HOW THE PURITY POLICE WILL ATTACK THEIR NEXT TARGET CAFFEINE

June 15 - Many people attempt to make their fortunes by guessing where
stock prices, interest rates or real-estate values will go. While my
financial status might benefit from such necromancy, I still haven't
fully recovered from Sunday school, where we were taught that greed
and avarice were just as evil as adultery and theft.

So instead, I've been speculating about the next target of the Purity
Police, and I think I've found it: caffeine.

I'll grant that an attack sounds preposterous at the moment, when
there's a Starbucks on every urban corner with sufficient foot
traffic, when even greasy spoons offer latte and when rural conve-
nience stores promote their espresso.

To put it another way, in all the political uproar a couple of years
ago about those "White House coffees" that Bill Clinton put on for
major campaign donors, the complaints concerned money, not the fact
that an addictive stimulant was being openly dispensed in the Execu-
tive Mansion.

But the campaign will come, and if previous assaults on our liberties
by the Purity Police are any indication, it will come in these stages:

1) The publication and promotion of a book that details the horrors of
caffeine - its effects on the central nervous system, the destruction
of tropical rain forests to plant coffee bushes, the lengths
to which addicts will go for their fix, etc.

One such product just appeared on the new-books shelf at the local
library, and some nosing around on the Internet produced several
similar titles.

No one can say whether one of these will be the "Reefer Madness'' of
the anticaffeine industry, but it's safe to predict that an anti-caffeine
book will soon create a buzz. Time and Newsweek will publish cover
stories about caffeine and its dangers, followed by segments on "20/20,''
"Dateline," and "60 Minutes."

2) Congress, ever eager to respond to public demand without perturbing
big campaign contributors like soft-drink bot tlers, will respond with
legislation that allows the Food and Drug Administration to require
caffeine content on product la bels. After all, some people may be
aller gic to caffeine, and others may prefer to avoid it.

3) The Purity Police have never stop ped at "reasonable" before, so
there's no reason to think they'll be different in the future.

They will grant that caffeine may be acceptable for "consenting
adults," but "society must protect innocent children from this
addictive scourge. We need drug-free schools, not schools with caf-
feine-dispensing machines in the hall, with the school district in a
marketing partnership with these drug distributors, rather than
protecting our children."

It will be pointed out that children are deliberately being lured into
the loathsome toils of caffeine addiction. If anyone asks "so what?"
there will be research which shows that the latest school-shooter had
stoked up on coffee that morning and that more than 95 percent of
violent felons had ingested caffeine within the six hours preceding their
crimes.

4) The Purity Police will use their strength in some progressive
jurisdiction like Boulder or Davis, Calif., to get an ordinance
banning caffeine sales to minors.

This will spread, even after several parents go to jail for allowing
their children to drink iced tea at home.

Many family-friendly restaurants will post signs that say "only
caffeine-free beverages and desserts served here."

The Purity Police will picket some of these places, based on their
reasoning that "impressionable children cannot be expected to know
that the adults they might emulate are sipping decaf, and thus succumb
to the mistaken idea that it is acceptable to drink a dangerous
beverage that looks and smells the same as the allegedly harmless
decaf."

5) With encouragement from the Purity Police, lawsuits will be filed
by "caffeine victims," and employers will respond by banning caffeine
in the workplace - after all, people drinking coffee, tea and pop
aren't getting any work done, and they can get edgy and nervous and
create an "unpleasant work environment" for their colleagues.

Caffeine screening will be added to the pre-employment blood and urine
tests, and employees will be regularly tested for its presence.

6) Caffeine in all forms will be made illegal without a prescription.
The result ing black market will finance some ruth less criminal gangs
whose bribes and payoffs will corrupt many police agencies as our
prison-industrial complex contin ues its handsome growth rate

But our children will be protected, of course, and the Purity Police
will have to find a new target, something like chewing gum or bottled
water.