[FoRK] Welcome to the American Totality. You've been warned.

[Stephen D. Williams]

Owen Byrne wrote:
> I'll just toss this out there - I'm mostly of the "it's gone too far" camp concerning smoking laws. 
> In Nova Scotia (all of Canada?) selling smokes is severely regulated. Among other things
> - you can't sell anything other than cigarettes and (apparently) lottery tickets. This resulted in grocery stores, drugstores, etc. creating these weird cigarette stores in the same building, but with separate entrances. 
> - you can't display any cigarette advertising, including the packages of smokes themselves (they have to be kept in a drawer where they aren't visible to customers). So if you're a retailer trying to sell specialty tobaccos, etc, you're kinda screwed, since customers will have to have known previously of your products, or they have to guess at what you sell.
>
> As I said, too far.
>
> Owen
>   
...
Or a good model for selling legalized drugs of all kinds.  Things that 
are legal with no consistent redeeming value.
I suppose you could argue that that's not true in the general case: 
Zoloft for instance could probably be over the counter.  I think I read 
recently that Extasy is being used by psychiatrists, meaning there is a 
case for it to be OTC.

One big part of the nanny state is the assumption that only in very 
restrictive, and somewhat random cases are you intelligent enough to 
self medicate.  Various OTC cold medicines totally space me out, but 
none of the prescriptions I have taken do.  Not even high-end 
painkillers space me out in any significant way.  The logic behind the 
rules and categories seems tortured.

sdw