such a (neo?)liberal move. No you can't have your cancer sticks. No you also can't have public healthcare either.
Cigarette companies are fucked up and need to burn, but all this is going to do is create a black market that police will use as an excuse to further terrorize black communities. When will we learn that prohibition doesn't fucking work?
This was my reaction also even though tobacco sucks. The article says that the FDA isn't banning possession, just buying or selling I guess. Eric Garner was already killed in 2014 for selling cheap cigarettes while black.
I honestly don't know what to make of this. Prohibition bad, but also cigarettes bad. A socialist society would probably not devote any labor power to producing poison sticks. But we don't live in a socialist society, of course. It does look like yet another excuse to target black people, but the last few years have shown us that the cops don't need an excuse and can execute almost anyone and then just invent a rationale for it that the media will swallow. 30% of the USA will defend the cops regardless of what they do, and 99% of the people in power will basically twiddle their fingers in response to any crime the police commit. So it's basically a really bad situation here all around, as usual.
I don't think tobacco products are inherently bad. I think the largest share of the problem is the wild lengths cigarette companies have gone to throughout history to get millions upon millions addicted to them. They manufactured them to be as addictive as possible and proceeded to market them with amazing efficiency.
I think the way we square that contradiction of prohibition being bad but cigarettes also being bad is by targeting the cigarette companies directly. Force them to pay restitutions to people and families affected negatively by cigarettes. Seize their companies and sell off their assets, use that money to fund programs for people looking to quit smoking. But please don't go out arresting small time dealers and manufacturers who are probably just trying to pay rent. And for the love of god please don't go out arresting the people buying from said dealers. Trying to enforce prohibition at that level is just a blank check for more police violence. You say they don't need an excuse, and I think that's mostly correct, but I'd rather not give them any pretense at all. Force the police to show their ass to the whole world by not giving them any legal justifications whatsoever.
I believe a socialist society could totally devote some small amount of labor towards producing tobacco products at more reasonable scales. Cuba is widely known for cigars, after all. If a community wanted to set up their own tobacco farm for their own enjoyment, I don't see why we should stop them. It would be almost like a community wide hobby. At a certain point we need to recognize people's bodily autonomy. Large cigarette companies bypassed that autonomy through the magic of marketing. Smaller, community run operations could act much more ethically through their accountability to the community they exist within.
I think such small operations should be encouraged even, so that cigarettes are not totally relegated to black markets where there is zero regulation at all. Black market cigarettes are something we really want to avoid taking off. If you think cigarettes are deadly now, just wait until they are produced illegally with absolutely zero oversight. See the ubiquity of Fentanyl laced Heroin as an analogous example in the opioid epidemic. Prohibition leads to extremely dangerous products.
The biggest problem was allowing for the existence of large, profit motivated companies that depend on mass cigarette addiction for business. If they never existed, cigarette addiction would never have become such a massive problem in the first place.
Thanks for understanding! I'm not a smoker, but the opioid epidemic is something that has impacted my life so severely that I end up getting extremely passionate when the topic of prohibition comes up at all lol
...Am I in the minority for thinking this is a good thing? Literally the entire business model of the tobacco industry is to get as many people addicted as possible so that they can profit at the expense of peoples' health. I see no reason not to attribute the vast majority of smoking deaths to capitalism when considering how many more people die to it because of all of the marketing and advertising and product development that has come with the profit incentive being applied to it. The only reason why companies make and market menthol cigarettes is because they are harder to quit, and therefore increase their revenues. Nobody should be defending this (hopefully I'm just reading way too much into the comments). I don't think this will necessarily end the existence of flavored tobacco, but banning the sale of flavored cigarettes alone will most likely have a net positive effect.
Oh no, I don't expect banning cigarettes overall for example to do anything. But I don't think that a huge black market will appear for menthol cigarettes (at least to any degree that matters). The main reason they exist is to be more addictive, which only really helps if they are just as accessible as normal cigarettes. If they're significantly harder to access, then it wouldn't really help that much, because anyone willing to go that far out of their way for menthols would likely just go for normal cigarettes if that option wasn't available.
And as long as the penalties are just for the sale rather than the use or possession, I wouldn't think very many people would be thrown in jail over this, then again we do apparently have summary execution as the penalty for selling loose cigarettes, so...
And I might as well add that quite a bit of my perspective is informed by the long history of smokers in my family. Losing someone from smoking-related health issues tends to make you quite a bit more supportive of these types of measures. I see it very much like the opiod crisis in a lot of ways -- not only in root causes, but if you see what either of these things do to people, you don't think strictly about harm reduction, you think about how it needs to end, because I don't want anyone to go through that.
I'm someone who's been severely impacted by the opioid crisis, and I have a lot of friends who have been impacted as well. In my experience, this type of prohibition only ever makes things worse for the people addicted at the bottom. There will be a black market for this, and people are going to get killed when police use it as an excuse to terrorize poor and BIPOC communities even further. As you said, Eric Garner was murdered by police after they targeted him for selling unlicensed cigarettes. This is the end result of these type of laws.
I understand you've been hurt by piece of shit cigarette companies, and the way we deal with those companies is by going after them directly. Same goes for pharma companies in the case of opioids. We need to force them to pay restitutions and shut them down. Simple prohibition will hurt the people at the bottom exponentially worse than the people at the top. If this were not the case, then Biden would not be moving to ban this stuff at all.
Cops are just going to murder a dude selling tropical flavored Swishers on the black market or something. That's no good.
Agreed. As someone who fought like hell to finally quit smoking banning menthols seems like a plus.
Luckily alcohol isn't so immediately addictive as nicotine and can be done it moderation.
Honestly thr problem with drunk driving isnt the 'drunk' part, it's the 'driving' part. Car are wayyy too unsafe in any condition and should be banned after we rebuild out infrastructure around trains.
Also people do get other people killed with their cigarette smoking, it's called second hand smoke.
I think the menthol cigarette ban is a good move for the most part, but as someone who occasionally smokes pipes and cigars I'm really struggling to see the value in banning all flavored cigars besides scorched earth. Menthol smokers are not going to flock en masse to flavored cigars, they are two very different things, and cigars are nowhere near as dangerous as cigarettes (unless you're inhaling and sucking down 20 a day or something like Rush Limbaugh lol).
The problem is that menthols specifically are used largely by black smokers. Its explained in the article. One legitimate concern is this will likely lead to black underground sellers being targeted and punished or killed over something that was legal until it wasn't. Eric Garner was killed over selling loose cigs for example.
Yes tobacco causes harm, and tobacco companies cause immense harm, but this is likely to become another tool in the war against drugs.
With these actions, the FDA will help significantly reduce youth initiation
uhhhh vapes? Hello? Or did they ban vape flavors nationwide already?
Also this is a real "rearranging Titanic deck chairs" type of reform. Either fucking let people shorten their lifespan if they want, or go all the way and ban every chronic behavior that shortens it. Enough of this "some vices are okay and others aren't" bullshit.
Agree, except strictly on the let's not ban any vices side lol
Let's fuck up the companies responsible for peddling addiction while also recognizing the bodily autonomy of those of us at the bottom.
Fuck, did they do some shit with DIY nicotine?
I think I last bought nicotine in 2020 and it shipped just fine afaik. I get it 1L at a time and probably won’t need more for four years (judging by how long my last liter lasted).
This shit drives me nuts, I don’t really want to hoard like a prepper weirdo. Plus freezer space
Also, on the subject of menthols, it feels extremely paternalistic to do this under the guise of looking out for black people by banning sometbing associated with them, get fucked USA.
I haven’t been keeping up on the news (I did around 2014-2015 when I stopped smoking, tons of libertarians on the politics sections of ecig forums, I’m lucky I didn’t internalize too much of their weirdness).
That’s a real bummer. Thanks for the update, I appreciate it. I should probably just step down my nic and be done with it, it just annoys the hell out of me to be coerced into it
as an AMERICAN and a paTRIOTE i will be smoking a carton of cigarettes per day until joe "people's republic of china" biden is removed for TRAESON.
Felix described this shit re: Dems in NYC (and now, nationally!) like a year ago, how they'll never offer anything seriously good like M4A or even fucking card check, but they'll go all-in on meaningless half-measure shit like this that mostly only pisses people off. His specific line was something like, "you can't buy a gun, you can't buy a large soda, you can't even buy a fucking flavored Juul pod," describing NYC, and they're gonna try to take shit like that nationally, as we can see here.
They're just little managerial freaks who just want to sit at the levers and knobs of the system and keep tweaking and tweaking them trying to find the optimal settings to maximize economic output.
Next it's Christians. I've been warnin' yall for years and nobody listened. First they came for the cigarettes.
This gives me an extremely worrying feeling that Biden is going to ban Kratom soon.
How about we just fuck up the cigarette companies rather than doing even more prohibition/war on drugs shit?
I could see banning menthol cigarettes being done in good faith if flavored vapes were widely available, but it looks like they're trying to ban both. This is how you create black markets that will get people killed.
This is different from the war on drugs shit in that there won't be any legal scrutiny on the smokers themselves.
Also haven't flavored vapes been banned for a couple years now?
People who are illegally selling black market menthol cigarettes will be targeted, though. I'd rather not see the cops murder someone for selling menthol cigarettes on a street corner.
I'm not sure if all vape flavors have been banned, or what the specific extent of the ban is, but yes something like that is already in effect. If menthol flavored vapes are banned too, then it's pretty obvious this isn't about the health of smokers.
Why menthols and not cigarettes in general?
I can't think of anything that differentiates menthols from other cigarettes, other than that being more common among black smokers than white smokers.
Ton of studies have shown menthols to be more addictive and thus harder to quit. I know people who smoke menthols, and despite not smoking as many per day as other people hooked on more normal cigs, it's been much harder for them to kick the habit
it says the ban started in 2009 of flavored cigs, but i don't remember ever being able to get a coffee flavored cigarette... which to me would just be a beautiful and awesome experience.
coffee flavored cigarette
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CIGARETTE FLAVORED CIGARETTES
I remember smoking cloves (“kreteks” if you will) occasionally around this time, and I believe they were axed by the 2009 law
