Monday, February 14 2011
By Jerry Weinberger | City Journal (Washington, D.C.)
It’s probably a good thing that Americans—at least most in the middle and upper-middle classes—have given up the habit of tobacco. I say “probably” because I’ve always been convinced by those economists who argue that smokers do a favor to nonsmokers by paying exorbitant taxes on their weeds and then kicking off early, reducing the burden on Social Security and Medicare.
Another reason for skepticism about the victory over tobacco is that it involved the biggest public shakedown of a private industry in our history. The claim that the plaintiffs in the tobacco cases had been taken unawares was always bogus. I remember well how I borrowed a cigarette at the tender age of 15: “If you’re packing, can I bum a nail?” That was back in 1959, and “nail” was short for “coffin nail.” Long before the surgeon general’s 1964 report linking smoking to cancer, everyone knew that smoking, at the very least, would “stunt your growth.”
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