I mean, since we're reprising the War on Drugs...

Blowing Smoke About Tobacco
By Philip Alcabes
Tuesday, May 30, 2006; Page A17

"Tobacco: deadly in any form or disguise" is the slogan of the World Health Organization's World No Tobacco Day tomorrow.

You see how well that sort of thing worked with alcohol and ganja.

The anti-smoking movement worked in the USofA by making cigarette smoke socially offensive. MUCH easier to do that to prove the long term toxicity of a short term pleasure.

The claim is false: Tobacco is not deadly; the harm is in the smoke. A policy that confuses innocuous tobacco with harmful smoke is responsible for millions of avoidable deaths each year worldwide.

Cigarette smoke is a deadly delivery device for a benign but habit-forming product: nicotine. Nicotine isn't especially dangerous -- about like caffeine. Good policy toward tobacco use would reduce the grave harm of smoking by replacing cigarettes with non-smoked forms of nicotine for the addicts. They might use nicotine safely forever, if harmless delivery systems were widely available.

I like this article. It's a really good example of a useful rhetorical technique. I think I'll unpack that technique a little later today.