Tobacco.org

LEX: Tobacco’s road 

The authorities’ love-hate relationship with smoking has had decidedly more of the latter.

King James I called it a “custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.” . . .

Tobacco was a bane well before there was an FDA, but it has been a boon to governments too. Regulating such a heavily taxed product out of existence clearly is not easy. Neither is cajoling an entire population to quit through health warnings and advertising bans. If beatings and the threat of eternal damnation did not do the trick then nothing will.

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