Say Anything Blog

When ballot Measure 3, which created a permanent anti-smoking bureaucracy in North Dakota, was being considered myself and others warned that it would be used as a perpetually-funded (by tobacco lawsuit settlement dollars and your tax dollars) campaign against whatever it is we’re doing that the nanny staters don’t like.  Even to the point of campaigning against the will of the electorate.

Well today the newly-formed committee has announced its new agenda, and sure enough a $2-a-pack hike on cigarettes and a ban on smoking in bars is on the agenda even though a similar ban on smoking in bars died in the state legislature this session.

North Dakota’s newly formed anti-tobacco committee wants a $2-a-pack state cigarette tax and a smoking ban in all public places, an early draft of its agenda shows.

The idea of raising North Dakota’s cigarette tax, which is now 44 cents a pack, has not come up in the 2009 Legislature. The tax has not changed since 1993.

Any state tobacco tax increase would come on top of a newly increased federal tobacco excise tax, which jumped this month from 39 cents to $1.01 a pack.

The committee’s work has been the recent focus of a money fight in the North Dakota House. Republican lawmakers argue the panel is unnecessary, even though voters endorsed a November ballot initiative to establish it. Measure 3 won approval from 54 percent of the voters last fall.

The committee, which is independent of the state Health Department, has been given the job of drafting a state tobacco control plan using recommendations from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Funny how the Measure 3 proponents are standing behind their mandate from the electorate as represented by the fact that their measure was approved, yet want to take up a ban on smoking in bars that was already killed by the representatives of the people in the legislature.  We’ve now gone, thanks to Measure 3, from policy being set by a legislative assembly made up of our duly-elected political leaders to policy being set by a bunch of unelected bureaucrats.

Wonderful, right?  And there’s no doubt that this unelected bureaucracy will act as a nanny state advocacy group essentially using our tax dollars to campaign against the will of the people.  Because they know what’s best for us.

Frankly, this isn’t at all unlike the Temperance Boards that were set up by the proponents of prohibition to battle anti-prohibition sentiment among the public.  Except now we’re talking about tobacco, and the idiots are operating on our money (and the money of the companies whose product they’re crusading against).