Cowboy Confessional

Evidently San Francisco is populated entirely by children.

Adults appear to be in short supply given the paternalistic exuberance of the city’s Board of Supervisors. The sups suffer under the odd delusion that they have acquired the power to control the lives of adults and free commerce to boot. Routinely, the Board of Supervisors legislates against a slate of selected sin. Given that bad behavior is a cherished San Francisco Barbary Coast tradition, such protective overdrive is out of character with the city’s very vibe.

Like any weary parent, the self-appointed guardians on the Board of Supervisors have had enough. Frustrated by their failures to ban everything else from plastic bags, to handguns, to parking, the sups have reasserted their non-existent parental authority over their citywide crib. In a display of statism that would make Mao flinch, San Fran supervisors have banned the sale of tobacco in pharmacies.

Gang violence, public defecation and hypodermic litter are secondary concerns.

“When it comes to pharmacies, I feel that our children and our teenagers get a different message,” said Public Health Director Mitch Katz. By “children and teenagers” Katz means adults, the only class of citizens legally enabled to buy tobacco.

Ill content with a single euphemism, Katz noted that San Francisco Supervisors curtailed tobacco sales in pharmacies because drug stores were the “group where the case was the strongest.” More plainly stated, pharmacies are small enough in number, and their tobacco sales are such a tiny part of their total revenue that the city doesn’t expect the pharmacies to put up much of a fight. Costco, Wal-Mart and trade associations that represent mom-and-pop liquor stores would bring out the heavy litigation artillery, so the City Supervisors decided to pick on someone not their size.

This ban on the sales of a recreational drug (nicotine) seems oddly out of sync with San Francisco’s schizophrenic peccancy. The very mantra of The City has long been whatever consenting adults enjoy should be allowed, with the exception of voting Republican which remains a hanging offense. Indeed the San Francisco enables many vices including both the right and the subsidized facilitation of injecting recreational drugs that are a tiny bit more potent than a pack of Marlboros.

Pharmaceutical sales prohibition of shag and snuff are just the beginning. Katz himself foreshadowed this eventuality suggesting the ban could be broadened in the future. The pharmacy prohibition seeks to desensitize San Francisco citizens to submissiveness. America’s new nanny, Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, has set his sights beyond San Francisco saying “Whatever we can do to make this country a smoke-free zone, we should do it.”

My friends and family back in tobacco-growing Virginia will decline to participate. Virginians refuse to ban guns so they are equipped to enforce their prerogative.

Complicit in denying adults the right to commit decelerated suicide is the American Lung Association of California. Their policy director opined “It changes the conversation from something where people of conscience act to one where a city says, ‘You know what, we support healthier lifestyles in our city’”

Her slogan clearly demarks the line of contention. On one side are the citizens of San Francisco — people of conscience who routinely demand to live their personal lives with little restriction — and the city government, hell-bent on keeping them from doing so.

Perhaps San Francisco’s true children are confined to the Board of Supervisors.

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