At the end of an (interesting) piece in today’s New York Times on how patriotism has been used as a marketing device, there’s the revelation that following the gift by the US Smokeless Tobacco Company of Skoal and Copenhagen snuff to troops in Iraq, “some legislators are complaining that the company violated military policy against distributing free samples of tobacco products, calling the giveaway reprehensible.”

Pathetic. While snuff is on no one’s list of healthy products, taking it is vastly safer than smoking tobacco. More to the point, if service people are adult enough to go through a war they are quite capable of deciding for themselves whether to chew some free chaw. </