It's a proven fact: Ninety percent of the deaths from substance abuse are due to tobacco. Nine percent to alcohol. And one percent to heroin. Nobody ever in the world's history has been killed by marijuana. Closest thing was a laboratory rat they tried to feed too much marijuana, to see if marijuana causes cancer, who exploded. So why is it that tobacco and alcohol are legal, and marijuana illegal? I don't know, but in 1934, when the states were ratifying the 21st amendment making alcohol legal again, the U.S. Congress passed a bill to make marijuana illegal. I guess they didn't want us to get too much of a good thing.
But, today, if Bill Clinton has anything to do about it, we're going to put the shoe on the other foot. The guy who joked on MTV that if he had another chance he would inhale, is missing no opportunity to advocate raising taxes on tobacco so high, it'll be cheaper for the kids to buy the wacky tobacky than the straight stuff which is illegal for them anyway since they're not legal age. Regarding the problem of a black market in cigarettes, the ever-profound Bill Clinton has said, "so what if there are a few black-market cigarettes."
Bill Clinton simply doesn't know what will happen when the government tries to make illegal something to which a lot of poor people are addicted. He thinks illegal drugs are something of a game. After all, all through his life Clinton has been evading the law. Got drafted? Get your friend the Senator to pull some strings. Your real estate scam goes sour? Get your business partner to unload the loss on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Need some money to get re-elected? Figure out how to bend or just plain break the campaign finance laws. This is the way white-collar criminals operate. They have lawyers. For them, there's no right-and-wrong. Everything's just a matter of calculation. And this is how they think the poor behave: Increase the cost of tobacco and fewer people will chose to smoke.
But it's different for low-income people addicted to things like alcohol, tobacco, drugs and gambling. They don't think in calculating terms. Either they don't think they'll get caught, or they completely discount future consequences. And, when they do get caught, they don't have the option of getting daddy to bail them out, and getting his insurance to pay for "rehabilitation." Instead, the poor do stupider and stupider things. Like joining gangs and forcing their girlfriends into prostitution. Like pushing drugs on junior high school students and getting their hands on guns.
In Canada, two years ago, when they "experimented" with high taxes on cigarettes, they discovered what happens: A black market, smuggling, organized crime, the murder of law enforcement officers, and corruption. And, how much extra money did they raise? Because so many people started buying black-market cigarettes, tax revenue went down, not up. Fortunately, Canada lowered its tax on cigarettes and eliminated the black market. The same cycle is underway in California right now because last year the voters there did the Clinton-thing and passed a ballot initiative that jacked-up taxes on tobacco. The situation is not yet as bad as it got in Canada, but already there is a black market, organized crime, and lost revenue.
The conservatives within the Republican Party don't have a clue how to stop the Clinton attack on tobacco. This is because the conservatives still think that if we just tried hard enough we can win the war on drugs. To admit that adding tobacco to the war on drugs would make an already terrible situation even worse, would be to admit that the war on drugs cannot succeed.
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CLIFFORD F. THIES is a chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus, a nationwide organization for libertarians active within the Republican Party; cthies@su.edu.