Crack Nicotine: Anti-tobacco Fantasies and the Law of Unintended Consequences
Jack Wheeler
Monday, Oct. 7, 2002
Irresponsibility Run Amok President Bush often eloquently argues for "a new ethic of responsibility” in America, in which Americans assume more personal responsibility for their individual choices and the consequences of their actions. He should consider, then, Betty Bullock, and the members of the California jury that awarded her $28 billion last week, as the antithesis of responsible morality.
Betty started smoking when she was 17. Warned constantly by her doctors for 40 years to stop smoking, she would belligerently respond: "I’m an adult. This is my business.”
Now 64, she ceased being an adult responsible for her life decisions once she got lung cancer, and sued Phillip Morris, makers of the Benson & Hedges cigarettes she smoked all those years, for fraud instead.
In a debauch of irresponsibility, Betty’s jury members pathologically indulged her demand she be treated as a child rather than an adult. Approving law professors at Stanford University said that such giant anti-tobacco punitive awards means a growing number of Californians "have strong doubts about whether cigarettes should remain for sale.”
Little do they realize the nightmarish possibilities of their doubts.
The Right to Be Stupid
In a free country, one ought to have the right to be smart, and the right to be stupid – as stupid as you want to be, provided you initiate no violence to others.
Smoking tobacco is unfathomably stupid. Betty Bullock – or anyone who smokes - is an idiot. Cigarette smoking accounts for some 400,000 cardiopulmonary deaths a year in America, more than 60 times the number of deaths (6,000 to 7,000) attributed to all illegal drugs combined.
Tobacco use is one of the greatest health hazards in America today, needlessly causing hundreds of billions of dollars annually in medical expenses. If Californians desired a truly effective disincentive regarding nicotine use, they would pass a referendum excluding anyone suffering a nicotine-caused disease - and thus a voluntarily acquired disease - from any government medical benefits.
Drug users should not be treated as helpless victims. A tobacco addict is no more justified suing a cigarette manufacturer than a cocaine addict would be suing her supplier. She cannot expect the taxpayers to pay her medical bills resultant from the willful self-destruction of her health, or for her drug pusher to financially reward her for her drug habit.
Orgies of Greed
But the last thing on earth a liberal lawyer or politician wants is to have the law treat people as responsible adults. A lawyer’s bread-and-butter is infantilizing their clients into helpless children. A politician would much rather use the problems caused by tobacco addiction as a rationale to raise taxes.
In tandem with anti-tobacco juries engaging in orgies of indulgence, anti-tobacco politicians in state after state around the country are engaging in orgies of greed. Tobacco taxes have become a golden goose for government coffers. With a city tax alone of $1.50, a pack of cigarettes now costs $7.50 in New York City.
The tobacco companies’ standard objection is that higher taxes will lead to more cigarette smuggling. The anti-tobacco crowd’s standard response is to demand adjacent cities and states have ever-higher tobacco taxes as well.
Yet the entire argument regarding increased taxes and cigarette smuggling is irrelevant and astoundingly naïve. The true threat is unimaginably worse.
Nicotine as an Insecticide
Nicotine is a naturally occurring substance found in many plants, such as eggplant. Its highest concentration occurs in tobacco leaves. Its function is to protect the plant against insects, i.e., it is a natural insecticide.
Black Leaf 40, an environmentally safe and biodegradable agricultural insecticide used around the world, is 40 percent nicotine sulfate. Farmers have been using nicotine sulfate insecticide since the early 1800s. To make it, all you do is boil tobacco leaves in water with a little sulfuric acid (the same acid as in a car battery).
Free-Basing Nicotine
If you mix the resultant nicotine sulfate extract with a common alkali such as lime, then add a solvent such as ether, pure nicotine alkaloid - or free-base "crack” nicotine - will float to the top dissolved in the solvent, which is then evaporated off. A trivially simple procedure that anyone with a high school chemistry course can perform, it is the same process as making free-base cocaine from cocaine hydrochloride powder.
And just as "crack" or free-base cocaine is far more addictive and lethal than cocaine hydrochloride powder, so crack or free-base nicotine would be frighteningly more addictive, and lethal, than tobacco.
The faster a drug rises in the brain, and the higher its concentration, the more potentially addictive it is. Smoking tobacco leaves is a quick and concentrated, and thus addictive, way to administer nicotine - unlike the nicotine skin patch, which delivers the drug slowly. Faster still, much faster and far more concentrated, than smoking plant leaves would be smoking nicotine free base.
Tobacco companies have been aware of this for years. In 1973, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco determined that certain of their competitors (such as Phillip Morris’ Marlboro) were dosing their tobacco with ammonia. This makes the smoke more alkaline, enabling more of the nicotine to be in the smoke, giving it a higher "kick.”
For the same reason, chewers of coca leaf in the Andes always do so with a little lime. New Guinea tribespeople carry a gourd full of powdered lime with a thin bone of the cassowary bird as a stopper; when they chew betel nut, they lick the lime off the bone.
It is thus a small leap to apply these primitive practices and crack cocaine chemistry to tobacco, and make full strength, pure free-base nicotine.
Nicotine as an Addictive Poison
Nicotine is the most addictive substance known to science. It is far more addictive than any illegal drug, including heroin (that is, a lower percentage of nicotine addicts are able to permanently quit than heroin addicts). Smoking crack nicotine would be the fastest way to administer the drug, making crack nicotine many times more addictive than tobacco.
Nicotine acts by stimulating the nicotinic cholinergic receptors located throughout the brain and body. If these receptors are mildly stimulated, such as via smoking tobacco leaves, there will be a sensation of heightened alertness, an improved capacity to focus and block out extraneous stimuli.
Just as the high of crack cocaine is experienced more intensely by the addict than snorting coke powder, so will the high of crack nicotine be more intensely pleasurable to the tobacco addict than smoking tobacco leaves. But if the nicotinic cholinergic receptors are stimulated too strongly, one's brain and body will go into fatal convulsions.
In its ability to quickly and massively overstimulate one's nicotinic cholinergic receptors, crack nicotine is incredibly poisonous. One drop of 40 milligrams of pure uncut crack nicotine smoked in a glass pipe has a 50 percent chance of killing an adult. Two drops will kill you for sure. It is more toxic than cyanide, one-tenth (gram per gram) as toxic as typical military nerve gas. A few drops on your skin, one or two drops on your mucous membranes, and you are dead.
Poisonous Enough to Kill Castro
Thus purveyors of crack nicotine would have to cut or dilute it with water (as it’s water-soluble) by about 20-1. The nicotine sulfate in Black Leaf 40, on the other hand, cannot be absorbed by the skin or membranes well; it is poison only if you swallow it – like an insect is supposed to.
The famous "poison pen” with which the CIA, per John Kennedy’s request in 1963, tried to kill Fidel Castro was a hypodermic needle disguised as a ballpoint pen and filled with Black Leaf 40.
Do the Math
There is an average of 2 milligrams of nicotine in one high-nicotine cigarette. Total state and city taxes in New York City are now about $3 for a pack of 20: a tax of 7.5 cents per milligram, or $75,000 per kilo of nicotine in cigarettes.
Three drums of nicotine sulfate extract would yield one drum, or 200 kilos, of crack nicotine. This could be manufactured at an average cost (ingredients, equipment, Third World labor) of less than $500. The tax avoidance value (@ $75,000 a kilo) is 30,000 times that: 15 million dollars for one drum of crack nicotine. That is a 3 million percent profit.
Further, one eyedropper-full of uncut crack nicotine would have a nicotine content of four cartons of cigarettes, one kilo poured in a 20-ounce soda-pop bottle would equal 5,000 cartons or 50,000 packs: a value-per-volume increase of 1,000 times for cigarette smugglers. A typical fix of cut crack nicotine (diluted 20-to-1, or 2 mg) would be 1 percent of a crack cocaine fix (200 mg) by weight: making it 100 times easier, in terms of size, to smuggle than cocaine.
Enter the Mob
Given these numbers, the politicians’ greedy tobacco tax crusade makes the creation of a crack nicotine market inevitable and irresistible to organized crime. And soon.
More Americans are addicted to nicotine than any other drug. The market for crack nicotine is in the tens of millions of addicts, vastly exceeding any illegal drug by orders of magnitude. Crack nicotine would be far more lucrative for drug dealers and organized crime than heroin, cocaine or anything else.
The mortality rate from overdosing, compared to that of any other drug, would be of equal dimensions. Because crack nicotine would have a market 100 times larger, and a profit margin 100 times greater than crack cocaine, such plagues as drive-by shootings, gang turf wars, violent crimes by addicts needing fix money, and the corruption of judges and entire police forces could explode exponentially.
Fantasies and Consequences
The fantasy of anti-tobacco activists, that ever-higher jury awards will stop cigarette sales or ever-higher tobacco taxes will result in fewer people smoking, is going to result in a hideous nightmare instead.
The anti-tobacco activists must realize there are far better alternatives to jury-award and tax crusades. They could become advocates of adult responsibility, and demand that taxpayers not subsidize the medical consequences of tobacco addiction. They could demand safe alternatives to cigarettes, such as Nico Water (mineral water laced with 2 mg of nicotine), recently banned by the FDA and ignorantly opposed by anti-tobacco groups such as Tobacco Free Kids.
Unless they abandon their fantasies and adopt realistic alternatives, such groups are about to learn a horrible lesson taught by the Law of Unintended Consequences – and all of us will suffer for it.
© Copyright 2002 by the Freedom Research Foun
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