The Law is a Poor Substitute for Morality

It is too bad that we think that the law can be a substitute for common sense, decency or fair play. It can’t be. We Americans are all about protecting our rights under the law and our freedoms. But don’t we also have a moral obligation to do what is right for society at large? Isn’t the price for freedom about doing the right thing without having to create a law in the first place?

If everyone just did what was plainly right and commonly seen as being in the public interest, there would be less need for laws and lawyers. We have 1.1 million lawyers in the United States. Japan, which has a population half our size, has just 23,000 active attorneys. How does Japan get along with so few attorneys?

Here in America, anything that is not explicitly outlawed is deemed to be “legal”. It is just the opposite in Japan. If it is not explicitly allowed by the law, you should assume it is illegal. The Japanese system provides regulators with wide discretionary authority to decide what is allowed and what is not.

I am frustrated and angry with how people follow “the letter of the law”, but pervert and abuse the clear intent of the law. Take the ban on marketing cigarettes to children. When I attended a Tobacco-Free Charlotte County meeting organized by the Charlotte County Health Department last week, I learned for the first time how tobacco companies are getting around the prohibition of marketing cigarettes to minors. It really makes me mad.

For example, I didn’t know that you could convert cigarettes into “cigars” to get around the law, simply by changing the packaging. I had never heard of nicotine laced toothpicks, swizzle sticks, lip-balm, candy flavored tobacco (snuff) and candy-flavored nicotine drops that look like harmless breath mints.

To me nicotine laced products are all drug delivery systems that should simply be banned. Now that the FDA has the authority to regulate the manufacturing, marketing and sale of tobacco products, I hope they’ll get to work. In the meantime, tobacco companies and others continue to devise new ways to evade the law and create a new generation of addicts. It is reprehensible.

There is hardly a person in this country that doesn’t know that nicotine is a habit forming, potentially lethal substance. Nicotine laced products, including smokeless tobacco, are being marketed under the guise of being smoking-cessation products. In reality many of these products are being used as just another way of turning our kids into nicotine addicts. Who do they think they are kidding?

What’s the harm of nicotine-laced products? It is widely assumed that tar and other substances in tobacco smoke are the cancer causing agents in cigarettes. Get rid of the smoke and you get rid of the problem. But recent studies have made a strong connection between nicotine itself and cancer. The thought is that, over time, nicotine impairs the immune system and your body’s ability to fight and destroy cancer cells.

To avoid the high federal excise tax on cigarettes, tobacco retailers are now taking advantage of a loophole in the law with new “roll your own” machines. The new machines, being deployed at tobacco shops across the country, produce a carton of cigarettes in about 8 minutes using loose tobacco, which is exempt from federal taxes. A carton of roll your own costs just $21, about half the price of a carton of regular cigarettes.

When an existing law does not do what it was intended to do, we enact more laws to close such “loopholes.” The fact is that people who are intent on circumventing the law will always find a work around. If it is very profitable and illegal they’ll just go underground. The law is surely no substitute for morality.