By Dean Maddox, Public Safety & Crime Reporter

Old Mark Twain once said there’s lies, damn lies, and statistics, and the nanny state bureaucrats in Massachusetts are patting themselves on the back right now claiming they saved taxpayers $70 million with their ban on menthol cigarettes, that they passed in 2020.

Something doesn’t smell right about that. Just look at a map. If you live in Boston, you can be at the New Hampshire state line in less than a half hour to get your smokes. That’s like if Sacramento County banned Marlboro Reds, my cigarette. You can bet your bottom dollar I’d start buying them by the carton up in Roseville.

So why do the Massachusetts anti-smoking bureaucrats think their menthol ban convinced anyone to quit? Well, they say their data models report a 1.37 percent decrease in smoking since 2020, and they’re patting themselves on the back and saying its this menthol ban that did it.

Okay you Boston Einsteins … your neighbor to the south Connecticut reported a 3.4 percent decrease in the amount of people who smoke WITHOUT a damn menthol ban. How do you explain that?

The fact is less people smoke every year. It’s not cool like it was twenty years ago when I started. Not that we didn’t know it’ll kill you too, but back in my day not caring was part of the cool factor. Today’s kids are smarter about that stuff. Of course they can’t hold a conversation without staring at a screen either, so let’s not give them a Nobel Prize just yet.

Here’s the bigger issue with these Massachusetts bureaucrats and their fake smoking numbers. Would it make us all healthier if you forced us to go to the gym at gunpoint? Or forced us to eat our broccoli? How about if you attached a fitbit to everyone and made us pay taxes for not taking enough steps or getting our heart rate high enough.

Yeah, smoking’s bad for you. Everyone knows it. But in a free country adults get to make dumb decisions. The real unhealthy habit in America right now isn’t cigarettes. It’s politicians who think they should run everybody else’s life.