INVEST IN CHILDREN

One of my fondest fantasies involves a girls-school playground and a billboard. The billboard says: "smoke Happy Kittens; they're zesty!" Advertising a brand of cigarettes for the young. Because when I am old and knackered, I will need a strapping nurse half my age to push me in my wheelchair, which I will need by then, out to the designated smoking area regularly. And obviously her motivation must be a yen for a smoke herself, quite possibly a Happy Kitten™, rather than shoving me over a cliff.
That means a whole new generation of tobacco aficionados.
So not folks who have learned to vape.
Actual tobacco.


"SMOKE HAPPY KITTENS -- THEY'RE ZESTY!"


Other possible billboards: "Live well, get vaccinated", and "get strong, eat gluten". "Milk and meat build healthy bodies"
For very obvious reasons.

Happy Kittens™: a quality Virginia leaf cigarette, with cute cat pictures on the package. Lacking the California government warning that you should not become pregnant while smoking. Because of those chemicals that the State knows about. So possibly smuggled in by foreigners.

In England they now insist that the front and back of a package of smokes should have photos showing gangrenous feet and dead kittens, and tell you that smoking causes syphilis. Probably because syphilis is endemic over there, among all ages, incurable, frightening numbers.


That is the wrong approach.


Napoleon funded the conquest of all of Europe by turning tobacco into a state monopoly. We have Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico to our right, who are just begging to be taken over as colonial dependencies. Yes, and both Oregon and Alaska are north of us, but no one wants them.
We could fund education and medical care for the rest of eternity if tobacco became a state monopoly. Great projects. Public health. The defeat of every damned Republican between here and the frigid Atlantic. Eradication of childhood diseases and Evangelicals.

Instead, in another thirty years the only place where smoking will be allowed will probably be out in the salt-marshes. My co-smoker at the time will have to paddle a canoe when the tide is in. Or mount my wheelchair on a flat-bottomed Florida airboat, as if we're hunting alligators.
We'll have import alligators.


Because of the enormous taxes on tobacco in California, little old ladies in the ghetto are funding their retirement by selling smuggled cartons. Drug dealers are busking coffin nails outside of schools instead of pot. Children have become goons for hire, so they can afford their smokes. The senile elderly wander into traffic for the discarded buts.


Do-gooders and puritans need something else to sneer at and vociferate against now, and there's no guessing what their next target will be.


America's children are a potential gold mine.


Happy Kittens!




For your information, that cute little nurse over at the hospital is unsuitable. She's barely five foot tall, and can't weigh more than ninety pounds.




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