smoking

Today I learned that the EU will stop subsidizing tobacco by 2010. The way they presented it when I was in school, I thought the US was the only country that subsidized tobacco farmers, and I came away with the impression they all lived in North Carolina. It says here a lot of them live in Kentucky, but even Wisconsin and Minnesota have some.

One of the other things I'm pretty sure I learned in school is that marijuana is worse in terms of lung cancer than cigarettes because you hold the smoke in your lungs longer. It turns out that that was just speculation. There's a new study that says smoking marijuana might actually have a slight benefit.

So here's my bored-engineer-type plan: anybody who needs a tobacco subsidy gets governmental permission to grow marijuana instead.