Comparable Panics, Justification of Regulation.

Here is something I read something over twenty years ago, and my memory for details is a bit foggy, beyond what I included in my reading notes at the time:

Wolfgang,  Marvin, ed., _Studies in Homicide_, Harper and Row,  New York, 1967, esp. Garfinkel,  "Inter- and Intra- Racial Homicides"

The burden of  this chapter is that in the Jim Crow South,  the systematic inferiority of Blacks worked two ways. On the one hand, the  idea of a Black person's innocence was laughable, but on the other hand, it was equally laughable that the killing of a Black should be taken seriously.  The result was that Blacks who killed Blacks tended to get off lightly. Of course, this tended to encourage the development of a Black community dominated by the "tough guy," the borderline gangster. It was racist from the standpoint of the vast majority of Blacks who never killed anyone. This is a point that the Apartheid-era South African writer Alan Paton made in a larger way in  his classic _Cry the Beloved Country_. The case of Tommy Jemmy needs to be seen in that light.

In fairness to the Senecas, the fear of poisoning played a somewhat comparable role to witchcraft in Anglo-American society, circa 1800, one of the classic cases being that of  Eliza Fenning, an English servant  girl who was hanged for attempted murder in 1815 on thin  evidence, after a nonfatal food-poisoning episode, which probably had a strong element of group hysteria.  Chemistry was still in its infancy, and poisoning was not scientifically verifiable.  The balance of probabilities is that  the cause of the food  poisoning  was Ergotism (grain spoilage  leading to natural LSD production) or something like that.

http://www.exclassics.com/newgate/ng567.htm
http://www.exclassics.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergotism

Of course, poisoning accusations tended to be more narrowly focused than witchcraft accusations. The target was, in the nature of things, almost always a woman of inferior position. The suspicious death which led to the  Tommy Jemmy case would seem to have been "within the parameters" for an Anglo-American poisoning accusation.

The cigarette case is somewhat different from the Tommy Jemmy case. It doesn't stay "on the rez." The effect of Indian Gaming was practically to force every state and municipality in the United States to legalize gambling in order to get its share of the money. There is no reason to believe that the effect of Indian Cigarettes would be any different in its ultimate effect of forcing the rest of the United States to legalize the sale of cigarettes to children. It has been observed of heroin that "you have to work at being an addict," that the initial symptoms are not terribly  pleasurable. The same probably applies to tobacco.  If you get to the age of eighteen or twenty-one without starting smoking, you aren't very likely to start thereafter. The adult market is steadily dying off, or at least switching to  nicotine  gum or nicotine patches, which are not subject to restrictions on indoor smoking, and don't tend to set off fire alarms. The taxes on  tobacco are largely remitted for nicotine gum, with the legislative intent of steering people away from cigarettes, thus making nicotine gum the economy consumer's line of least resistance. With "plausible deniability," the tobacco industry  is intent on selling to children,  especially young girls,  who are considered an "underexploited market." However, tobacco advertising  is being relentlessly curtailed, and the states are gradually forcing sellers to collect actual identification when selling tobacco, and even to maintain records of who buys how much. The big tobacco companies are, perforce, looking overseas for  markets, especially in the Third World. The Senecas are still attempting  to  push more cigarettes onto the domestic market, which in practice means selling to children. Of course, the tribe's political  influence has proved  not to be so overwhelming after all. Conceivably, the Senecas may carry the  issue to the courts, but the courts are even less susceptible of political influence than the  legislature.