When Hitler becomes Hitlaw

What will you do when Hitler's law comes to your town? Or aren't you going to wait that long?

Smoking Banned In Your Own Home
- California Adopts Hitler's Policy

In Belmont, Calif. it is now illegal to smoke in your own home and, as John Blackstone reports, the new law has angered one woman who's now on a mission.

Smoking Bans and the Third Reich

Hitler was a fervent anti smoker and a crusader for the anti-smoking cause. He personally funded research into the dangers of smoking and little wonder those results given the nature of his regime tended to support his assertions that smoking was an evil the Aryan race must be rid of. Many of the studies carried out during the Third Reich are the basis for the arguments put forward today by those seeking the imposition of repressive smoking bans. Hitler once stated that tobacco was "the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man" Under the Nazi's the Bureau Against the Dangers of Alcohol and Tobacco was established in 1939 followed in 1942 by the Institute for the Struggle against the dangers of Tobacco. Nazi's were the first to coin the term "passive smoking" Under the Nazi regime the German people had imposed on them the most comprehensive set of tobacco regulations and restrictions seen in any modern nation to that date. Hitler himself took particular interest in this area often personally overseeing the drafting and implementation of anti smoking policy.

Nazi Germany had the Bureau Against the Dangers of Alcohol and Tobacco. Meanwhile the fourth reich U.$., realising that the Nazis missed a few tricks in the monopoly stakes, has its less condemnatory but rather more comprehensive Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

In Nazi Germany it was considered criminal negligence if drivers were involved in crashes while smoking and in keeping with this line of thinking UK drivers may face a ban on smoking at the wheel. Frankly, it's usually negligence, rather than a hedonistic desire to thrillseek at any cost, that causes most drivers to have accidents.

No doubt many will whine, "But smoking distracts your attention from driving so the world will be saved again when the same State that makes billions from the sale of tobacco bans smoking at the wheel." Sure, don't smoke. It'll leave you an extra hand free to fanny around with the huge SatNav TV thing flashing away in your line of vision. Logic hasn't left the building, it had never entered.

The ongoing coordinated global smoking ban is nothing to worry about though. Carry on as you were.