Here in Michigan, where the Prohibition Party was founded, we still have a vestige of its original focus on getting rid of chemical scourges of mankind. A law was passed in 1909 banning deleterious and adulterated cigarettes. The law is MCL 750.27, MSA 28.216 and is still on the books.

As your 1995 Platform correctly alludes to, there is much power in the opposition side. To defuse it, the law by wise wording, allows safe cigarettes! ONLY. We all know that there are none of those. In that 1909 era, Prohibitionists succeeded in having many states, about 20 or so, ban cigarettes.

Sadly, those bans were all repealed so far as we can tell. But Michigan's more carefully worded law remains the law. It bans the dangerous ones! No amount of "power" has dared to repeal that. Even the pushers don't want to say on the record that they are for deleterious and adulterated products! In the American Journal of Public Health, Vol 87, pages 869-870 (May 1997), I published that law, and three other ways of attacking tobacco.

We are in process of developing a website, to write to our Governor, to get the 1909 cigarette ban law enforced, by his simply ordering the State Police to do it.

And we plan a third website, addressed to the Michigan Attorney General, asking her to get a court order directing tobacco companies to obey the law. A fourth site, to US Attorney General Janet Reno, asking her to seek proper financial relief from the tobacco powers, is on the horizon. The reimbursement lawsuits so far have only focused on health issues. All of them overlook tobacco's vast, 90%, role in alcoholism and crime. If we could bankrupt tobacco companies, that would have a good effect. Better yet, to have all states and Congress adopt the Michigan law.

Be advised that the AJPH printed a rebuttal to what I wrote - an erroneous rebuttal, one that overlooked key medical and historical facts, including the successes of Prohibition. The rebuttal's error was to overlook the medically long known fact that alcoholism is 90% a tobacco problem. End the tobacco problem, alcoholism will be about 90% gone, as a side effect, along with lung cancer etc.

Unfortunately, the medical researchers/doctors who have/publish such data, are extremely apolitical, publish in obscure medical journals unknown to laymen, and do nothing at all to circulate their research to the activists in society.