Nevada has once again received its annual allowance from tobacco, $33.7 million, slipped under the door like hush money with a receipt attached. It arrives each year from the famous 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, which was designed to punish cigarette companies for their sins, while rewarding states for noticing them.
The Attorney General announced the sum with suitable gravity, declaring it would support health and education, and continue the noble war against addiction. It is admirable. We take money earned from a habit we discourage and spend it teaching people not to form it. It is a tidy circle, like a man who fines himself for bad behavior and calls it reform.
The settlement, now nearly thirty years old, has produced over $1.12 billion for Nevada alone. That is a great deal of repentance, especially considering the sinner is still in business, and the sermon is still being delivered. The tobacco companies agreed to pay, the states agreed to regulate, and the public agreed, without being consulted, to continue smoking just enough to keep the arrangement solvent.
One must admire the efficiency. The government warns you against cigarettes with one hand and cashes their checks with the other. It is a bit like scolding your neighbor for drinking while collecting rent from his saloon.
The money is divided into worthy causes: the Fund for a Healthy Nevada and the Millennium Scholarship Program. This ensures that the proceeds of yesterday’s vices may educate tomorrow’s citizens, who will grow up to invent new vices, which the government will later regulate and monetize. Thus, the republic sustains itself.
There are also strict limits on tobacco advertising now, which means the companies may no longer glamorize smoking in quite the same cheerful fashion. This is progress. We have replaced the cowboy on the billboard with a paragraph of warnings written in a font that suggests a funeral notice.
Still, the arrangement has a certain charm, though not the sort often advertised. It is a public-private partnership where the private sector pays for its misdeeds and the public sector grows accustomed to the income. Like all such arrangements, it begins as justice and matures into a dependency.
And so Nevada takes its $33.7 million this year, grateful and disapproving in equal measure. The state will spend it wisely, or at least publicly, and the tobacco companies will continue selling a product that everyone condemns, and enough people buy.
In this way, both sides keep their principles intact, and the checks keep arriving, right on time, like any respectable vice.
The Old Blog in the Desert 
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