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 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 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.
Alright you guys, Sheldon Richman, because it's Friday, TGIF stands for The Goal Is Freedom.
His weekly column at the Libertarian Institute, libertarianinstitute.org.
And this is part three of the trilogy, the FDA's assault on tobacco consumers.
And Sheldon also keeps a blog, Hobby, not Habit.blog.
And the blog is called A Hobby, Not a Habit.
And it's about smoking a pipe.
Because Sheldon Richman is a pipe smoking guy like that.
Welcome back to the show, how you doing man?
I'm doing fine, man.
Always happy to be back.
So this FDA, they're harassing your hobby, your interest.
We've talked about that over the last couple of weeks.
But now you have this further development in discussing this raid on Jeff Gracik.
Is that how you say it?
Gracik.
See, I'm terrible at everything.
This should be of interest to anybody, not just someone who's interested in pipes and tobacco.
Because it shows you what the FDA can do.
And I think I lay it out there in their own words so you can see what it is they're doing.
Just quickly recap, in 2009, the Congress and Obama enacted a law called the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which for the first time gave the FDA authority over to regulate what are called tobacco products.
But it also, well, the FDA took that as a license not only to regulate tobacco products, but to define tobacco products.
The bill, I've read the bill, the bill doesn't say, FDA, you are free to define this term any way you like.
It just talked about tobacco products the way you and I might talk about tobacco products.
Cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, etc.
But the FDA went ahead and said, well, you know, we're going to interpret, and that's their word, you can see it in the article, we're going to interpret it to mean not just tobacco or things derived from tobacco, like say nicotine, which is used in e-cigarettes, but also things like pipes.
Pipes are made out of wood or clay or meerschaum or corncob.
And also the mouthpiece is made out of some kind of plastic, acrylic, vulcanized rubber.
In other words, they're not made with tobacco.
You could be a pipe maker and never see or touch tobacco, if that's what you wanted to do.
You sell it to people who might like to use it to smoke tobacco, but that's them doing it.
And a lot of, there are, I don't know how many, we can't know how many obviously, but there are pipe collectors who don't smoke.
They just love these things as sort of works of art and they're gorgeous.
If you look online, go look at what artists and pipe makers are making by hand, one at a time.
They're lovely.
The grain, I mean, it's sort of a combination of nature and human beings, turning a piece of briar wood into something truly gorgeous.
So, but nevertheless, the FDA says, no, we're counting that as a tobacco product or an accessory, which also counts as a tobacco product and therefore we're allowed to regulate it.
So as a result, they're turning up unannounced at the homes, sometimes home workshops of these artists and pipe makers.
These are, you know, small businessmen, right?
This is not a factory.
This is a self-employed person.
And they did, and then they're saying, we need, we want to inspect.
We need to ask you questions.
So they did this last December.
Jeff Graysock, who's got a, he makes his living making pipes.
That's all he does.
He has two kids and a wife and that's how he earns his living.
He did a workshop in his garage at his house in Southern California.
And one morning in December, there's a pounding on the door, an impatient pounding.
And he thought, well, maybe it's a UPS guy in a rush.
So he goes to answer the door and it's three guys flashing FDA badges.
Now, they didn't have guns.
They didn't pull guns, certainly.
I doubt if they had guns.
And they weren't unfriendly.
It wasn't like Elliot Ness, you know, breaking into a bootlegger's warehouse and smashing barrels.
But they said, we're here to inspect.
The funny thing is, as time went on, and by the way, they took up six and a half hours of his day.
He got really nothing done that day.
He didn't get reimbursed for that, of course.
As time, as the hours went on, Jeff says, and I interviewed Jeff, and you can see the quotes in the piece.
As I interviewed Jeff, he said it became clear that the guys really didn't know what they were doing there, what they were supposed to do, because this is all very new.
So the FDA must have just said, OK, start visiting pipe makers here.
Here's an address.
Go see this guy.
And without any kind of guidance, they didn't know what to do.
They weren't there to test materials to see if they were toxic.
They didn't take anything with them.
They didn't say, can we take a sample of the wood or a wood stain or, you know, anything like that.
They just took up a lot of his time in a somewhat friendly way.
And even, he said, even somewhat sympathetic way, like, hey, we know we're wasting your time.
We have orders.
We were told to do this.
And but he had to, that's the result.
And in a sense, he consented to this because he can't sell his pipes to customers, retail, unless he's registered with the FDA under this law.
And so once you register, it's as if you've consented to an inspection every, once every two years, unannounced.
And that's where it stands.
So you can read the gory details in the piece today.
Crazy.
It's like we live in a totalitarian police state, only mostly, but not entirely.
Yeah, they're allowed to come in your house.
They can say, look, here we are.
We're here to do it right now.
I think they might have said, if it's not convenient, we could come back.
But they said, no, we want to do it now.
And and look around and look and demand records.
They wanted records back to 2006.
The thing is, the guy doesn't keep records.
He's a one man artist and he's an artist.
He sits with Briarwood and with his hands.
He should have not let them in.
Right.
He should have just called the lawyer and said, wait a minute now.
Or what?
Well, he understood that by registering with the FDA, he basically allows this.
I see.
And he's worried.
If he gets shut down, as he puts it in, and I have the quote in the piece.
He said, if I get shut down by them, my kids don't eat and our house gets foreclosed on.
So he's he bent over backwards to comply, which is one reason it took so long.
He said he did.
He looked for any records he could find.
And, you know, he just didn't want to upset them because he can't he can't afford to get shut down.
He's a small operations.
One guy works with his brother to some extent, but it's not some big company, some big factory that can have a legal department.
And so and he was told by retailers, especially, you know, one online retailer, we can't carry your pipes if you're not registered with the FDA, because then they would get in trouble with the FDA.
See how it works?
It's divide and conquer.
The FDA tells the retailers, you can't carry the pipe makers pipes if they're not registered.
So then they go to the pipe maker and say, hey, we can't carry your pipes unless you're registered.
But and then they'll register and then they'll say, we'll register for you.
We'll save you the paperwork because you don't have a law, a legal department.
And then the pipe maker says, OK, yeah, sure.
Thanks a lot.
You're saving me the trouble.
You know what it is?
It's it's not a totalitarian police state.
It sounds like England.
It sounds like right where they're trying to regulate knives and just regulate everything to death.
It's still England.
It's not Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, but it's still nanny state to death.
And, you know, it's easy for people to think, well, that's not my job, though.
So what do I care?
But seriously, think about that.
I mean, essentially, if they can come after the pipe makers, they can come after anyone for anything.
We're helpless before these guys.
Essentially, and especially you don't want to end up in federal court.
You'll do anything to stay out of federal court, man.
It reminds me a little of the movie Brazil, right?
The over bureaucratized society where you can't do anything without consulting central services.
And then they send two idiots out to, you know, I don't know, to do what?
To dither and ask you what you're up to.
And that's what seems to be headed.
But the ominous thing is that the FDA can, as I put in the article, they can declare non-A, A.
In other words, they can say this thing, which is made out of wood and plastic, is hereby decreed to be a tobacco product.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, the way you break it down, you quote specifically from the language here.
Where they just absolutely have to pretend that there are some adverbs and pronouns and things in there that aren't in there.
So a pipe is a tobacco product, but an ashtray isn't a tobacco product.
It's just a decree.
And so what are they going to define tomorrow?
It may be somewhere outside the category of tobacco where it impinges on other people.
What if they decide they want to go after caffeine?
They can declare caffeine something they want to completely regulate and maybe decree that the companies lower the caffeine content of coffee.
Look, the FDA is talking about lowering the nicotine content of cigarettes.
Why can't they talk about lowering the caffeine content of coffee?
Hey, in Hawaii, they just raised the cigarette age to 21.
Yeah.
And they're debating and passing a law to raise the cigarette age to 100.
How do you like that?
And then they quote the representative who's a doctor saying, trust me, I'm a doctor.
Smoking is really bad.
And so that's all you need to know.
And yet they give a hard time to people who want to switch to these electronic cigarettes, vapors, vaping devices, which don't burn tobacco, don't even have tobacco.
They can have nicotine, which is an extract from tobacco, of course.
But it's not nicotine that causes disease.
It's tars and the stuff you inhale, the thousands of chemicals in cigarette smoke.
So they're making it tough.
In the name of protecting kids, they're making it harder for people to switch from cigarettes to electronic cigarettes, which don't have the dangers of cigarettes.
Britain says they're like 95 percent safer than cigarettes.
And yet here they get a hard time.
So I don't know what they're up to.
I think they just want to, you know, look, it's as Mark Twain said, and I quoted this, too, you know, nothing, nothing needs reforming so badly as other people's habits.
Yeah.
Well, that's what I remember as a little kid, the neighbor lady telling my mom, you know, there ought to be a law about whatever it was they were talking about.
And then I've heard that cliche my whole life long, where people just think that that's what opinions are.
Opinions are things that you think the government should do to everybody else, essentially, without even skipping, you know, without even taking the step in between of asking the question of whether that's really the right idea or not.
That's what democracy is.
It's just everybody's chance to share in the power bossing everyone else around.
That's as close as we could ever get to being free.
Yeah.
That's the American way.
I just want to stress that, you know, you don't need to be interested in pipes to be concerned about what the FDA is up to, because who knows what area it's going to move into tomorrow.
We all know about mission creep and bureaucrats like to expand their their agendas and their budgets and their staffs and their prestige.
So this bears watching, even by people who couldn't give a darn about anything related to tobacco.
I'm not I'm not evangelical about tobacco.
I keep that to myself, but I'm only talking about it because the government, you know, we're that we're from the government.
We're here to help you.
You know, the whole story.
And by the way, for you pipe smokers out there, check out Sheldon's great blog, because it's not just complaining about the politics of tobacco smoking.
It's about smoking a pipe.
And it's really great.
You got to look through it.
It's cool.
It's hobby, not habit blog.
And yeah, it is.
It's just like Brazil.
I used to sell bumper sticker like that.
Have you ever seen Brazil?
But no one ever bought it because I guess they hadn't seen it.
Great movie.
One of my favorite movies of all time.
Yeah, it is great.
In fact, I gave it to a friend for Christmas like three years ago and they still haven't watched it.
I think it's the name that puts them off.
They're like, well, I don't want to watch a movie about Brazil.
They just don't get it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I know.
I know.
Well, Sheldon, thanks for coming on the show.
Great to talk to you as always.
All right.
Love talking to you.
Thanks.
See you, man.
This is Sheldon Richman.
He is my partner at the Libertarian Institute, the executive editor there, and that's LibertarianInstitute.org.
Check out this article, The FDA's Assault on Tobacco Consumers, Part 3.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
