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My computer communications consist primarily of
uploading these columns to Denver, checking CompuServe once
a week and stringing null-modem cables between incompatible
computers that need to transfer data. Most of the inhabited
universe is long-distance from Salida, which makes the
information highway
an expensive toll road for those
of us who don't live in standard metropolitan statistical
areas.
But while visiting another little mountain town recently, I ran across a rather mystic fellow who claimed to be a world-class Internet surfer, able to gather any information from anywhere.
How good is he? He told me that with the proper access
codes -- it was something like
abra@cadabra.open@sesame#hocus@pocus_oracle
-- he
could download future data from Internet.
I've got to keep hacking at it,
he said,
because I haven't figured out how to set a specific
future date or visit just the forums I'm interested in. As
it is, you take what you get before the connection
fizzles.
He passed along a disk with his newest such download, a
mono-media text published electronically in 2024 and
entitled Memoirs of Peter Pecksniff, a TEA
agent.
It seems that in 1995, the federal Food and Drug
Administration formally classified nicotine as an addictive
chemical to be regulated; it was listed as a Schedule II
controlled substance, available only be prescription. At
the same time, Colorado became the first state to ban
outdoor smoking year-round, with Gov. Roy Romer citing
forest-fire danger.
Naturally, some scofflaws continued to smoke, and thus arose the Tobacco Enforcement Administration. Pecksniff, the author, was among the first TEA agents.
We had a lot of public support at first,
he
recalled, although there were a few critics who
questioned the need for a draconian bureaucracy to control
tobacco when the same approaches had failed for alcohol
during Prohibition and for other substances during the War
on Drugs. But who cares what they think?
CIA surveillance satellites were refined to detect the infra-red signatures of glowing cigarettes, and special dogs were trained to sniff the breath of people walking down the street; if tell-tale aromas were detected, then the dogs went for the throat.
Again, there were critics,
Pecksniff wrote,
but face it, these criminals were potential dispensers
of second-hand smoke that might kill 3,000 people a year,
and our dogs terminated 300,000 felons the first week of
enforcement. We took our duty to protect lives quite
seriously.
Although the dragon-breath dogs saved the expense of
trials and prisons, social costs still went up. People
did quit,
Pecksniff noted, which made them live
longer and increased pension costs, and it also cut
revenues for health care.
The TEA, which started with
just 10,000 agents, soon had more than a million employees,
further swelling the federal deficit.
We had to guard the borders against tobacco
smugglers, inspect paper mills to make sure they weren't
producing paraphernalia, fly helicopters over rural
farmlands and napalm any suspected tobacco plants. But they
should have known before we started that this would be an
expensive and complicated project.
Nonetheless, Pecksniff felt proud of his
accomplishments, until about 2015. That was the year
that the logic of 1994 became formal law. As some will
recall, the syllogism was that the government has a duty to
protect people from addictive materials, nicotine was
addictive, and therefore, the government must eliminate
nicotine. The TEA got the job of eradicating all addictive
substances.
Scientists soon demonstrated that caffeine was
addictive. For a couple of years, we were busting coffee
bars and tea parlors left and right. They'd been bringing
that stuff in by the boatload, and it really strained the
agency. Then we started the house-to-house no-knock
searches for not just beans and leaves, but paraphernalia
like coffee pots, tea kettles and ceramic cups.
Then came the discovery that laboratory rats, if
force-fed Hershey bars around the clock, got addicted to
the theobromine found in chocolate. We had no choice but
to bomb the factory, although by that time, our public
support was eroding.
It dropped even further in 2012 when the National
Center for the Suppression of Delight discovered that the
spicy capsaicinoids found in chile peppers met the criteria
for addiction: It produced pleasure, victims craved
increased doses, and they suffered withdrawal symptoms if
deprived of their jalapenos and anaheims.
At this point, residents of the southwestern United
States rose up in arms, probably smuggled in from Mexico,
justifying their treason on the grounds that an 1848 treaty
protected their traditions and customs.
Pecksniff retired then, so I don't know how the
insurrection fared, but he did note that in 2013 the
national anthem was changed from land of the free and
home of the brave
to land of the pure and home of
the addictive-substance-free environment.
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