The California Department of Tax and Fee Administration (Tax and Fee Administration) reported that the number of packs of cigarettes distributed and taxed in the State has decreased in the past six fiscal years from 651 million to 465 million and, as Proposition 56 foresaw, when cigarette sales decrease, so too does the tobacco tax revenue available for relevant programs
Writing a book on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida had done nothing to dissuade me from this view, as Derrida himself was regarded as a lightweight, a deconstructionist more in vogue with language and literature departments than with serious philosophy departments in academe
Over the 20th century, cigarette consumption fell only a few times before 1965: during the Great Depression, at the end World War II, and in 1953 and 1954 (Giovino 2002)
Proposals for prohibitions, in all their forms, need a much stricter assessment of the likelihood of illicit trade, perverse but easily foreseeable consequences and the ethics of using the force of law to control individual risk behaviors
However, the federal government did not declare opioid abuse to be a crisis until 2017
