Just a sampling of the photos and video on the Yes on Prop 2 website.

• Organic, pesticide-free castor bean.We have sourced our wild castor bean from a Texas location that uses no pesticides or chemical fertilizers.
• Organically-grown, genuine Greek hemlock. The same stuff recommended by Socrates! Never grown with anything but all-natural pesticides.
• Pure Missouri lead. Our products will contain only the finest all-nautral lead from the Missouri Lead Belt. This product is ultra-purified to get rid of any contaminants.
• Genuine, pure arsenic from the High Sierra. The Sierra contain some of the highest concentrations of arsenic. Our products are filtered to remove organic materials to leave us with only the purest, highest-grade, all-natural arsenic, straight from the idyllic hills of California’s High Sierra.
• Hormone-free, free-range rattlesnake venom. We harvest our venom from nothing but rattlers grown in the fresh air of the Sonoran Desert.

So remember, these products are pesticide-free and are completely natural! They must be good for you, right? Yum yum. Be healthy! Live natural!

Meanwhile, a billion bottles a day go into landfills or some obscene number like that. In addition, huge amounts of energy are spent shipping water from all over the globe. Can you believe that people will actually buy water from Fiji (one of the fastest growing “brands” of water) and France (Evian, Perrier) and then actually worry about recycling the bottle! For Christ’s sake, can’t they see that the environmental damage from shipping the water is the main thing.

Oh, and actually it isn’t the main thing. If the water is so-called “spring water”, that means that it has been exctracted from the ground just before it comes out of the spring (otherwise it’s well water or surface water). The way you prove that your water is spring water, is basically by impacting a spring enough to make is stop flowing. Now taking 1% of the flow out of a river does nothing, but taking 50% or 99% of the flow out of a spring basically is going to kill everything that used to live in that water shed. When are people going to stop this bullshit!

1. 17% of all alchohol expenditure is on alchohol consumed by underage drinkers
2. rougly 20% of all alchohol expenditure is on alchohol consumed by problem drinkers (my calculation based on numbers given in the NYT).
3. “people who begin drinking before age 15 are four times as likely to become dependent on alcohol as those who start after they turn 21.”

One thing the article does not mention is that underage and problem drinkers are probably not dropping big buck for the good stuff. That means that these percentages probably significantly understate the percentage of actual alchohol consumed by those groups since they are getting more alchohol per dollar than the connoisseur who may be spending a lot, but is buying 20 year-old single malt and fine wines.

The main issue that the article doesn’t raise at all is what this really means in terms of useful actionable information.

• Is the rate of consumption by underage drinkers historically high or low, which has great significance given item #3 and what that means for the future.
• Is this evidence that US laws are doing any good? Perhaps some comparison to countries without minimum drinking age laws would give some idea about whether or not our laws actually serve some useful purpose. As much as alchohol prohibition was a failure in the United States, rates of cirrhosis did decline, but only be levels similar to that achieved by Britain through taxation. Taxation is age-blind but perhaps other countries have better solutions (or worse problems?)

For the complete, albeit brief, article see Addiction: Sales Estimates Paint Portraits of Alcohol Abusers – New York Times

The indirect subsidies are perhaps the most egregious. The most clear example is the fortune that the US government has spent and continues to spend to build dams and draw down aquifers to supply water to farmers who are growing the same crops that farmers get paid not to grow in other regions (this may have changed somewhat in actual execution since 1996, but fundamentally this practice still exists). These are some of our biggest public works projects and most make no sense economically and are environmentally disastrous, resulting in runoff that is actually toxic to crops downstream. Anyone who is not outraged about the damage these subsidies are doing to the environment and to everyone’s pocketbooks except a few lucky folks who benefit should read Mark Reisner’s classic Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water.

Other indirect subsidies include efforts by corn-state senators to push requirements that Americans put ethanol in their gas tanks. This is pure pork barrel sold under the guise of decreasing dependence on foreign oil (and sometimes air quality issues). The truth is, for most of the history of these subsidies, the process was so inefficient that ethanol was not a break-even technology. In other words, it took more than one BTU of petroleum inputs to make one BTU worth of ethanol. The process has gotten more efficient, but some leading experts still assert that it is a net-loss process. If you count up all the petroleum inputs including pesticides, fertilizers, diesel to run tractors and ship the corn to distilleries and ethanol to market and so forth, it still takes more BTUs of petroleum than we get back out in BTUs of ethanol. Meanwhile, the ethanol is more expensive and takes money out of the pockets of US consumers. Why? Because corn-state senators want to foist this on all of us to prop up the corn and ethanol industries in their states.

Direct subsidies were, of course, eliminated by the Freedom to Farm Act of 1996. Well, of course NOT! That act actually replaced subsidies based on production with fixed amounts based on past subsidies, grandfathering in most recipients with the result that they now get paid whether they produce or not. By the year 2000, direct subsidies to farmers had tripled over 1996 levels to $22 billion. They are projected to reach $190 billion by 2012 [1].

What does this have to do with health? According to Barry Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the Carolina Population Center of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “We put maybe one-tenth of one percent of our dollar that we put into subsidizing and promoting foods through the Department of Agriculture into fruits and vegetables” [1]. And here we get back to my friend who can’t afford apples. The government heavily subsidizes corn and soybeans. Good healthy foods in themselves, but of course Americans don’t eat much corn and soy in their natural forms. They consume this mostly through high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in Coke, Mountain Dew and other junk food, and in high-fat tortilla chips. Recent studies have linked HFCS consumption to obesity, which of course is linked to diabetes, which has an enormous impact on our health care system. So in short, we pay double – once to sell cheap HFCS and once to fix up the diabetics after the fact. Europeans, by the way, aren’t much better, it’s just that they subsidize beet sugar to prop up their farmers[1].

With soy, since tofu is not exactly a nightly food on most dinner tables, most typical Americans eat it in the form of hydrogenated oils, a particularly unhealthy form of saturated fat[1]. Furthermore, what humans don’t eat goes to make cheap pork and beef. Not that beef is bad for you per se, but Americans eat too much meat and sugar, but not enough vegetables. Government subsidies encourage these unhealthy choices when they should be encouraging the opposite or at the very least encouraging nothing at all. In other words, agricultural subsidies might not be bad if we subsidized the right things, but we don’t. We subsidize precisely the unhealthy foods that are overly prevalent in the American diet. Even if you are a healthy eater, why should you pay the bill for this?

I don’t know what regular people like us can do except that old standby: contact your legislators (January 3, 2006, by the way, is National Write to Congress Day).

• Write to your sentaor
• Write to your representative

1. “The Fat of the Land: Do Agricultural Subsidies Foster Poor Health?”, Environmental Health Perspectives, Volume 112, Number 14, October 2004.