Your tax dollars at work: Fighting tobacco in other countries (but not at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue)

More creepy fascism from the science czar's office. Several flacks at the Office of Science and Technology Policy have a press release up on the White House web site. They're ready to take the fight to tobacco around the world!

Protecting kids and the public from tobacco is also important around the world. There are 1.2 billion smokers already worldwide, and tobacco use in developing countries is on the rise. Reversing this trend—through proven interventions such as monitoring tobacco data, protecting people from tobacco smoke, offering help to people who want to quit tobacco use, applying sensible limits on tobacco advertising, raising the price of tobacco, and warning the public about the dangers of tobacco—will save millions of lives.

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This week marks the fifth anniversary of the entry into force of the Framework Convention for Tobacco Control, a treaty to reduce tobacco's devastating health consequences around the world. We join with others across the world who are concerned about public health in their own countries and recognize the urgency of curbing the tobacco epidemic. All nations, including our own, should work to save lives by helping communities take on this most preventable cause of death.

Obama has already passed legislation banning certain types of cigarettes, including flavored smokes. (Although he hasn't managed to kick the smoking habit himself, we gather.) More broadly though, this is what we can expect in the coming years if health care reform passes. With socialized health care, the individual's health problems, such as tobacco addiction, will be subsidized by the entire country. If everyone's health is the government's business, then the government will necessarily take strong, even global, action to regulate individual health.

That's the vision of the Framework Convention for Tobacco Control. The treaty calls on signatory nations not to outlaw tobacco directly, but to tax the hell out of it and scare the public with bogus reports of secondhand smoke. Maybe Obama should have brought this up at his speech in Cairo? We can only imagine how the Muslim world, where smoking sheesa is extremely popular, would respond.