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Many people attempt to make their fortunes by guessing where stock prices, interest rates or real-estate values will go in the future. While my financial status might benefit from such necromancy, I still haven't fully recovered from Sunday School, where we were taught that greed and avarice were just as evil as adultery and theft.
So instead, I've been speculating about the next target of the Purity Police, and I think I've found it: caffeine.
I'll grant that an attack sounds preposterous at the moment, when there's a Starbucks on every urban corner with sufficient foot traffic, when even greasy spoons offer latte and when rural convenience stores promote their espresso.
To put it another way, in all the political uproar a
couple of years ago about those White House coffees
that Bill Clinton put on for major campaign donors, the
complaints concerned money, not the fact that an addictive
stimulant was being openly dispensed in the Executive
Mansion.
But the campaign will come, and if previous assaults on our liberties by the Purity Police are any indication, it will come in these stages:
1) The publication and promotion of a book that details the horrors of caffeine -- its effects on the central nervous system, the destruction of tropical rain forests to plant coffee bushes, the lengths to which addicts will go for their fix, etc.
One such product just appeared on the new-books shelf at the local library, and some nosing around on the Internet produced several similar titles.
No one can say whether one of these will be the
Reefer Madness
of the anti-caffeine industry, but
it's safe to predict that an anti-caffeine book will soon
create a buzz. Time and Newsweek will publish cover
stories about caffeine and its dangers, followed by
segments on 20/20,
Dateline,
and 60
Minutes.
2) Congress, ever eager to respond to public demand without unduly perturbing big campaign contributors like soft-drink bottlers, will respond with legislation that allows the Food and Drug Administration to require caffeine content on product labels.
After all, some people may be allergic to caffeine, and others may prefer to avoid it, so caffeine labeling seems reasonable.
3) The Purity Police have never stopped at
reasonable
before, so there's no reason to think
they'll be different in the future.
They will grant that caffeine may be acceptable for
consenting adults,
but society must protect
innocent children from this addictive scourge. We need
drug-free schools, not schools with caffeine-dispensing
machines in the hall, with the school district in a
marketing partnership with these drug distributors, rather
than protecting the health of our children.
It will be pointed out that children are deliberately
being lured into the loathsome toils of caffeine addiction.
If anyone asks so what?
there will be research which
shows that the latest school-shooter had stoked up on
coffee that morning and that more than 95 percent of
violent felons had ingested caffeine within the six hours
preceding their crimes.
4) The Purity Police will use their strength in some progressive jurisdiction like Boulder or Davis, Calif., to get an ordinance banning caffeine sales to minors.
This will spread, even after several parents go to jail for allowing their children to drink iced tea at home.
Many family-friendly restaurants will post signs that
say only caffeine-free beverages and desserts served
here.
The Purity Police will picket some of these places,
based on their reasoning that impressionable children
cannot be expected to know that the adults they might
emulate are sipping decaf, and thus succumb to the mistaken
idea that it is acceptable to drink a dangerous beverage
that looks and smells the same as the allegedly harmless
decaf.
5) With encouragement from the Purity Police, lawsuits
will be filed by caffeine victims,
and employers
will respond by banning caffeine in the work place -- after
all, people drinking coffee, tea and pop aren't getting any
work done, and they can get edgy and nervous and create an
unpleasant work environment
for their
colleagues.
Caffeine screening will be added to the pre-employment blood and urine tests, and employees will be regularly tested for its presence.
6) Caffeine in all forms will be made illegal without a prescription. The resulting black market will finance some ruthless criminal gangs whose bribes and payoffs will corrupt many police agencies as our prison-industrial complex continues its handsome growth rate
But our children will be protected, of course, and the Purity Police will have to find a new target, something like chewing gum or bottled water.
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