Pop the top. The gentle fizz tickles your ears and nose before that first, refreshing swig gurgles down your throat. Ahhh! Shortly, the sugar rush gives you a mild jolt, completing the package. There's nothing like a Coke. Or a Pepsi. Or a Dew.

Flick the Bic. That first drag warms and prickles your lungs, followed shortly by the buzz of the nicotine express. Yeah!.

Sodas and smokes both feel good and give you a lift, but they're both bad for your health. Yet Utah taxes cigarettes, partly to discourage their use, but it doesn't tax soda pop. Which is really rather odd, when you think about it, because most of the reasons for taxing cigs apply to pop.

True, a Pepsi won't give you cancer. But the refined sugars in it will make you fat without adding anything to your nutrition. That can lead to heart disease and diabetes. Other chemicals in the drink rob your system of calcium and other important nutrients. Oh, and it rots your teeth. Then there's the caffeine.

Rep. Craig Frank, R-Pleasant Grove, says, perhaps as a joke, that he wants to tax pop because of the caffeine. He thinks the Legislature should study a caffeine tax, as other states and cities have done. We think Frank's on to something. But the studies we've seen show that the refined sugars are a bigger health problem than the caffeine.

Doctors agree that sodas are something we should drink sparingly or not at all. Because they contain obscene quantities of refined sugar, our bodies pump out insulin to regulate our internal chemistry. Then, as the rush recedes, we crash.

That's why you see public service ads on TV that try to discourage kids from drinking pop or so-called energy drinks (which are even worse). But if one reason to raise the huge cigarette tax is to discourage kids from smoking, and kids are sensitive to the price of cigarettes, the same policy surely should apply to pop.

Sodas, like smokes, are a luxury. You can tax them without depriving anyone of a necessity of life. Because diet sodas create their own metabolic problems that have been tied to obesity and heart disease, even though they don't contain sugar, there's no reason not to tax them, too. Ditto for the energy drinks.

Since it's OK to tax tobacco in the name of public health, Utah should be all over a soda tax. That would spread the tax burden to many more people, and like smokers, if they wanted to opt out, they could.

We're not kidding.