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*Promote this *Quality review of the the Tobacco industry!

I never understood this. Why ruin good bud with nasty low grade tobacco?
Also, why risk hepatitis, herpes, and other disease by sharing a slobbery joint with your bro's? I won't even share glass.

@VoodooV: "Every one of these youtube crusaders are comfortably enjoying the perks of a system they despise."

What perks? Like roads and firemen? You know, it's not like we couldn't have those things without government. And those kinds of services are only a small portion of the federal budget. In fact, from all the excise taxes collected on gasoline, tobacco and alcohol, they'd cover the roads completely, which costs around $60 billion annually. In fact, things like the EPA, Dept. of Trans, NASA, Dept. of Edu, all cost less than the revenue the federal government categorizes as "other." Look it up: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historicals

So what about all the wars and militarism? Is that, too, a perk? And the prison industrial complex that locks up 1% of our population? What are these perks you speak of?

Even Ayn Rand took gov't assistance.

I love it when statists bring this up. I personally am not an Objectivist, and find lots of flaws with their ideology, but this is a cheap blow. Obviously it shows the economic illiteracy of most statists. For one, she's forced to pay into social security, so therefore why shouldn't she receive some of it back? And second, if you spend more than a couple seconds reading about U.S. monetary policy, you'd know that the purchasing power of the dollar is reduced over time due to inflation, and hence savings are always impacted. This should alarm you instead of excite you.

The whole thing is infested with logical fallacies: false equivalencies, ad homs, strawmen, and even a no true scotsman thrown in for shits and giggles.

By all means don't take any time to point out which things he said were these things. No, that'd be helpful, and we wouldn't want to cloudy any appeals to emotion with pesky things like fact and well thought out rebuttals.

they spend all this time criticizing the problems of gov't and NEVER ONCE demonstrate how it would work without these systems.

I think there are plenty who do. It's just that statists don't accept those answers, or any answers that don't emulate the current status quo systems they're accustomed to. I'm not interested in replacing public schools with another bureaucracy.

Maher makes a good point. Liberals won't hesitate to shit all over Christianity but if you dare criticize Islam, you might as well be a Nazi, even though Islam is objectively more conservative than Christianity.

But then, hypocrisy is common amongst most liberals. They call for an end to the War on Drugs because of its lack of efficacy but then call for a War on Guns because apparently that would somehow be more effective..? Drugs, alcohol and tobacco cause far more death and suffering than guns but you'd be hard-pressed to find any liberal who would support banning them.

I'm not really concerned if someone is an addict or a criminal. I'm simply concerned with the repercussions of hard drugs being made readily available for anyone to use. The prohibition did increase crime, sure, but the availability of liquor since then has caused far more deaths and ruined many more lives. Hell, in 2010, alcohol killed almost as many people in the U.S. as guns did. Tobacco causes more than 5 million deaths worldwide each year. Just because something is legal doesn't mean it isn't harmful. The widespread availability of liquor and tobacco has caused more damage than the entire war on drugs.

As for education, I don't think that's the root of the problem. Everyone knows that smoking is unhealthy and that alcohol is addictive and that driving while drunk is incredibly dangerous. The problem isn't lack of awareness. The problem is apathy. People know these things yet do them anyway because they just don't care. The momentary relief/pleasure derived from liquor and cigarettes is more important to them. If all drugs were legalized, I have no doubt that more people would use them because they'd be easier to get and people don't really care about the downsides.

Yeah, I've seen references like this. It's crap. A quick Google search turned up articles where fat people were motivated to lose their weight because of fat shaming. There was a recent article in our local paper that made a similar point. You can always find a study to support your view. I prefer the evidence of my own eyes.
Obesity has soared in one generation because we now refer to fat women as BBW. Manufacturers of planes and cars, clothing are now designing for heavier people.
Acceptance of fat has led to the current crisis (and I do acknowledge the role of the fast food industry which I compare to the tobacco industry).
Remember how cigarette smoking was once seen as glamourous? Not any more... it was re-branded as a disgusting vice that took its toll on your health, your looks, your breath and people (like me) dropped the habit so that in one generation it's the exception rather than the rule.
Sure, there are hardcore smokers who will never be cured. And some fat people are always going to stay fat rather than develop some willpower. But it should never be accepted or promoted somehow.

I just don't understand how you can think that the power to influence public debate through politics and the media of pro green energy groups can compare to that of the size and influence of the old energy sector.

Green energy is a cottage industry compared to old energy. The power of environmentalists and even a few activist minded billionaires would pale to the spending power and incentive to act of old energy companies.

Surely if you're concerned about money muddying the debate, the first group you would focus on is the ones with disproportionately more money?

Also your arguments I've seen previously echo the tobacco / lung cancer debate. Aren't you concerned you're being duped by these supposedly authoritative blogs?

I interviewed the head of NORML a few years back for an op-ed I wrote. And while I was unable to use any of the information he provided at the time, he said that one of the first things Congress did was to exempt alcohol and tobacco from the Controlled Substances Act. Afterword, it didn't take much to vilify marijuana alongside heroin and LSD.

I honestly don't get how it can be schedule i. While I'd move it off the schedules all together (or create a schedule vi and toss in alcohol and tobacco with it, call it substances that can be taxed and controlled at the federal level, with each state and local districts being allowed to ban or add additional controls on them, such as the federal mandate to be 21 to buy alcohol despite not being on any schedule, schedule vi would seek to codify that) I think I'd move meth to schedule i, despite the ingredients being lower level schedules, and I'd probably move LSD from schedule i to ii or iii... probably ii.

I'm with @newtboy. Do you actually read the responses or just cherry pick the parts that suit your agenda? Christ, even in the part you quoted I said "the first step". The paragraph before that explicitly outlined how that there were huge challenges to overcome.

And you're posting links from an organisation that

worked with the tobacco company Philip Morris to question serious cancer risks to secondhand smoke, and to lobby against government public-health reforms... and is known "for its persistent questioning of climate science, for its promotion of 'experts' who have done little, if any, peer-reviewed climate research, and for its sponsorship of a conference in New York City in 2008 alleging that the scientific community's work on global warming is fake."

Because it's snake oil, and people die from it. The reason I asked @Sniper007 what he would suggest as an alternative is because there are some interesting alternatives currently being researched, but diet has already been shown to be ineffective. It pretty much killed Steve Jobs, for a start.

Yes, absolutely, you should eat healthily as a general life rule (although raw vegan is nonsense). There's some good evidence to show that diet can lessen your chance of developing cancer, but as a treatment? Nope.

Cannabis, on the other hand, may potentially have some benefit but as of today, there's no evidence to support that (and Cancer Research UK have labelled internet claims of such "highly misleading"). It's further complicated by the fact that smoking cannabis is often combined with tobacco smoking.

Finally, yeah, chemo is awful, but right now it's still the best treatment.

Naw, he's just informed about the behavior of chickenshit conformism. Raised during a period of formula baby drink through a bottle. Like that old baby from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He never got any titty time as an actual baby, just a buncha bottles with milk/formula. Now he spends his days sucking down tobacco and obsessing over women with big breasts.

If you can't see the correlation between the mass insanity that is the internet and our fucked up commercialized, biotech driven formative years, then you need to quickly reassess your existence.