It’s now illegal to buy cigarettes in San Francisco unless you’re at least 21 years old, thanks to a new ordinance approved unanimously by the city’s Board of Supervisors. San Francisco is, of course, legendary as a city open to any number of alternative lifestyle choices and feel-good pharmaceutical activities, among them behaviors that come with no small measure of health risks. The anything-goes vibe has been cultivated for decades and is fiercely defended by the pleasure-seekers who flock to Baghdad-by-the-Bay. It’s not the sort of place one expects to find restrictions on adults and their activities.
For example, just imagine the outcry if, in the name of protecting the health of the young, the city tried to limit consensual sex to those 21 and older.
But the city’s hippie-dippy laissez-faire attitude falls by the wayside when the drug in question is nicotine. “Our city has a history of taking on major industries in the name of public health,” harrumphed supervisor Scott Wiener, who sponsored the age-restrictive ordinance.
Legislation, big and small, is also in the works regarding cannabis. California—a trailblazer in medicinal marijuana—has fallen behind Colorado, Washington, and Oregon when it comes to “recreational” marijuana. Loath to miss a trend, California is gearing up for an effort to legalize cannabis outright. San Francisco wants to be prepared to help in the sensible proliferation of quality pot-shops with pleasing signage and has set up a “task force” to help craft weed-friendly zoning rules. Who created the task force? Supervisor Scott Wiener.
Wiener is typical of our times, an age of bizarro-world bluenoses. Soft drinks used to be the teetotal stuff prohibitionists demanded; now soda has replaced demon rum on the new prohibitionists’ list of moral hazards. Sugar is bad, and so too salt and fat—unless they’re used in farm-to-table-locally-sourced-hardwood-smoldered bacon.
But most curious is the ongoing crusade against tobacco. For decades we’ve been told that cigarettes kill, and yet as the noose around Big Tobacco’s neck is pulled ever tighter, state after state is loosening laws against smoking marijuana. The only good tobacky, it would seem, is wacky-tobacky.
Smoking must be stamped out! Unless you’re smoking to alter your consciousness—in which case, like, who are we to harsh your buzz, dude?
