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I vaguely remember reading a sci-fi story a number of years back in which the premise was that the government had outlawed meat-eating and that stimulated an underground network of "burger dens", similar to opium dens or speak-easys, in which, if you knew the password or had been sent by someone who was known at that "den", you could purchase bootleg meat which had been, as one character put it, "smuggled in from his suppliers at the stockyards in Venezuela".

Interesting premise ... and I remember thinking at the time that it was a little far-fetched.

In my dreams ... or, rather, nightmares.

Either the government (as the representatives of the people) has the right to ban or tax something out of existance, or it doesn't. Those using the slippery slope argument (first its cigarettes, then its cheeseburgers) already lost that battle when drugs were made illegal. Somewhere between the libertarian ideal of "everything's OK for everybody", and the left-wing "ban everything that might ever cause one miniscule bit of harm to the universe", is the idea of a middle ground betwixt those extremes.

Right now, most people can distinguish between tobacco, which has zero nutritive value, and cheeseburgers, which have some properties as food. If the lefties convince enough people that they're right about this and other parts of their agenda, then we'll have a lot more to worry about than where to find a burger den. Every day, we live in the middle, between the extremes on all of hundreds of issues, and a slight movement towards one side or the other is not going to bring people's lives crashing down.

Face it, more people can find something wrong with crack cocaine than with aspirin, and more people can find something wrong with tobacco than with cheeseburgers. That's how the balance is set. If you'd REALLY like to stop the slide, then persuade people that the extremists are misguided, but Chicken Little "the sky is falling" rhetoric is not going to convince anyone.