They got 15,667 signatures to support a measure that would take North Dakota’s share of the tobacco settlements and put it in a trust fund to…

...establish a nine-member board that would be put in charge of developing a comprehensive program to discourage smoking, smokeless tobacco chewing and other forms of tobacco use.

When I spoke with one of the initiate measure supporters at their booth at the North Dakota State Fair they told me that it didn’t matter whether or not you agreed with the tobacco lawsuits in the first place.  The money is coming to the state now whether we like it or not, so we should do “something responsible” with it instead of just letting the legislators waste it.

Personally, I don’t think setting up a board of bureaucrats to combat the free consumption of a perfectly legal product to be all that “responsible.” All this trust fund will do is fund a quasi-government board of unelected do-gooders which exists for no other reason than restrict our freedoms.

I am a fierce opponent of all types of government waste, but better to let the legislators fritter this money on the sort of pointless projects they’re wont to come up with than to use it to create a perpetually-funded nanny state bureaucracy to annoy us all into living our lives as they see fit.

The optimal situation would be to just distribute the money back to the taxpayers and be done with it.  But that probably makes too much sense.