Healthy male adolescence is dependent on three things: Internet pornography, delusions of being the next Jimi Hendrix and tobacco. Of those three, the government only actively works to stop one: cancer sticks. Maybe it’s because the free market secretly relies on B.C. Rich convincing you a $120 guitar shaped like a spider will propel you to international stardom, or maybe it’s because naked ladies are the only profitable online industry — an intriguing strategy, eh, dying print media? You know the public is dying for a topless Maureen Dowd — but no matter the reason, tobacco seems to be the vice of choice when it comes to legislative bullying.

And that’s not to say that this is all bad. After all, despite what Hank Aaron and Ronald Reagan wanted us to believe in the 1950s, the only thing cigarettes make “smooth” are lung cancer obituary templates. But ever since the Big Tobacco lawsuits of the ’90s, chipping away at the tobacco industry has become an easy way to waste session time and seize the moral and patriotic high ground — never mind that tobacco is one of our great nation’s longest standing enterprises, outlasting both of its popular contemporaries: the slave trade and the powdered wig consortium.

All of this makes the Joint Finance Committee’s rejection of a plan to use $3 million in stimulus funds to help strangle the sale of flavored tobacco in Wisconsin so surprising. The proposal, which was hatched by the Department of Health Services, would have used the money to fund efforts to ban flavored tobacco products at the local level. But this recent crusade against cherry-tinged cigars is confusing. Kosher law demands the separation of meat and dairy, and retrospective history has shown us the dangers of mixing Aerosmith and Run DMC, but there are no religious texts or platinum albums to suggest smoke and mangoes aren’t a natural fit. Peter Jennings liked both, why can’t we?

We can’t because the future of our nation — the children — are too irresponsible to understand the dangers of cigarettes, and by infusing them with fun flavors, we’re setting them up to sound like Macy Gray (too soon?) by the time they’re 25. At least that’s what the Department of Health Services says. But it’d be hard to convince most rational people that, in this day in age, kids don’t understand the dangers of cigarettes, and it’d be even harder to honestly suggest that flavored tobacco is some subversive attempt to get your little brother hooked on Kodiak.

First off, the notion that somehow a kid otherwise unlikely to pick up a cigarette will do so because it tastes like guava is pretty far-fetched. Kids hate fruit. It’s like that Christmas your dad gave you David Halberstam’s “October 1964.” Sure, you like baseball, but not enough to read a 400-page book about the Yankees. And maybe I was simply too young to understand how cool Joe Camel was, but I never felt compelled to light up simply because a some cartoon mascot was, especially one dressed in a bad sports coat and boxy sunglasses. Dressing animals like Miami Vice characters, while not a good marketing strategy, isn’t going to destroy the youth. We do that through our own inventions.

More importantly, it’s time for the government to either go all in and ban tobacco in this country or just leave Phillip-Morris alone. If the industry is legal and decently regulated, stop trying to hinder its ability to market products. And if people honestly believe eliminating flavored tobacco products will put an end to post school day drives to that one Super America where they don’t card, they probably need to start smoking something. Want to know why a good percentage of young people smoke? Because their parents did. Can we ban smoking parents? It’s doubtful, although we know some people wouldn’t mind; at least it would free us from that Obama character.

Time will tell whether this idea has any long-term legs. Ultimately, using stimulus money for anything that doesn’t create jobs is probably a non-starter, but it’s not like attacking the tobacco industry requires a terribly creative mind. Still, the war on gaggers is far from over, and if your popularity is based solely on the way you look with a grape cigarillo in your mouth, I’d start stocking up.

Sean Kittridge ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in journalism and history