Commentary: Picking peppers in the enlightened police state

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Have you ever wondered who smokes the grape and peach flavored cigars that are available for individual sale in gas stations?

Those few of you who are even less hip than I am may think, as the government claims, that these flavored cigars are “gateway” drugs, and the fruity artificial flavors are the enticement that the tobacco companies use to hook young children on tobacco.

In line with those purported beliefs, last month the “Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act” went into effect. The law prohibits the use of any flavor except menthol in cigarettes.

It also authorizes the FDA to take the same action with respect to cigars, a power that most observers expect the agency to act on.

However, those of you who are more hip than I am know that this aspect of the law doesn’t really have anything to do with tobacco. You know that, more often than not, the buyer of a grape flavored blunt cigar empties out the tobacco and fills the wrap with marijuana.

Thus, should the FDA exercise its power under the Act to outlaw flavored cigars, it will really be more of a shot in the War on Drugs than the War on Tobacco.

In fact, just a week before the Act went into effect, the Wisconsin Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of State v. Carroll. In Carroll, the Court of Appeals held that a mere photograph on the defendant’s cell phone of him smoking a blunt cigar constituted probable cause that he was involved in marijuana use or trafficking.

I’m thinking about the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, and the Carroll case, because, horror of horrors, I woke up this morning without any cigarettes in the house.

Fortunately, I had some loose cigarette tobacco. Unfortunately, I had no rolling papers.
No matter. The garden in the backyard is full of Serrano peppers, so I picked a pepper, cut off the ends, hollowed it out, filled it with loose tobacco, and managed to get my morning nicotine fix. The pepper not only made an excellent fulcrum for nicotine, but it added a nice hot flavor, too.

Of course, a younger man might have done the same thing with marijuana instead of tobacco. Or he could have used an apple instead of a Serrano pepper, as was common when I was young.

Either way, the Act will be ineffective. Back in the 1970s, there were no flavored cigarettes, but we started smoking at the age of nine anyway; kids don’t need grape flavoring to start smoking. And if grape flavored cigars are outlawed, marijuana smokers will substitute a different fulcrum for their drug of choice, like Serrano peppers.

There are two ways the advocates could react to the inevitable failure of their new law. They could finally realize that you can’t regulate everybody, everywhere, all the time. Or they could come up with new stronger regulations in the effort to make the country into a police state.

I’m betting they opt for the latter.