Are Fracking Bans the Equivalent of Banning Coffee?

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From the New York Post:
Fifty years or so after coffee became popular in Sweden, King Gustav III decided to take extreme action against this menace to the public health. In 1746, the monarch issued a royal edict warning citizens of the obvious dangers of this known poison. First he heavily taxed coffee, then he banned it outright. People kept drinking it anyway.
To turn the public against the caffeine threat once and for all, he ordered up an experiment involving two identical twins, both of them condemned prisoners. One would be forced to drink three pots of tea a day; the other, three pots of coffee. Two doctors were assigned to supervise. One doctor died. The other doctor died. Poor King Gustav himself was assassinated. At length the tea drinker died, at age 83. The coffee drinker? He survived them all. The coffee ban kept getting renewed anyway, until the 1820s.
Fracking looks more and more like the coffee of the 21st century.
Read the whole article here. 

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