Obama’s nanny state just spent half a million of your tax dollars to send text messages to farmers and people living in rural areas urging them to stop using tobacco dip and smokeless tobacco products.
This is just more nanny state waste, this time from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)…
The government contends that the rate of people using smokeless tobacco in rural areas—estimated to be one in 10—is too high, and approved the study it described as an “innovative intervention.”
“Rural Americans are a vulnerable group at high risk for tobacco-related illness,” according to the federal grant for the project. “Smokeless tobacco use is high among rural Americans at 11 [percent] and has not decreased significantly in the past decade. Rural Americans who want to quit have access to few innovative interventions. This is a significant missed opportunity for tobacco control in this population.”
The “TextTo4GoSmokelessTobacco” proposal says that its work will be important because no one has ever sent text messages to men in Middle America on how to quit chewing tobacco.
It isn’t the government’s business nor is it the government’s job to stop people from using smokeless tobacco.