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THE COMING NIGHTMARE OF CRACK NICOTINE |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Friday, 25 June 2010 |
On Monday, June 21, the demented state legislature in Albany
passed a bill increasing cigarette taxes.
A pack of smokes will average $9.60 across the state, and will be $11 a
pack - $11 for a single pack of
cigarettes - in New York City.
This is not only pro-smuggling, it is pro-terrorist. Who do you think runs the most lucrative
cigarette smuggling operations from Virginia and the South into New
York? Hezbollah and Al Qaeda. The higher taxes will mean higher profits for
them, which they will use to kill Israelis and Americans in Afghanistan.
The state legislators who voted for the taxes should be
tried for aiding and abetting terrorism for this alone. But the consequences could be vastly
worse. New York's
new tobacco tax law is an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences run
amok.
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. 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 politicians desired a truly effective disincentive regarding
nicotine use, they would pass a law 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.
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.
Now for what the horror of those taxes could be.
This begins with understanding that nicotine is 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).
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, the higher its concentration, and the
faster it clears the brain, the more 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 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.
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.
Now let's do the math.
There is an average of 2 milligrams of nicotine in one high-nicotine
cigarette. As of July 1, total state and city taxes in New
York City will be $5.85 for a pack of 20: a tax of
14.63 cents per milligram, or $146,300 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 (@ $146,000 a kilo is 60,000 times that: 30 million dollars for
one drum of crack nicotine. That is a 6 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.
Given these numbers, the politicians' greedy tobacco tax crusade makes the
creation of a crack nicotine market inevitable and irresistible to Hezbollah/Al
Qaeda smuggling rings, Mexican drug cartels, plus the Mafia.
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.
Not to mention enormous profits for Moslem terrorists.
You might consider sending this to the legislative retards in Albany. Do they really want to be responsible for the
coming nightmare of Crack Nicotine?
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