 Plus: third edition of our Perelman’s Pocket Cyclopedia of Havana Cigars now shipping
Los Angeles, February 16 – After more than a century of blame on alcoholic beverages as the source of most of society’s problems, we had Prohibition.
And we got Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and the Mob. Thanks, Carrie Nation.
Now there is evidence that moderate amounts of alcoholic beverages, especially lower-proof styles such as wine, can be part of a heart-healthy lifestyle.
Not so fast, says a multinational team of medical researchers, who last week trumpeted their latest findings, showing that the “global burden of disease” attributable to alcohol is about that for tobacco and an even larger killer, hypertension.
When are these people going to put a sock in it?
According to the report published in the British medical journal Lancet, diseases based on alcoholic beverage consumption contribute to four percent of the “global burden on disease and death” while tobacco accounts for 4.1% and hypertension – undoubtedly caused by reports such as these – is responsible for 4.4%.
Just as with tobacco, the lead researcher of the report, Swedish researcher Robin Room, says alcoholic beverage prices should be scaled up, hours of consumption significantly reduced and a global treaty on alcohol control should be enacted.
May I quote the Spanish philosopher George Santayana, writing a century ago in 1905 in The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress:
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
For the benefit of our Swedish friend, whose grasp of the history of American Prohibition is obviously lacking, Monday marked the 76th anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, an orgy of violence in a Chicago garage designed to wipe out the major competitor to Al Capone’s outfit for control of Midwest bootlegging operations.
People will drink alcohol – and smoke tobacco products – if they want to. They have wanted to since the dawn of recorded history and price has proved little barrier. Moreover, higher prices also bring innovation and new technologies which bring production costs – and prices – down and create new volumes of consumption. So it has been since ancient Egypt.
Prohibitions and governmental dictates have done little except inspire civil disobedience at best and widespread violence and corruption at the worst.
Room denounces education as ineffective and demands a government-imposed tightening of access to alcohol. He may have some ideas about compiling statistics, but little or none about history, politics or people.
Gerber no baby in the cigar trade:
Nice story in the Arizona Republic last week about lawyer-turned-smokeshop owner Bart Gerber, who owns four Churchill’s Cigar stores spread across Tempe, Scottsdale and Glendale, Arizona.
Leaving aside his Arizona State law degree in 1995, he opened the first Churchill’s Cigar in Tempe, followed by a second location in 1997, one in Scottsdale in 1999 and his newest, in Glendale, this month.
His concept – born during the Cigar Boom of the 1990s – was to offer a place which actually catered to the emerging “cigar class.”
Other stores, he told the Republic, “were selling pipes and walking sticks. Cigars seemed to be an afterthought. Most bars and restaurants wouldn’t allow cigar smoking either. There was no place to go to smoke your cigars.”
So, he opened his own and then added a smoking “club” which he modeled after seeing similar set-ups in the Los Angeles area. A big-screen television, pool tables, comfortable chairs and the ability to smoke as you pleased made the $600 annual fee a bargain to the 60-plus members of the club.
“A certain type of individual likes to smoke cigars,” Gerber told staff writer Claire Bush. “Usually it’s an aggressive, confident person with an independent streak. A cigar smoker is the kind of person who is blazing a trail; they do things in their own way.”
The newer stores have done well and like most cigar sellers, saw business rise in 2004, up about 10 percent for his store group.
“Growth seems natural for us now,” he noted. “I’m optimistic that the trend will continue through 2005 and beyond.”
To quote the Reverend Johnson near the end of the 1974 smash comedy “Blazing Saddles”: “Good luck, Bart.”
Finally; it’s here!
Thanks to some good work by our printer Pace Navigator, the new, third edition of our Perelman’s Pocket Cyclopedia of Havana Cigars has arrived. All who ordered already will have their orders shipped today or tomorrow, and, of course, new orders are welcome.
We’re quite happy with this new edition, which offers a number of new features and the best of the second (1998) edition. At 192 pages in all, it’s 15% longer than the last edition, but packed with lots of new features, pictures and information for Havana lovers around the world. You can order yours today through our Online Store above!
~ Rich Perelman
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