Smoking and The License to Kill (yourself)

I am a physician.  At the time in my teenage development when I would have taken up cigarettes I was given two alternatives by my father.  Dad was a track and field coach at the University of Kansas.  He had some modest successes, like Al Oerter, my roommate in college who has won the Olympic Discus competition so many times I have lost count.   

Anyway, my Dad said:  "Son, you have two choices." 

(To myself I thought: "Gee!  Neat!  What will the choices be?  Cigars or cigarettes?  Cigarettes or a pipe ... that would be distinguished.")  

"To wit:" he said, "You may smoke anything you like.  Or you may continue to live at home with your mother and me."

So, I am a physician and I am a non-smoker.  I am also a realist.  After all the years and all the patients and all the lectures about how they should stop smoking I finally bowed to my wife's assessment of addicts: "They aren't going to give up their addiction no matter what you do.  Instead of wasting your time on folks who will never change, why don't you concentrate on a solution that would get smokers to pay for their own excessive medical care utilization?" 

Then, off-handedly she threw in a couple other ideas.  "And while you are at it, why don't you come up with a comprehensive approach that would keep the tobacco companies in business, create a new support industry to monitor smokers and cigarette purchases.  And don't forget to at least make sure that only adults can purchase cigarettes.  You probably can't control the adults who will give cigarettes to minors, but you can try to restrict buying to an adults-only population."

"Anything ELSE!" I moaned, "or is that ALL you think I should do?" 

"That ought to do it for now.  Let me know what you come up with." 

And she waltzed out into her eggplant and tomato garden, leaving me thinking I never should have mentioned the Attorney's General and their suits against the tobacco companies in the first place.  I reminded myself that, "If I would just listen to the ATC (All Things Considered) reports and analyses on situations like this and not try to participate in the discussion, I would be a lot better off."

But then, I DID get to thinking about a solution and, in a flash, it came to me: create a Smoking License,  a License to Smoke, just like a private pilot's license or a driver's license.  Look at the logical parallels. 

Take the private pilot's license as an example: if God had meant for men to fly, we would have been born with wings and an intrinsic ability to sense the magnetic fields of the earth so we could find our way home as automatically as migrating birds.  And private citizens are licensed so when they commit "pilot error" and "buy the farm" as the saying goes in aviation circles, the Transportation Safety Board will be able to look at the license and see who the fool was who thought he could take a short-cut through the thunder storm, instead of flying around it.  This is an example of the pilot certification becoming, so to speak, a License to Fly and similar to James Bond's double-0-7 license, a License to Kill.  Of course, in this aviation example it is a License to Kill Yourself.

Now take the driver's license as a second example: unlike flying, God did intend for all of us to drive, even those who logically should be restricted to riding a bus for life and never getting behind the wheel of anything besides a NASCAR-simulator arcade game.  And since driving does not require the ability to discern magnetic fields or even have the good sense to THINK while operating a motor vehicle, the piece of paper issued by the State DMV also could be viewed as a License to Kill. 

Unfortunately, especially in the case of intoxicated drivers, it is usually a License to Kill Others, like old people, mothers driving a van full of neighborhood kids to their ballet lesson or a school bus full of high school band members going to Washington to perform for the President.

Which brings me to the Smoking License, an outstanding concept in licensing, if I do say so myself.  Here is the answer to all of the seemingly impossible criteria my psychologist wife imposed on my potential solution:

Anyone, that is, any adult wishing to smoke would simply apply for a Smoking License.  The marvelous aspect of this solution is that the infrastructure to issue, revoke and monitor the Smoking License is already in place at, where else (?):  the Department of Motor Vehicles.

They already have the computers, the cameras for you photo ID, the laminating machines and the billing and payment programs in place.  In addition, they have on-line communication with every Police Department across the country.

When you are old enough to drive, you get a license.  When you are old enough to smoke, you update your license to reflect the fact you smoke.  How do the Authorities know you are a smoker?  When they take your picture at the DMV, they stick a cigarette in your mouth.  Actually, they would stick a bright, white plastic tube with a disposable tip in your mouth, indicating your chosen preference for black, congested lungs, a hacking cough and the ability to irritate everybody near you who is allergic to cigarette smoke.

In addition to the DMV fee for the motor vehicle license, a smoker would also pay the Smoking License Fee.  This could be a lump sum payment, assuming the smoker had a couple thousand dollars handy at the time of application.  Otherwise, smokers could remit the Smoking License Fees in monthly installments throughout the year.  The actual fees paid would be calculated by the State Attorney General in conjunction with data provided by the State Health Director and would vary with the average amount per person spent on smoking-related diseases in that State during the preceding 12 months. 

Finally, we come to the only part of the solution requiring the application of a little technology: the new bar code or magnetic credit card-like strip on the back of the Smoking License.  The bar code or mag strip would be read by the new tobacco vending machines, or by clerks selling tobacco at retails stores.  The machines (and the retail clerks) would only dispense cigarettes to those with a valid license.  In addition, the mag-stripe license card would be tied to a network (like a credit card network that monitors all the purchases made using the License to Kill (yourself).  The more one used the card, the higher the dollar surcharge that would be attached to each sale.  This is based on the fact that the more one smokes, the more likely they will have to use scarce medical resources when they get lung, heart and other smoking-induced problems.

So, there you have the elements of a solution to the problem of regulating tobacco use.  It allows smokers to keep smoking, States to continuously collect revenue to cover the cost of smoking-related illness, vending machine operators to continue vending, but only to adults with Smoking Licenses and the tobacco companies to keep producing "nicotine-delivery products," so the growers don't have to sit, dejectedly in their North Carolina fields, smoking their whole crop themselves.

For further information on the Smoking License, Model Legislation and Lobbying Assistance Funds, please contact the Foundation for Smoking License Promotion, an intellectual think-tank.  The Foundation is funded by three groups which have only altruistic motives for helping smokers: the Pulmonary Disease Physicians of America (who care for acutely and chronically ill lung patients), the National Chest Disease Hospitals of the U.S. (who provide the intensive respiratory care units used by the Pulmonary Disease Physicians) and T-OPEC,  (The Tobacco and Other Products Economic Council) an independent, non-partisan, unbiased arm of the tobacco industry.  NOTE: No animals were harmed in the course of this research . . . in fact, no animals were even used, just humans.