For Willis, an enthusiastic carnivore who has been away from American-style indulgence for almost two years, a Drew Carey exposé on bacon dogs.
The meme that short-term risks like food poisoning are somehow more threatening to public health than long-term risks like heart disease has always been troubling for me. If we base our laws on a desire to curtail the potential for individual harm, how can we justify the legality of cigarettes? Second-hand smoking regulations, they make sense. Person A is endangering Person B without Person B's explicit consent. But Person A, he can mesquite-ify his own lungs, so long as he's footing the bill for the inevitable treatment he'll require.
This debate is at the crux of the controversy over universal health care. If the public picks up the tab for preventable diseases, doesn't it also deserve to mandate preventive care? Given how nebulous and subject to fluctuation is the science regarding what ails ya, the notion of codifying dictates based on the latest in medical research is scary. Aren't pharmaceutical and oil lobbyists bad enough? Do we really want to facilitate the rise of the Medical-Industrial Complex?
Well, let's toll that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime, hands off the bacon dogs. Uncle Sam was a butcher, you know. And, Willis, I'll see you at Five Guys Burgers & Fries come August.
2 comments:
I don't think laws are set up according to a rational system. Sure, you start out with a desire to legislate with some sort of ideology or set of rational principles in mind, but the process of bill creation and delivery through the apparatus of government badly mutilates anything put through it. The lobbying, corruption, political gamesmanship, and the sensibilities and taboos of a sometimes criminally ill-informed public all must have their say, and in the end often the best you can do is define a basic playing field by relegating the unacceptable solutions behind the sidelines.
As far as smoking goes, I will say as a smoker that even without basing our laws on curtailing individual harm we can't justify the legality of cigarettes, at least in the virtually uncontrolled way it does now (i.e., just a sin tax and a low age restriction) vis-a-vis, say, marijuana. I wonder how many less dangerous drugs require at least a prescription? Plus, "Person A footing the bill for their treatment" often doesn't happen, and even when it does, the mere fact of insurance covering part of the cost means that other people will pay for their decisions through higher premiums.
All of this does not mean that cigarettes will be banned, nor necessarily that they should; rather, I guess I'm just stating the point that in this country and in most countries tobacco gets preferential treatment, and that the civil libertarians who get all "out of my cold dead hands" about tobacco laws can't really explain why a substance as deadly as nicotine remains on the market while marijuana, which is less toxic than caffeine, does not. Furthermore, they can't explain the logic behind the fact that nicotine doesn't even require a prescription, meaning that tobacco can be sold in the corner convenience store along with caffeine and, well, nothing else in the drug world, but, say, Zyrtek does not.
All good points. Though I do believe there is a blogspot law which prohibits comments longer than the original post...
...but I agree. To me, it's a little like city planning. Modern metropolises that began as medieval villages have screwy street patterns. There's windy lanes and funky little alleys to nowhere. But if you fly over the Midwest - Iowa is a great example - the blocks are all set up on this sensible grid. The older cities, they weren't set up with modernity in mind. They just grew as the population did. The younger cities, they had the benefit of planning toward a desired, cumulative effect. And I think the law works like that to some extent. That's not to say that more modern systems of law are therefore smarter. I can recall a few recent totalitarian regimes, for instance, that established systems of jurisprudence second to none on the crazy scale. But I think the analogy still holds.
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