Anti-tobacco fever runs high in the land these days. To the true believers in its ranks it is a holy war based on indisputable facts and motivated by the purest of purposes. But just how pure and holy is it? A look a only a few elements will provide an indication:

Before its defeat the McCain Bill -- per McCain himself, "the biggest money-grab ever" -- started out, like most anti-tobacco maneuvers to "save the children," only to wind up proposing a $4,000 an hour "cap" on lawyers' fees in tobacco litigation, creating 17 new federal bureaucracies and slapping an additional $1.10 regressive tax per pack on cigarettes.

According to a Wall Street Journal poll 70% of the public realized the bill was about money and had little to do with so called "public health."

The EPA report declaring Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS) a class A carcinogen was promptly attacked as "junk science" by The Washington Times and Investors Business Daily and The Wall Street Journal -- hardly radical rags. It was then overturned by U.S. District Court Judge William Osteen who said of it that the EPA "publicly committed to a conclusion before research had begun... disregarded information and made findings on selective information; did not disseminate significant epidemiological information; deviated from it Risk Assessment Guidelines; failed to disclose important findings and reasoning; left significant questions without answers... produced limited evidence, then claimed the weight of the Agency's research evidence demonstrated ETS causes cancer." In short, they faked it.

When it was originally released in 1993, this study received massive media coverage and became not only the cornerstone of the ETS hysteria itself but, in large part, the core of the anti-smoking campaign overall. But how much coverage has its gutting received? Almost none.

Just recently EPA Administrator Carol Browner was busy defending the report in the Washington Post as if it were the word of God.

Over the past four years the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) headed by Donna Shalala has been funding the National Organization for Women (NOW) to the tune of $600,000 ... in tax money. What has the women's equality movement got to do with tobacco? Not much... until HHS came along with its funding and, no doubt, a few strings attached.

But that is small potatoes compared to the millions (also in tax money) Americans Stop Smoking Intervention Study (ASSIST) has been doling out to "privately funded" anti-tobacco coalitions in 17 states, primarily through the National Cancer Institute.

Not only are government agencies not supposed to engage in political activism, such use of tax funds is illegal. ASSIST may be coming to an end soon, but don't hold your breath waiting for the money to be refunded.

Like the EPA on ETS, the FDA recently had the slats kicked out from under it by a U.S. Court of Appeals. The judges accused the FDA of trying to create a national tobacco policy behind the backs of lawmakers, saying it had no authority to regulate tobacco, which it tried to falsely treat as a "drug" for the purpose. It also struck down its attempt to ban the advertising of a legal product (tobacco) as a breach of freedom of speech.

That's quite a bit of hanky-panky -- distortion, misrepresentation and under-the-table dealings -- and that's only the tip of the iceberg. There are numerous other instances where anti-tobacco "evidence" has been disproven or challenged by cooler minds. Yet, despite its flaws, inaccuracies, illegalities and outright falsehoods, the jihad goes on. The public has been and continues to be misled by those who would replace freedom of choice with draconian control.

But the beat goes on. The latest foray is against gun manufacturers for deaths and injuries caused by their products. (According to Professor Lester Brickman of Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, "The strategy is to emulate what took place in the tobacco wars." The domino theory rears its head again, this time for real it seems.) Can motorcycles and automobiles be far behind? Or speedboats, jet skis and snowmobiles?

Feints in the direction of fats, junk food, even peanut butter have been made as well. Add coffee and carbonated drinks and sweets and God knows what else.

It will certainly be an un-sweet world when the self-righteous and politically correct social engineers get through. Reason indicates that their rabid efforts to legislate a totally safe and squeaky-clean society are doomed to failure. Let’s hope so.

Even if you neither smoke nor use guns the trend should give you pause. Under the pretext of doing the right thing, the do-gooders are undermining civil liberties and laying waste to freedom of choice. Where can it all lead? Consider Nazi Germany where similar policies were enforced in the 1930’s.

It is high time the whole shoddy tobacco war and clones thereof came to a halt and government returned to its proper business of protecting individual rights instead of legalizing discrimination against users of perfectly legal products and heavily penalizing the corporations which produce them.

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