http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448077/

Link broken (or the article was taken down) – do you have another copy you can post?

Full disclosure: I do not smoke, have never smoked, and I think it is a smelly and dangerous habit. My father died with his last cigarette in his hand, but he knew all the risks involved in smoking.

And it’s worth knowing exactly how the game plan works, because similar ones have been rolled out to localities in various states not only on “tobacco control” but on “food policy,” environmental bans and other topics.

About 20 years ago a blitz of astroturf campaigns for “traffic calming” swept municipalities my area. Many were very successful, although a few of the most egregious results have been undone since.

The funding and organizing was from leftist groups intent upon outlawing private cars. The secret goal that they didn’t reveal is that they were led by people who wanted sinecure jobs as municipal employees. Their tactic was simple: induce neighborhood tribal warfare. The street where you lived constituted your tribe.

If you thought you had so much traffic on your street at certain times of day that your children couldn’t safely play in the street, you were encouraged to campaign for traffic diverters to move traffic to some other street. Naturally the tribe on the other street wouldn’t welcome the extra traffic, so the wars escalated.

In my municipality the warfare went so far that nutcases were beseiging the city council with demands for “traffic diversion for pedestrians” because they didn’t like the fact that some people from “other neighborhoods” were walking on “their” sidewalks.

In order to assuage as many of the tribes as possible, municipalities hired new staff to handle “neighborhood traffic issues”. The winners, of course, were the staff newly hired to sinecure positions.

A certain city sometimes referred to as “Berserkely” stands as a prime example of the victory. You can’t drive a car from one place to another directly there. You are endlessly diverted from one street to another, and all around town. Cross town travel that should have been a mile or two became several times that.

Now, the left there has decided to tax soft drinks, to protect the poor hapless children who otherwise would become unhealthy and obese from drinking too much soda pop.

These local “tobacco control” campaigns are cut from the same cloth. The winners will be the newly hired “tobacco control officers”, and the smug fools who think they have “made a difference” in the left’s perpetual war against anybody anywhere (except themselves) enjoying anything.