The Precautionary Principle 

John D’Aloia Jr. 

John D’Aloia Jr. is a retired navy captain and a submarine commander. He is a columnist for several newspapers in Kansas.

The article in a local paper was titled “Fines hiked for cigarette sales.” The text related how the Kansas Department of Revenue, Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control, announced a significant change in its fine structure for the sale of cigarettes or tobacco products to underage individuals. ABC contends that the sale of cigarettes to minors demands action. The action? Increase administrative fines to the maximum allowable by law, $1,000.00 for each incident, and encourage local law enforcement officials to prosecute misdemeanor charges against the person selling the cigarettes, charges which upon conviction carry with them fines and prison time. Do not you love the mindset of the Clerks. ABC does not consider their socking it to retailers “a punitive action.” What do you call it? Gentle counseling? Holding hands? What would punitive action be? Burning at the stake? The Guardians have decided that tobacco is evil, that it is their duty to protect citizens from the evil, and that citizens must view their actions as protective, not punitive.

Baloney. It is not the purpose of our limited, constitutional republican form of government to protect us from every known evil (or as they are trying to do, from every supposed evil by invoking the Precautionary Principle--think the sky is falling, the sky is falling). Theoretically, we are still free citizens, responsible for ourselves and our families, conforming our relationships with others to the precepts of the Golden Rule and millenniums of Christian morality. Cigarettes stink, are addictive, and their use does have adverse health impacts--but what business is it of the government to step between those who smoke and those who fill smokers’ needs? But, you say, by doing so, the Guardians and the Clerks are preventing the future expenditure of large amounts of tax dollars on the health care for smokers. This line of reasoning is based on the acceptance of a fallacious premise--that government has a duty to provide health care. Acceptance of this premise by an ever increasing number of people is leading to socialized medicine and a socialistic state. There is no freedom in a socialistic state--the Guardians rule.

A Forbes.com news article reported that Bill Gates had donated $42.6 million to the nonprofit pharmaceutical company Institute for OneWorld Health to combat malaria (no eye-rolling please, that is its name and it has noble goals--to develop safe, effective, and affordable new medicines for people afflicted with infectious diseases in the developing world). Gates’ donation will be used to help produce a malaria treatment drug called artemisinin, extracted from finely ground wormwood plants. Gates has every right in the world to use his money as he sees fit, but this use is a sad testimony on the times. With a stroke of a legislative pen, and a lot less dollars, we could be eliminating the onslaught of malaria outright, we could be drastically reducing the number of people infected instead of trying to bring the cost of a treatment down from $2.40 a dose to less than a $1.00 a dose. How could Gates make a much bigger impact on world health? Get behind the effort to break the grip of the environmental Luddites on the use of DDT. As written about before, the judicious use of DDT is a proven and safe eradicator of mosquitoes and other disease vector insects, including bedbugs, reported to be making a comeback, in, of all places, high-end hotels--but that is another story.

The ban on DDT--and nuclear power and other technological advances--stems from an unproven thesis called “the Precautionary Principle.” The principle goes to the effect that if there is the remotest threat to human health or the environment from whatever, then precautions must be taken even if no cause-and-effect relationship can be established or scientifically demonstrated. The standard Green precaution is to enact a ban. D--- the science, d---the human race--ban whatever we say is a threat to Gaia. It is a crass play on emotions, a course of action purposely taken to reduce the world’s population and to put them in the power seat, completely ignoring facts and the benefits to the human race and society that are gained from risk-taking.

The November 2004 “Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter” described the entire world-wide hysterical drive to make the Precautionary Principle an imposed creed as a return to “the age of superstition, in which a global bureaucracy/priesthood rules by terror, minutely controlling every aspect of life.” Precautionary Principle adherents are a Guardian variant--may a swarm of aseptic Culux pipiens descend upon them.     *

“If I knew that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for by life.” --Thoreau