.
They're tightening up on tobacco and nicotine, even when it's in a non-tobacco form.
So isn't it kind of funny the way things have crossed?
Well, that's where we got pot prohibition in the first place was all the alcohol prohibitionists were out of work, and they didn't want to have to get jabs, so they just went after pot smokers instead of alcohol drinkers.
Well, there was a good bit of racism, of course, involved in that.
They went after the ethnic groups, which were partial to marijuana.
And then they went after, you know, earlier in the 19th century, they were going after opium because the Chinese workers who were here to build railroads were using them.
So these early laws were always linked to race and ethnicity.
They were not scientific considerations.
There's a great book about that called The Strange Career of Marijuana, and it's all very much about what you're saying.
The book I like to recommend, it's from 1973, is Thomas Sass's book Ceremonial Chemistry.
It's available on Amazon still.
Unfortunately, not on Kindle, but it's in paperback.
If anybody interested in this whole subject of the drug war, but not just what we consider hard drugs, but also marijuana and tobacco and alcohol, should read this because it's so important.
This is not essentially a physical or pharmacological matter.
Governments and lobby interest groups go after these substances not because of their chemistry, but because of the groups that use them and the ceremonies that surround them.
Because, you know, from time immemorial, people have affirmed themselves by demonizing the practices of others.
That's just an unfortunately it's something maybe it's in the human DNA, but we ought to learn to get rid of that.
We demonize others in order to, you know, affirm ourselves.
We're good because we don't do what they do, and they're not as good as we are because they don't do what we do.
That's why some drugs get demonized and others are socially okay, socially blessed.
That has nothing to do with the chemistry.
There are dangerous things that are legal, and there are, you know, quote, dangerous things, and there are, quote, dangerous things that are illegal, and it's not because of the degree of dangerousness.
It's because it's other things.
It's anthropological and sociological.
The reasons are anthropological and sociological, not chemical.
All right.
So I'm sorry.
I was going to say no one knew that better than Tom Sasson.
He wrote about it at length, but his best stuff is in that book.
He had a later book called I Write the Drugs, which people also should take a look at.
Okay.
And now, so in your article here, the FDA's assault on tobacco consumers, part two, which is, again, at libertarianinstitute.org and hobbynothabit.blog, you talk about this new bill that's being introduced.
So what difference is that going to make?
Right.
Because so far I think you've been talking about advances in bureaucratic rulemaking and decision enforcing and that kind of deal, right?
The FDA is doing lots of things on the authority of the 2009 Tobacco Control Act.
The other day, earlier in January, Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut, introduced a bill.
So far, no sponsors, at least the last I checked, so she's a loner, introduced a bill to outlaw flavoring in tobacco products.
And it specifies except cigarettes, and the reason it says except cigarettes is that the FDA has already outlawed flavoring in cigarettes.
It did that in 2009, so that's why cigarettes are accepted.
So you can no longer be flavoring like fruit and mint and vanilla and, you know, chocolate and stuff like that in vaping juices or, you know, and cigars if this bill passed.
And it's superfluous because the FDA is already moving that way.
I don't know why she feels like she needs to get in her, put her oar in.
The FDA is already moving on this, and like I said, she's got no sponsors.
But it would do that, and it's just another, you know, it's just another way of trying to pile on.
And so that's why I started off with the bill, because it's the most recent thing to happen.
But the FDA has been very busy.
You know, in November it outlawed, it said it was going to outlaw menthol cigarettes.
It's, like I said, the flavored e-juices can't be sold in, like, a Walmart or a general retail store where 18-year-olds and under 18 can enter.
They're making their moves.
I mean, the handwriting is on the wall.
There's no doubt where the FDA is headed here.
And it seems like, you know, everybody who's interested in Liberty, whether they use these products or not, should be concerned, because what's next?
Will they go after caffeine next?
Who's going to decide caffeine's not good for you?
Although there are plenty of studies that show caffeine in coffee are good for you.
But, you know, it won't be contained.
Once they get a taste of this, they'll move on.
And there's no reason to think, oh, I don't use those things.
I don't need to worry about that.
I think that's very short-sighted.
Yeah, I guess the silver lining is some people will be able to make real fortunes quickly in the black market.
There'll always be a black market.
Look, people get what they want to get.
And if they can't get it legally, they'll get it illegally.
You know, look, look at all the evasion of cigarette taxes that goes on.
Poor, what was his name, Eric Garner got killed in, what, Brooklyn or New York?
Staten Island, I think it was.
For selling, you know, individual cigarettes, so-called Lucy's, which was a way to get around cigarette taxes.
When cigarette taxes go up, we see an increase in smuggling in order to avoid taxes.
I mean, heck, we Americans know what the colonists used to do to get around the trade restrictions by England.
We ought to be proud of that stuff instead of condemning it.
In those days, we condemned the customs agent and praised the smuggler.
These days, it's the other way around.
And so, yeah, people will get the products they want.
The problem is, when you turn it over to the black market, that you get a thuggish element that comes in, involved in the selling and the manufacture.
Because lots of people don't want to be lawbreakers, even if they think there's nothing wrong with the activity itself.
If the government says it's against the law, a lot of people will say, well, you know, I don't want to get caught or I just feel funny about lawbreaking.
And so that leaves it to the people who have no compunction and who have a specialty in violence.
And we know this from Prohibition.
You're talking about, especially on the supply side, not so much the customers as much as those willing to be involved in the trade, especially in the higher orders.
Then you also get a more dicey quality control because it's not an open and above market.
So you don't always know what the dose is.
You don't know the quality.
It's famous that in the case of heroin, the heroin may be diluted by something that's outright poisonous.
There could be bad crap in there like battery acid and who knows what else, or a stronger drug than the person thinks that he's buying, like fentanyl or something.
Black markets are not good.
You're killing people in order to save them.
I mean, that's sort of what the Prohibitionists is up to.
It's like in Vietnam, right?
We had to destroy a village to save it.
Here we have to kill users in order to save them from their bad habits.
Let's leave people alone.
Leave them to their habits.
If they use force against someone else, fine.
Stop them.
But otherwise, leave them alone.
And I recommend I link it at the end of my article.
Everybody needs to read Lysander Spooner's great essay from the 19th century, Vices Are Not Crimes.
I urge everybody to read it.
Vices Are Not Crimes.
A vindication of moral liberty, it says.
Yeah, and you may not think these things are vices.
I mean, I don't happen to think a lot of this activity is a vice.
But for the sake of discussion, since they're typically known as vices, drinking alcohol, smoking, et cetera, Spooner was answering that.
You're not using force against someone else.
You're not compelling somebody to do something.
Until you do that, you ought to be left alone.
It's a simple message that people generally practice in their own lives.
But when it comes time for public policy, then they accept all kinds of intrusions against peaceful people.
Yep.
And almost to an unlimited degree, in fact, as long as it's the others.
Funny how that works, too, because, I mean, you often hear libertarianism explained that way, that, hey, you know how the rule is you're not allowed to hit people and steal stuff from them?
Well, we just think that's true for the government, too.
That's essentially the only thing, you know.
The non-aggression obligation, I think you call it.
Right, Sheldon?
Sorry, I missed that.
Say it again.
The non-aggression obligation is what you call it, right?
You're right.
And most people in their everyday lives live like libertarians.
But suddenly when it comes to politics or public policy, they think they're in a different realm now and the state is somehow different.
But no, you know, we want one moral code for everybody, including people who somehow have achieved power or gotten their hands on power and call themselves politicians and bureaucrats and rulers.
The same code should apply to them.
Michael Humer, a great book on political authority, you know, goes on.
If you tried to do what the state routinely does, you'd be arrested.
If you taxed people to help the homeless, you know, if you taxed your neighbors, you, Mr. Private Citizen, taxed your neighbors to do something good like, you know, feed the homeless, you'll be arrested.
But if the state does it, most people consider that okay.
It'd be even worse if you taxed them to hire mercenaries to tax them more and boss them around and tell them what time to go to work.
Libertarians are just trying to end the double standard, the double moral standard.
One code for all.
If you and I have to rely on persuasion to get other people to do the thing, you know, help us or do things we want them to do, then that's true for everybody.
Everybody should have to.
Unfortunately, everybody just wants revenge.
Now that my team's in power, we're going to show you.
You tap our phones.
We're going to tap your phones instead of saying, you know, hey, we're against that phone tapping that you were doing.
And so we're not going to do that.
It always just seems like it ratchets up and up and up as the power goes back and forth between factions.
Sure.
There's mission creep.
There's, you know, public choice and other groups of thinkers have explained this in great detail, why there's an incentive to expand the mission.
Like you said, you want you want to if you're a bureaucrat, you want a bigger office.
You want a bigger budget.
You want more staff.
You want more prestige.
We know this.
I mean, you've told the story many times about what the ATF and the and the and the Waco incident where it wasn't their budget being discussed when they conducted their race.
And there were scandals, too, for racial and sexual discrimination inside the agency.
And so, yeah, they named it Operation Showtime.
It was actually part of it was because of the bad publicity from Ruby Ridge, because even though it was the marshals that shot the dog and the boy and it was the FBI that shot the wife.
It was the ATF's screwball op that started the whole thing off in trapping and framing up the guy and getting him in trouble in the first place, trying to turn him into an informant.
And so in order to make up for their embarrassment and taking the hit on Ruby Ridge, they went after the Branch Davidians and they call it Operation Showtime was literally what is called Showtime.
And they had the media was there before the cops got there because they had called all the local TV stations, tell them to come out and cover.
It's going to be right.
And we're going to show the new Democratic Bill Clinton administration to that.
You know, here we're picking on right wing rednecks just like you want us to do.
So this is an important point, something that seems very mundane.
Bureaucrats wanting to protect their budgets or expand their budgets can end up putting it, you know, setting it to motion, something that ends in great violence and obvious obvious rights violations.
So from a small but seemingly small thing like, oh, how can an agency get its budget increased?
You end up having getting people killed or SWAT raids or or, you know, people persecuted for the products.
It's really not hard at all to imagine that somebody could get shot in a raid over tobacco coming up in the very near future that, well, you know, we were there for a legitimate reason enforcing this rule in law and regulation, like it or not.
And the guy reached for his waistband and so we had to wax him.
You know, that's the law waistband.
Eric Garner in the chokehold.
Yeah.
I mean, we can see it now.
It's coming soon.
All right.
Listen, I'm sorry.
I got to go because it's time for the next one.
But thank you so much for covering this and for covering some that.
It still makes me angry, but it's not nearly as bad as some of the stuff we cover on this show.
And it's very interesting.
And I'm glad you're sticking up for yourself and other pipe smokers like yourself, too, Sheldon.
Well, thanks for indulging me.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
Talk to you soon.
Talk to you soon.
Bye.
OK, everybody, that's the great Sheldon Richman.
He's at Libertarian Institute dot org.
This is TGIF for this week is the FDA's assault on tobacco consumers.
Part two.
And also, maybe you're into smoking a pipe, maybe not.
But check out his great blog, a hobby, not a habit.
Meditations on pipe smoking.
And that's a hobby, not habit dot blog.
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 US.
