Caution: Reading This Column May Be Hazardous To Your Mental Health

    The behavior of our Federal government with regard to the tobacco industry and particularly cigarettes can only be described as schizophrenic. Consider the following. Simultaneously our government provides subsidies to tobacco growers, runs all kinds of programs in an attempt to stop people from smoking the very product it subsidizes, and taxes the shit out of people who purchase the product that again not only does our government allow to be produced but encourages to be produced through subsidies. Confused? The way I see it, this is like spending your hard earned money to purchase doggie treats for your dog and then beating him for eating the very product you bought for him. Actually, when I Googled “tobacco subsidies” (God I love Google! If I was a single guy and I met a girl named Google, I would marry her on the spot). Anyway, according to this web site

http://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=tobacco

our government spent $944,104,224 or almost a billion dollars on tobacco subsidies between the years 2000 and 2009. If you check out the web site you can even see what companies the money went to.

    Our government has also spent money, although I have no idea how much, paying a bunch of bureaucrats to develop labels and such to discourage people from consuming the product that they themselves support. Most recently the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is considering making it a requirement for the manufacturers of cigarettes to place very graphic images on packs of cigarettes since apparently the FDA believes that the current warning labels have been a total failure. From what I’ve read these nitwits actually believe that people who want to smoke cigarettes will stop because of the photos on the pack. Personally I believe that the more interesting they make the photographs the more likely that they will become collectors items. You know, having an original Marlboro pack with a diseased lung pictured will become like having an original Lou Gehrig baseball card. Hell, eventually they’ll be traded on eBay.

    Nevertheless if our government insists on wasting our money, I have developed a few suggestions for these scary, graphic images and the Surgeon General's warnings that should go with them.

    For our intellectual smokers I suggest the following,

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING:

The graph on the front is a linear regression

analysis indicating the relationship between

smoking cigarettes and cancer given that

I don’t know about you but considering the “r” factor this would scare the shit out of me.

    Then of course we need to consider the not too intellectual rest of us,

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING:

The actual use of this product will cause

you to run out of cigarettes.  We want

you to buy them though because we need

your tax dollars.

Or,

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING:

Carrying around a reminder of your tax

bills all day will cause mental illness and

all kinds of physical ailments as well.

    Hello!! Would you really want to buy something that served as a constant reminder of how much money you owed?

    Now of course we do not want to be discriminatory in our labels. We need to be politically correct. After all it would not be proper to focus all our efforts on preventing just white people from smoking. We want to discourage “minorities” with scary graphics as well. So therefore I offer the following suggestion,

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING:

If you are not white and you use this

product, the guy in the picture will come

to your house!!

    And of course our primary focus should be on teenagers. All of the so called experts say that the biggest battle in preventing smoking is in stopping young people from starting to smoke to begin with . So for them I have a few suggestions like,
 

  SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING:

Yo Dude!!  If you like carry around a

message like this all the time it could

make you like crazy.

    And,

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING:

Wow, it's really really hard to squeeze

out a zit if you're smoking a cigarette

    And this should work too,

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING:

Smoking cigarettes with your girlfriend

can lead to becoming overly friendly and

her getting pregnant.

    And, if the goal of our government is to put really, really scary pictures on packs of cigarettes there just has to be a special Halloween edition. So I have come up with this,

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING:

BOO!!

    Lastly, let’s try to combine the effort of the FDA to put scary pictures on cigarette packs with another newsworthy topic.  That being our Transportation Security Administration (TSA) attempt to keep bombers off our airplanes by employing new molestation fondling groping enhanced pat down techniques on boarding passengers.

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING:

If your wife or girlfriend attempts to carry

cigarettes onto a plane TSA agents will get

a better chance to feel her up than you will.

    Hey if all the experts think this will work and it will save me from having to pay for tobacco subsidies, I'm in.  And I think I really will start to collect them.

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