Holland gives smokers a break
The current issue of the British Medical Journal carries an angst-ridden letter titled ‘Can the Dutch Government really be abandoning smokers to their fate?’ Since June 2010, the largest party in the Dutch parliament has been the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy which, as its name implies, is anathema to the public health establishment. Last year, it relaxed the Dutch smoking ban after a grass-roots campaign led by small bar owners. This year it decided that there are better uses for public money than funding anti-tobacco advocacy groups whose beliefs are fundamentally at odds with Dutch liberalism. STIVORO, the Dutch equivalent of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), received 2.7 million euros in 2011. By 2013, it will have to rely on donations from the public, which, in all likelihood, means it will have to close down. In addition, pharmaceutical nicotine products will no longer be handed out for free on the taxpayers’ shilling.
The BMJ letter paints a terrifying picture of a nation without a professional anti-tobacco lobby. Strangely, considering their imminent plight, none of the ‘abandoned smokers’ have put their name to it. Instead, it is written by fifteen anti-tobacco lobbyists whose livelihoods depend on the largesse of the state. They claim that the government is “closing down its tobacco control operation”. In fact, smoking prevention programmes will continue in schools and the majority of bars will remain ‘smokefree’. Physicians will continue to provide assistance to smokers who wish to quit, and nicotine patches will still be available over-the-counter to anyone who is not deterred by the 90% failure rate of such products.
The real concern of the letter-writers, who include a consultant to the pharmaceutical industry alongside employees of STIVORO, ASH and the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies, is that governments elsewhere might follow suit. Worse still, if smoking prevalence continues to fall in the absence a professional anti-tobacco lobby, politicians might begin to question the efficacy of tobacco control methods. Across Europe, health lobbyists of all persuasions have cause to be worried. The declining fortunes of leftist parties, combined with the dire economic situation, leaves the ranks of the ‘public health professional’ vulnerable to budget cuts. In Britain, Alcohol Concern recently lost its core funding from the Department of Health after one too many criticisms of government policy. Consensus Action on Salt and Health has also seen its grant disappear.
Under Labour, the third sector was awash with government cash and lobby groups masquerading as health charities provided noisy support for policies which had little grass-roots support. When an industry does this, we call them front groups. When the government does it, we call them stake-holders. Under the Lib-Con coalition, these groups have become more truculent and Andrew Lansley must wonder why his department is funding organisations which are unrelenting critical of his government.
The BMJ letter is careful to praise the coalition’s policy on tobacco whilst giving the implicit warning that any budget cuts will leave blood on their hands. Having painted a grim picture of what the Netherlands might look like without free Nicorette gum, they warn: “Every death that ensued would not just be the responsibility of the tobacco industry, which continues to promote its lethal product, but also of every politician in the Dutch Government who chose to look the other way and allow it to happen.” This hysterical reaction sums up everything that is misguided about the health lobby. From their perspective, smoking can be the blamed on the tobacco industry or it can be blamed on the government, but individuals themselves can never be held responsible.
This message is in stark contrast to the words of the Dutch health minister, Edith Schippers, who has said that “the state is not a nanny” . Her policy is to take a “middle path”, discouraging smoking while allowing “adults to decide for themselves over lifestyle decisions.” Such a philosophy is barely comprehensible to the anti-tobacco lobby whose current demands include the abolition of branded cigarette packaging and smoking bans in cars, private apartments, parks and beaches. If the demise of STIVORO prevents such draconian measures in the Netherlands, the government will not be “abandoning smokers to their fate”. It will be finally giving them a break.
Can gang crime be stopped?
Bill Bratton, arguably the world's most successful police chief – he was able to reduce crime significantly in New York, Boston and Los Angeles – spoke in London this week on the subject of gang crime. A good place to talk about it. Some 22% of London's violent crime is gang-related, along with 10% or so of all London crime in general. It could be worse. The US, says Bratton, is dealing with its fourth generation of latino gang problems and its third generation of black gang problems. It is estimated that there are 400 gangs with 40,000 members in LA, which has a population of around 4,000,000 people. The good news for us is that the UK is experiencing only its first generation of serious gang crime. So we can learn from other people's mistakes and successes.
Bratton, who is advising the UK government on policing and crime, has always maintained that you cannot arrest your way out of crime, in particular gang crime. There aren't enough officers, courts or prisons. And responding to crime after the fact is not the best way to make people safer: you need to work out how to stop crime happening in the first place. For that, says Bratton, the police have to partner with the local community - with schools, health providers, housing departments, welfare agencies, local community leaders and everyone else. It's a big job, but it works. A housing department, for example, might be able to save a young person from getting trapped in a gang by simply moving their family, if they agree, to a new area. You have to think creatively.
Doing just that led to a reduction of violent crime in Los Angeles – where half the violent crime was once attributed to gangs – and a fall in murders by more than half. And, says Bratton, his community policing approach created better race relations and much better relations between the police and the public. It's often called the 'broken window' approach: yes, the police should have zero tolerance of serious crime, but they should not tolerate petty crime that seriously affects the quality of life and the local environment that people have to live in. So fix the broken windows, clean up the graffiti, and you're sending out a signal from local people about how they are prepared to live and what they are not willing to put up with.
Will this approach work in the UK, where policing is very different? Regrettably, the recent spate of anti-terrorist legislation that gave the police draconian powers of stop, search and arrest made them seem more like the enemy of the public than their allies. Give police officers power and they will use it, whether it is appropriate and proportionate or not. Especially if you incentivise them to make more arrests and get more convictions. It is high time that the police became part of the community again, rather than officious controllers. Maybe the new wave of elected police commissioners will provide the opportunity for fresh leadership, fresh organisation, and fresh ideas.
End this pointless drug war
Christian Guy says there is no war on drugs. Perhaps he’s not familiar with a little country called the United States of America. Over the past 40 years, it has spent more than $1trn fighting its ‘war on drugs’. It currently has more than half a million people behind bars for drug offences (up 1100 percent since 1980), and is making nearly two million more drug arrests every year (up more than 300 percent in the last 25 years).
I guess he’s not familiar with Mexico either. Since President Felipe Calderon launched his own drug war in 2006, 45,000 people have been killed. On present trends, Mexico’s war on drugs will claim 55,000 lives by the time Calderon leaves office in 2012. That’s greater than the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War, in a country with not much more than one-third of the USA’s population. And just look at what has happened to Mexico’s murder rate since the army were first deployed (graph from Cato-at-Liberty):
Human Rights Watch has also suggested that the Mexican security forces have participated in ‘more than 170 cases of torture, 39 “disappearances,” and 24 extrajudicial killings since Calderón took office’, which represents a terrible regression in a country that had been making significant progress on human rights. If this isn’t a dirty, vicious drug war, I don’t know what would be.
And what have been the results? In the US, the use, misuse and abuse of drugs is as prevalent as ever. In Mexico, significantly less marijuana and heroin is being seized than ten years ago. And while it is possible that a little less cocaine is making its way through the country, that isn’t being reflected in higher street prices in the US. On the other hand, black Americans are 10 times more likely to be incarcerated than white Americans, and Mexico’s economically vital reputation as a tourist destination is being systematically trashed. Did somebody mention the law of unintended consequences?
These are just some of the specifics which make me regard Christian Guy’s suggestions that we need to “start planning and co-ordinating a proper fight” and that “our law enforcement strategy should be intensified” as dangerous and wrong. But it is easy to construct a general case against drug prohibition too.
Firstly, it hands control of a trade worth tens of billions each year to criminals. The more you try to stamp that trade out, the higher the ‘illegality premium’ on drugs rises, and the more violent the cartels battling to control that trade become. This is precisely what happened with alcohol when American banned it in 1919. Repealing that prohibition replaced Al Capone with Anheuser-Busch. The same thing would happen if we ended the drug war.
Secondly, that illegality premium – which some people put at 90 percent of the street price of drugs – is what drives drug addicts to crime to support their habits. The comparison with alcohol is instructive: how many alcoholics would rob you because they can’t otherwise afford another can of Special Brew?
Thirdly, prohibition makes drugs more dangerous. Drugs become stronger and more concentrated because illegality forces traffickers to pack as much potency into a given volume as possible. So heroin replaces opium, crack replaces powdered cocaine, and new synthetic drugs like Crystal Meth emerge on the market. And drugs are ‘cut’ with all manner of other substances so that dealers can maximise their profits. Being illegal, drugs are not branded or labelled. So users don’t know what strength or purity they’re getting, and overdoses and poisonings are the result. Again, the exact same thing happened with alcohol – America went from drinking beer to drinking adulterated whisky, and as a result 50,000 people died from poisoning in the first seven years of prohibition.
Ultimately, it is hard to think of any contemporary policy which has failed so thoroughly and catastrophically as the war on drugs, and at such great human cost. This war – and please, let’s not fool ourselves by pretending that no such war has been fought – has failed to reduce drug use, has made drugs more dangerous, has unnecessarily criminalized millions of people, has sunk countless poor communities into violence and degradation, and has pushed whole countries to the verge of civil war.
The rational, moral, social, and economic case for ending the war on drugs is overwhelming. Drugs should be legalized. They should be legalized globally. And they should be legalized now.
Beware the politicized medical establishment
As I've said before, politically active doctors are the most immediate threat to personal liberty in Britain. Now today the British Medical Association (in the name of "no platform for fascists", I won't link to their website) want to ban smoking in cars:
The British Medical Association (BMA) is urging ministers across the UK to extend the ban on smoking in public places introduced in 2007 to all vehicles in a further effort to protect people's health.
Children are at particular risk from secondhand smoke in cars because they take in more of the chemicals from cigarettes than adults and may not be able to refuse to travel in a smoky car.
Ah, the Helen Lovejoy argument: won't somebody think of the children?? Of course, if they really believed that rationale, they'd want to ban children from cars altogether. Or, better yet, why not ban cars? A tweeter has an ideal solution:
Let's ban parents! They regularly neglect, abuse & murder their children. I say this menace must be stopped!
Well, quite. Chris Snowdon has the low-down on the figures used by the BMA to justify this piece of health fascism. Basically, they're made-up. And Joshua Lachkovic has written a good broadside against the proposals at the TFA website. But I can't help but wonder if this is a tactical move by the BMA. The best way to shift the centre ground to where you want it might be to take an outrageous, extreme position, so that your true goal seems moderate. Shoot for the stars and you may just reach the moon.
My theory is that this ludicrous proposal is designed to make a politically achievable target seem moderate. The BMA wants plain packaging laws for cigarettes to be brought in, and today's furore will only distracts civil liberties campaigners from that objective. Clever stuff; though I might be giving them too much credit. Maybe they really are what they seem: anti-individual, anti-liberal, anti-choice paternalists who think that nanny knows best.
I wrote about plain packaging laws earlier this week: Plain packaging laws are stupid and illiberal.
Cocaine, crack and crime
There's a fascinating post on The Atlantic Cities blog today, which argues that the spectacular drop in crime the US enjoyed during the 1990s was down to a fall in the price of cocaine (and, therefore, the highly-addictive crack cocaine):
Cocaine was the driving force behind the majority of drug-related violence throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. It was the main target of the federal War on Drugs and was the highest profit drug trade overall. In 1988, the American cocaine market was valued at almost $140 billion dollars, over 2 percent of U.S. GDP. The violence that surrounded its distribution and sale pushed the murder rate to its highest point in America's history (between 8-10 per 100,000 residents from 1981-1991), turned economically impoverished cities like Baltimore, Detroit, Trenton and Gary, Indiana, into international murder capitals, and made America the most violent industrialized nation in the world.
Then in 1994, the crime rate dropped off a cliff. The number of homicides would plummet drastically, dropping almost 50 percent in less than ten years. The same would go for every garden variety of violent crime on down to petty theft. The same year as the sharp decline in crime, cocaine prices hit an all-time low. According to the DEA's System to Retrieve Information on Drug Evidence (STRIDE) data, the price per gram of cocaine bottomed out in 1994 at around $147 (calculated in 2003 dollars), the lowest it had been since statistics became available.
The Atlantic says that this drop in price is down to more sophisticated smuggling techniques, which increased supply. Of course, correlation isn't causation etc. But it sounds like a plausible explanation – reduced margins for dealers means the risks of jail or death from turf wars (the main source of drug gang-related murders) has less of a pay-off. The emergence of crystal meth (very low-cost to produce) probably hit demand for cocaine too.
The other side of all this, which I'm surprised the article doesn't mention, is that lower costs mean that addicts find it easier to pay for their habit. They're less likely to resort to theft and mugging, and so on. It's also noteworthy that crack probably only emerged as a way to get more "bang for the buck" out of cocaine while trafficking was harder.
The upshot of all this is that reducing the price of drugs like cocaine in Britain would probably help with crime rates as well. Drug legalization would be ideal, but a more achievable work-around might be to instruct customs workers to turn a blind eye or take a coffee break when flights from Colombia are coming in to Heathrow. They do it for European countries already, where there are seldom-enforced limits on how much alcohol or tobacco can be brought in. Extending the practice to one more country could make a surprisingly positive difference to the UK's crime rates.
Plain packaging laws are stupid and illiberal
Most puritans have been put sharply on the defensive in recent years. Drug prohibitionists may finally be losing their war, and campaigns like the government’s Talk To Frank, which helpfully gives the going street value of common drugs among other things, suggest that the cultural war is already won. Anti-sex campaigners must be even more depressed about how things are going, although to be fair they must be fighting the most unwinnable war in human history. On both counts, personal responsibility and liberalism seem to be winning over social conservatism. Thank god for that.
It’s strange, then, that anti-smoking campaigners seem to be advancing dramatically across the world. The indoor smoking ban, which besides being fundamentally illiberal is also putting half the British pub industry out of business, is now lauded by human weather-vane David Cameron, who used to oppose it. And now Australia has become the first country to introduce a “plain-packaging” law. Basically, it means that cigarettes will now have to be sold in plain white boxes with big health warnings on them and no logos. The plans are monumentally stupid. And, unsurprisingly, anti-smoking groups want to bring them here.
The laws are deeply illiberal. Arguments for the smoking ban to protect pub staff from second-hand smoke were unconvincing and weak, but at least made from a position of protecting third parties from smokers. Plain packaging laws do nothing of the sort; they simply treats adults like children by making "bad things" less shiny. The government should have no place in trying to change what adults do in their private lives if it only concerns them and other consenting adults – that is the essence of liberalism. That there is even a discussion of how to interfere in adults' lives like this to make them "better" should be chilling to anybody who considers herself a liberal.
I don’t expect anti-smoking campaigners to care about individual rights and personal liberties. These are basically irrelevant to them, because they see most of the adult population as bleating livestock who need to be controlled by "experts" for their own good.
What these anti-liberals should care about are the unintended consequences of their actions. What plain packaging laws will do is, essentially, empower counterfeit cigarette sellers by removing their biggest hurdle – replicating the designs on cigarette boxes. Currently, a fake pack of cigarettes is pretty easy to spot because of the shoddy quality of the box. If this is made uniformly plain across cigarette packets, it becomes much easier for people to pass fake counterfeits off as the real thing. And more people will be inclined to buy fakes knowingly as well – whatever social sanctioning there is against people smoking dud cigarettes will evaporate once the prestige of smoking a good brand is removed.
That means that fraud is easier; that money goes to criminal gangs instead of tobacco company shareholders; and that smokers’ health is endangered even more because of the shortcuts taken by cigarette counterfeiters. I don’t care if someone wants to smoke crappy Chinese-made cigarettes, but they had better be aware of their choices.
Australia has never been known for being a particularly liberal place, but it’s a great shame that anti-smoking paternalists are so powerful in Britain too, where there is a long tradition of liberalism. Adults should be allowed to be adults, without interference from the state. It is sad that this even has to be said. There are compelling consequentialist arguments against plain packaging, but in a free society they shouldn’t have to be made at all.
Edit: Angry Exile gives an interesting correction in the comments:
A slight correction from an expat Down Under. They're not going to be plain white boxes but plain olive, a colour the Health Minister tells us has been determined by trick cyclists as psychologically the most unattractive to smokers (yes, really), and with the obligatory big death cancer horror picture in the middle - example of one proposed design here.
The rubbery slope
The Telegraph reports that rubber bullets, or baton rounds, may be used against student protesters at the upcoming march. Rubber bullets have never been used in Great Britain (though they have been used in Northern Ireland), and have only been "pre-approved" once, during the London riots this summer. Deploying them now is a worrying step towards a dangerous “shoot first, ask questions later” approach to riot control, and should be reversed.
Despite widespread public perception of them as relatively harmless method of crowd control, rubber bullets are extremely dangerous. In a study of 90 patients suffering from injuries from their use in Northern Ireland, one person died and 17 were permanently disabled or disfigured. Over 35 years of their use in Northern Ireland, they have killed 17 people. Rubber bullets can be lethal to those they are fired upon.
Perhaps such force was needed at times in Northern Ireland. But it's obvious that student protesters won't present the same level of danger to civilians and police officers as riots at the height of the Troubles. Previous student protests have turned ugly, but not on a wide scale. The types of clashes that took place would not have been avoided by rubber bullets.
The police say that the bullets will only be used as a last resort. Yet they have not defined the circumstances under which they would be used, nor have they explained why they are needed now. What is so dangerous about these students that they require unprecedented police force to be controlled?
I doubt that the police will actually use their bullets against the students; to do so would be a PR disaster for them and the government. (If they did, incidentally, it would be politically lethal for the government.) The real danger is the slippery slope that arming the police with rubber bullets sets us on. If they are armed this time, they’ll be armed next time, and again and again. The police use of rubber bullets will become an ever more common occurrence. We're already seeing this – after a history of not using rubber bullets against marches, they have been approved twice in the last few months. Their deployment and, eventually, use will become a commonplace if not blocked by the government.
There is no need for the police to be armed with such dangerous weapons against a bunch of marching students, and to do so would set yet another dangerous precedent that empowers the police to be violent against protesters. We should jealously guard Britain's traditionally unarmed police from trigger-happy politicians and commissioners.
A measure of paternalism
Is measuring alcohol units a good thing? That was the question posed by a debate on Saturday at the Battle of Ideas. At first glance, it seems entirely reasonable that we should know the alcohol content of a given drink. But units are quite different: they allow us to compare the amount of alcohol to an ostensibly objective 'daily guideline'.
It very quickly emerged that this 'guideline' is flawed, if not harmful. From a medical perspective, it is almost impossible to predict the effect of alcohol on the average person. After all, we all have different levels of tolerance, are susceptible to different conditions, and are affected by a multitude of other factors too. The truth is all alcohol is unhealthy; and we know it! But by creating this artificial, arbitrary, and ultimately quite useless measure of alcohol consumption, we risk creating a problem. By definition.
Without an objective standard of what is healthy and unhealthy, we tend to conform to cultural norms. Alcohol consumption experiences its ups and downs, with one generation guzzling gin in Georgian proportions, and another religiously enthralled to temperance. Society itself defines this level of socially acceptable drinking. When we exceed it we are seen to have a problem. More importantly, we're brought up to see ourselves as having a problem, and in extreme cases friends and family intervene. It is a process that has been serving humanity well since at least 3000 BC, when Egypt's Pharaohs started mass-producing wine.
Despite agreeing that the measurement was flawed, a panellist at a government health body stood up and said that we nevertheless needed to look beyond the individual's right to drink, and look at society as a whole. He implied that measures needed to be taken to protect people from themselves, as individuals are too stupid or ignorant to know what is good for them. And thus that society is too ill informed to define an acceptable drinking norm. He brought up extreme problem cases, citing studies of alcohol addiction, and its effects on families and friends. Another doctor chipped in by saying the flaws of alcohol units paled in comparison to the need to inform the public of what they are consuming. They all called for greater regulation, restrictions and taxation, to the detriment of all drinkers.
Of course doctors know better than anyone else what the individual can suffer from excessive alcohol consumption, but these statements suggest a more sinister campaign for wider social control rather than individualised help for the particular patient. There is a fundamental difference between providing "information", and providing knowledge. The first is by their own admission deeply biased. Whereas knowledge is already provided not only by individual diagnoses and by society at large, but every Saturday morning by alcohol's very own resident teacher from experience: the hangover.
Do we own our bodies?
Yesterday morning the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority announced that it would increase the ‘fees’ it offers for women to donate eggs from £250 to £750. (At the taxpayer’s expense, of course.) There is a serious shortage of eggs so HFEA wishes to encourage more women to come forward. HEFA argued that the increase is to cover costs and not act as an ‘inducement’ which is prohibited under EU rules.
We should consider the unfortunate consequences of the prevention of financial inducements for the sale of eggs. Firstly, there is a shortage of eggs so potential parents are being denied the ability to have children – surely that is also unethical, or at least unfair? Demand exceeds supply – in economic terms we need to allow the market to set a price which would increase supply (of course, this may make infertility treatment via the NHS more expensive, but that is merely an argument against nationalising such services). Secondly, as with all prohibitions, are the unintended consequences which lie in the creation ‘fertility tourism’ and probably an illegal egg trade. Naturally, such a trade endangers the health of both donors and recipients. If the sale of eggs were legal, the egg trade would be both cheaper and far more subject to oversight and safety.
In essence, we have a situation where people are being denied the potential of having children whilst at the same time donors are being exploited and inducements are being offered, which is exactly what the ban and its advocates seek to avoid. This situation is clearly the worst of all possible worlds.
What startled me most in reading about this were the views of those opposed to allowing women to sell their own eggs. For instance, this comment by Dr David King, Director of Human Genetics Alert that; "Ethically, it's wrong to make part of the human body a commodity... The body should not be part of commerce."
I fundamentally disagree with such a position – and I think the same applies to blood and organs as much as eggs or sperm. If individuals wish to sell their eggs freely, that should be their choice. I would argue that it is fundamentally unethical to deny individuals the freedom to do so. It is also worth observing that even if a market in eggs were created, there is no reason to suppose that some women would not choose to donate eggs charitably.
There are many other activities which, by prohibiting free markets, governments deny us the rights to use our bodies as we see fit - narcotics, smoking, prostitution and others. Such prohibitions not only invariably fail but they also create opportunities for criminals and harm the most vulnerable, thereby necessitating more government intervention in the form of law enforcement as John Meadowcroft’s excellent book Prohibitions shows (On this topic there is a chapter by Mark Cherry addressing the specific issue of organs).
But there is an even more fundamental issue at stake. By denying the ability to use our bodies in the way in which we see fit the state is denying us property rights over our bodies and staking a claim to ownership. A person who does not have ownership over their own body is usually referred to as a slave.
Fat taxed enough already
Easy on the cheddar, chubby! Don't even think about eating those fries, fatty! Do I even have to mention the profiteroles, porky? Are these merely playground taunts? Worringly, they increasingly echo the voice of governments worldwide.
Owing to the rise of so called 'fat taxes', authorities are taking an ever-more active part in what their citizens digest (and what comes out of their wallets, of course). In the last few months alone, Hungary, France and Denmark have all implemented their own 'fat tax'. And whilst, as it stands, no gendarme will be confiscating your next banana-split, authorities, in their paternalistic wisdom, are increasingly frowning upon foods deemed undesirable.
Take Denmark, for example: a range of fatty foods, including even milk and butter, will be subjected to a tax if their saturated fat content is above 2.3%. The price of a pack of butter, for example, will increase by 45% due to the tax. Therefore, so it is thought, those selfish souls who indulge themselves on fatty foods will buy tofu and lentils instead: hey presto, obesity problem solved!
Things are never so simple, of course. The tax has already been received by many Danish firms as a 'bureaucratic nightmare', piling on additional costs to firms in an already tough period. Once more, any tax such as this is going to be inherently regressive; those least able to afford any price increases will be hit the hardest. But what does it matter? The French 'fat tax' is expected to raise an estimated €120,000,000 p.a.. A nice little earner.
Nor are we immune to such government meddling here in Perfidious Albion. Having successfully tackled all our other social, political and economic dilemmas, David Cameron is allegedly so enamoured by the idea of a 'fat tax' that he is toying with the idea of implementing one of our very own, as too are Finland and Romania.
Most are in agreement that obesity is a society-wide problem. The more rotund we become, the more our healthcare costs increase. So what's the solution? Surely not pricing poor people out of the market for fatty foods. We must seek a solution other than 'more taxes' – the default position of any government. Perhaps our BMIs could be helped by making it easier for people to help out at sport clubs without undergoing a raft of CRB checks, or by reforming our health system which currently permits the cost of atrocious health habits to be picked up by someone else.
Sadly the precedent has already been set. When we already allow the government to dictate what we may and may not consume in the form of innumerable drugs, letting them control what we eat is a logical advancement. And it will all be done for our 'own good'.
And nor is this merely a European phenomenon: the world over governments are beguiled with the notion of controlling our bodies. In New York, for example, it is now compulsory to display the calorific content of foods, presumably because people use to think that a bucket of KFC was a healthy snack. How long is it till cars are plastered with images of car-crash victims? After all, cars are dangers, didn't you know?
Along with this, Chicago's new mayor has implemented a mandatory 'wellness programme', in which one can only presume that those unworthy enough to be a few pounds overweight are scolded by their organic-mung-bean-fed superiors.
Can't we be left alone to comfort-eat in peace? Lord knows we need it, considering how grim the new is nowadays. If only someone would implement a tax on bad ideas produced by government.