I’m extremely in favor of harm-reduction legislation in general, and I think this ban is a good idea overall. Flavors are effective at hooking young people in particular — lots of vaping research has shown that — and so get it outta here. Great.
But man, “ban menthols because Black people like them” sure feels a little weird.
Like, I get that’s not exactly what’s going on. But.. it’s a little bit what’s going on?
I guess it’s just worth watching closely any time someone talks about protecting disadvantaged groups. I think that is actually what’s happening here, but it’s suuuuch a short rhetorical jump to “well, the under classes can’t be trusted with lottery tickets!” and so on.
Edit: just to make it abundantly clear: I don't think the FDA is actually banning menthols because Black people enjoy them. But I think their reasoning isn't too far from that, and it's worth being watchful for that sort of paternalism, IMO.
As the press release says, menthol was "the last allowable flavor".
It's not the government banning one specific flavor because it is popular with black people. It is the government first banning every flavor except the one popular with black people and now circling back to make the rules uniform.
No, the press release does specifically target black people:
> One studyExternal Link Disclaimer suggests that banning menthol cigarettes in the U.S. would lead an additional 923,000 smokers to quit, including 230,000 African Americans in the first 13 to 17 months after a ban goes into effect. An earlier studyExternal Link Disclaimer projected that about 633,000 deaths would be averted, including about 237,000 deaths averted for African Americans.
Then they go on to rationalize those positions about African Americans because that progress hasn’t been experienced by everyone equally.
I am not stating any position whether specifically targeting black people in this ban is good or bad. I am only pointing out that this group is specifically mentioned in the press release.
> Then they go on to rationalize those positions about African Americans because that progress hasn’t been experienced by everyone equally
I don't see any rationalizations - here are the basic facts:
1. Menthol is the last flavor that's available for sale
2. Black people are extremely over-represented among smokers of menthol cigarettes.
Stating that banning of other flavors (except Menthol!) didn't have a proportionate effect among black smokers is not rationalization - that's just a fact. I don't know why anyone would be uncomfortable with this. The reason Menthol is being banned is not because its popular among black people (which is what gp asserted and you appear to be opposing).
Yes, the press release highlights the racial disparities resulting from the previous, and blatantly racist, exclusion of menthols fron the general ban on characterizing flavors.
The data suggests, as mentioned in the press release, African Americans disproportionately favor menthol flavored cigarettes. Failing to ban such previously is unfortunate but not racist and certainly not blatantly racist unless there was intent to disproportionately harm African Americans. Prior intent was not mentioned in the press release.
> Failing to ban such previously is unfortunate but not racist
No, it was very much racist.
> and certainly not blatantly racist unless there was intent to disproportionately harm African Americans.
Both that the exception would have disproportionate impact on African-Americans and that the overt logic of the flavor ban applied equally to menthol was well known when the flavor ban was adopted. Intent is the only reasonable conclusion.
I am trying to follow your logic, but its fast and loose. It sounds like you are saying the prior cigarette flavor bans occurred after the cited evidence about African Americans consuming menthol cigarettes more frequently than other Americans therefore menthol cigarettes were not banned intentionally as a weapon to harm African Americans. That is a lot of assumptions not based on anything plus a factual statement that is likely false about the timeline.
Coincidence is not racism. Inventing a story from imagined assumptions isn't helpful for people disadvantaged by actual racism.
It's basically the opposite of what's going on, but simultaneously looks really similar. The article says:
> ...address health disparities experienced by communities of color, low-income populations, and LGBTQ+ individuals, all of whom are far more likely to use these tobacco products
So yes, one motivation for an action like this is that an enemy against those groups wants to deprive them of something that they use more than others.
Another motivation for the exact same action is that an ally aligned with those groups wants to remove something that harms them more than others.
Unfortunately, intent is hard to measure, and the behavior is very similar. I think one of the key differentiators is whether that removal extends only to the class being 'protected' or whether it extends to everyone. To extend your hypothetical example, if people without a high school diploma were prevented from purchasing lottery tickets, and those with college degrees (like the people passing the legislation and their peers) were allowed to buy them at a discount rate, that would indicate malicious intent and discrimination against those who are less educated. On the other hand, if you take away lotto tickets from everyone, including depriving yourself of the ability to buy them, because they're universally bad and also because they cause an unusually high degree of harm to those with less education, that looks more like benevolent motivation. Of course, if you didn't buy them in the first place then your sacrifice doesn't mean as much...
>>On the other hand, if you take away lotto tickets from everyone, including depriving yourself of the ability to buy them, because they're universally bad and also because they cause an unusually high degree of harm to those with less education, that looks more like benevolent motivation. Of course, if you didn't buy them in the first place then your sacrifice doesn't mean as much...
This point raises a third issue: should one at all submit to the whims of the crab bucket , the benevolence of its motives notwithstanding?
I think a more accurate way of framing it is "Menthols have been targeted specifically to black people, and also, they're even more harmful than regular cigarettes". It's definitely not "let's take this away because black people like it".
When paternalistic policies are directed at particular demographics, it is kinda disturbing. I mean, sure, there's a reason. But there always is, and it makes me wonder if a line is being crossed here that will set a bad precedent.
The entire "paternalistic" argument rests on the premise that the choice to smoke, or not, is for most people purely rational, and totally discounts the predatory nature of tobacco companies and the addiction that comes with it. Menthols are targeted at blacks, and especially black children, since the menthol flavoring makes them more pleasant to smoke. Of the 20 million American menthol smokers, 17 million of those are black. That's not by accident, it's intentional.
Could you expand more on how menthol cigarettes are targeted towards blacks? I have lived most of my life in "black culture" and anecdotally the targeting comes from the idea of "we smoke menthol" perpetuating culturally and generationally, not through external targeting or advertising. Maybe it was, once, and it continues as a result of that initial seed? I don't know, but I do know it is not a traditionally target ad campaign or similar. For the record, I also smoke menthols, partially because of that cultural influence.
Does the entire paternalistic argument really rest on that? What if you believe humans are rarely entirely rational and it's a spectrum (e.g. If I was addicted to heroin but trying to quit I'd probably be less rational when I really wanted a fix than if I was a pack a day smoker doing the same)?
There are only 42 million black people in the US. Are you really saying that 40% of black Americans smoke menthols specifically? And presumably some percentage smoke something without menthol? That doesn't seem right.
You do have to be careful with your groupings. I wonder if this isn't a confusion between the number of cigarettes smoked by a particular population and the number of people from each population who smoke, or something like that.
I'm not sure where the number '20 million menthol users' keeps coming from, perhaps somewhere in the data behind [1]? Regardless, [2] and [3] suggest that somewhere around 20% of the African American population smokes tobacco in some form. Among those 20% of black Americans who smoke about 85% use menthols.
The original harm was caused by tobacco corps targeting a particular demographic. Rectifying this wrong requires targeting that demographic, but it's not unsettling. Moreover, they have banned all the other flavors, so might as well finish the job with this one.
Sorry but where is the harm reduction for everyone else's race? Doesn't seem like it's a priority since the people in powerful also enjoy those vices. It's a bit coincidental that the races with less power also have the vices that they need to be protected by. My family is Mexican and they love tequila. I can guarantee you that if it was banned they'd all drink less alcohol and would be much less of a burden on our healthcare system. Somehow I'm yet to see a suggested ban of flavored Smirnoffs because it's turning our white college students into alcoholics.
I'm not going to argue for or against the ban, but tobacco companies specifically targeted african-americans to use them and the civil rights movement to defend industry policy.
Mexicans like tequila because it's made from agave which is easy to grow in the desert. Mexicans have loved tequila since before europeans even landed in mexico.
That’s actually a solid point. There’s extra responsibility to prevent harm to specific groups when the harm has been targeted at them specifically.
And yeah, I know that’s not actually the message. But as I read it, “banning menthols because they disproportionately harm underrepresented groups” is not so semantically different from the other version.
I mostly think it’s an area where we should all have our eyes peeled, basically. Like I said, I’m fully in agreement with this decision. Just hits my “maybe weird?” radar.
Black people couldn't possibly make their own decisions on whether they want to smoke, or what flavor of cigarettes they prefer. They need the white people running the FDA to protect them.
How are menthol cigarettes more harmful than regular ones? The menthol just makes it easier to smoke more. Is that the crux of your argument?
I find the “company X is targeting [arbitrary subcategory]” argument to be totally asinine btw. Is Krispy Kreme targeting fat people by offering free donuts for people that get COVID-19 vaccines?
Lastly there is nothing more patronizing than telling a black person that you’re preventing them from buying menthol cigarettes for their own good.
Man I hate the whole “safety culture” crowd. I find it such an insufferable ideology. But then again I’m explicitly not a collectivist so that’s par for the course.
Its cooling effect may contribute to the intensity of smoking (deeper inhalation and/or more prolonged breath holding) resulting in greater exposure to tobacco smoke toxins. The effect of menthol through increasing the permeability of cell membranes results in a greater absorption of smoked toxins [2,3] Ahijevych and Garrett[2] reported higher cotinine levels in mentholated cigarettes compared to nonmentholated cigarettes, suggesting greater nicotine absorption per cigarette. Clarke et al.[3] found that mentholated cigarette smoking was associated with higher serum cotinine and carbon monoxide levels per cigarette.
I should mention I oppose these bans regardless of whether menthol really is or isn’t dangerous, but interesting to know it increases cellular permeability. And seems like a good bit of increased heart/cardiac effects.
Menthol enhances nicotine delivery by altering nicotine metabolism. Menthol also interact with nicotine nACh receptors in the brain in various ways[1].
> How are menthol cigarettes more harmful than regular ones? The menthol just makes it easier to smoke more. Is that the crux of your argument?
It gives more pleasure so it hooks you on more. So yes, it’s more harmful, no? When I was smoking cigarettes back in the day, my fav was West Ice. They tasted really good and didn’t have bad aftertaste. It was easier to smoke more and smoke one only for the menthol taste.
>Percent of adults aged 20 and over with overweight, including obesity: 73.6% (2017-2018)
Since COVID targets older people more often, this may match the adult population within these groups, as the population becomes more overweight each year and people get heavier and slightly shorter as they age.
Yeah, I'm sympathetic to the government wanting to protect the health of folks (or if you're a cynic like me, making sure that citizens are productive for longer and don't use as many healthcare resources) but this feels super paternalistic. Why not just dramatically increase the taxes so people can still choose to pay a high price if they want to?
Afaik smokers and alcoholics are a blessing for most states. What is additionally spent on them due to healthcare costs is far less than the taxes they pay + the retirement payments they don't receive due to premature death.
I think choice is good, and taxing appropriately a good measure. Not sure about today's health and safety obsession in general. Wonder if in today's world (hypothetically given the same technological means as back then) we would ever try something like a lunar landing. And one wonders what we will forbid in 20, 30 or 40 years. Prohibition again? All those "poor people, suffering from alcoholism, disproportionately those who can't afford therapies (esp with regards to long term alcoholism), people on the fringes of society, who we must help, and who can't be trusted to make their own choices, because _we_ know better"?
Oh, you can bet your ass that prohibition of alcohol again is coming far sooner than 20-40 years from now. Newsflash, everybody dies! The government should have no rights to infringe on what people want to consume. This is a slippery slope. I am not pro-cigarette here but pro choice of drug consumption. That, and the distinguishing of cigars and pipe tobaccos from that of what a cigarette really is, which is not natural tobacco. Cigarettes are 50% "mother's liquor," which is ground up floor scrap and stem tobacco parts into a nice little puree with added re-uptake nicotine boosting agents. This is then dried into sheets and chopped up to look like ribbons of tobacco. It is not smoking tobacco naturally. Leave the natural cigars and pipe tobaccos in another category. The FDA is going to target all tobacco cleverly as if it's all the same when they know very well that it is not.
You think all these Addy popping, Vyvanse downing, benzo-calming programmers aren't dying way earlier? You are fooling yourselves so hard.
Ha, I've seen that clip and really enjoyed it. I also am pretty sure I saw some research that says that's not true but I've just been searching the last few mins and can't find it. I have a bunch of files from when I was working in the field that I really need to sort through.
But yeah, I also am concerned about how safety driven we are for things and unwilling to take risks as a culture but that might be recency bias because I'm reading "Where is my flying car?" and they basically make the same point about the regulatory state stymieing innovation in the name of safety (often for absurd things like nuclear)
It's really difficult to come up with good statistics, because of the number of things one can factor in. Tobacco industry in-country producing, or it's imported for example (total cost of cigarette smoking)? How many jobs directly, how many secondary (marketing, product chain, the news stand which sells them). How to factor in second-hand smoking exactly? Are smokers more likely to consume other drugs, if so, why? Because they have a tendency to try, or smoking causes them to try? How do you factor in that? How do you even "measure" that?
With alcohol: how to factor in violence due to alcohol? How much less police incidents Friday / Saturday evening due to less alcohol? But what about people maybe going out less than before, or spending less money when doing so (will they pay the same prize for drinks if there's no alcohol involved)? What about sports betting and gambling industry (where it's legal)? How will it affect illegal drug use (we've been through that, but it's been long enough for people to say "well, it was different than").
Even the death statistic is tough to do. "Pre-mature death due to smoking", maybe the person also was overweight and had diabetes, how do you estimate how long this person would have lived, if they didn't smoke?
In every step of the way is the possibility for variance. Social sciences, from sociology, to psychology, to health, is such a minefield. Medicine of course is half and half. You can do a lot of stuff on the level of biology, chemistry, hard science in a lab, but health benefits/damages are "observed" in practice (observational studies). And the number of problems there are just ... huge.
>Why not just dramatically increase the taxes so people can still choose to pay a high price if they want to?
If you increased the taxes enough to change behavior, that would imply that people who wanted to smoke were made unable to. If all the people who want Menthols after your tax increase can still afford them, then it would not stop them, by definition. Consequently, vice taxes are always either ineffectual, or a ban that only applies to the poor.
Yeah I mean if you increase prices 1000x it would have that effect but if you increase them closer to what a place like NZ or Aus does (I think like ~75%, it's been a while since I studied this stuff then the cost is offputting for many but it means that the societal costs aren't externalized onto nonsmokers in the form of additional healthcare burden and the like. There's lots of arguments about pigouvian taxes and whether they hurt the poor, but generally they are effective at stopping usage up to a point (as in there is strong correlation between an increase in tax and decrease in usage) and the benefits usually outweigh the costs even for the poor. Patricio Marquez from the World Bank has a bunch of great reports that break this down, often on a country by country basis. CTFK also has info but is a little paternalistic but I really like tobacconomics reports https://tobacconomics.org/
Increasing the price isn't necessarily about making it inaccessible to people so they stop smoking (though it is a minor part of it that is a nice side-effect), it is to make sure that the additional burden placed on the healthcare system by those people is balanced out by taxes paid in form of increased prices on tobacco products.
If people don't stop smoking, then might as well make sure they cover the extra cost they add to the healthcare system. Seems pretty fair.
To be clear, this statement I made has nothing to with my views on the specific menthol ban in question, as I am still not sure how I feel about it. I was just discussing the hypothetical non-existent strategy of just more taxing on tobacco products instead of outright banning them.
>it is to make sure that the additional burden placed on the healthcare system by those people is balanced out by taxes paid in form of increased prices on tobacco products.
That only makes sense in places where the taxes go to healthcare organizations. In the American system, that doesn't happen - there's no way that a city will hand the proceeds of its tobacco taxes to insurance companies.
Yeah, the point isn't to compensate insurers - they for sure get theirs and charge smokers more. It's to compensate healthcare systems and governments who foot the bill for 1) productivity decreases from smoking in the form of more sick days, more breaks, etc. and 2) people who don't have insurance and get cancer and are treated at the taxpayers expense
It's over $200 billion and growing. They're more than compensated.
Cigarettes and tobacco products are already heavily taxed for the user. Both the federal government and the state government makes a lot of money off people's addiction, and it's an addiction they can't break (obviously).
1. I'm skeptical as the age of retirement keeps going up. Have a source?
2. Agreed that's an issue in contexts with low rule of law but I think that's less of an issue here than say Ukraine/Russia/DRC where there is serious smuggling
So does life expectancy. You retire later, but in total amount of years retired per person? Probably even more today still? I don't think "standard retirement age" tracks perfectly with life expectancy.
Also consider. The life expectancy of a 60 year old is above average. At age 60 you have already "survived" quite a lot of danger (adolescent drug abuse, driving accidents while young, opportunity to be a soldier in a war, crimes of passion in your twenties, mid life crisis, et cetera). So the life expectancy of a 60 year old is above the "average life expectancy", as many die before ever reaching that age.
You can make the opposite point with the same logic though: "the powerful, dangerous tobacco industry was given a loophole in the flavored cigarette ban allowing them to prey disproportionately on vulnerable Black populations."
I heard a former tobacco marketer say once that the only thing that sells cigarettes is a sign that says "OPEN."
A more effective harm reduction strategy would be to make the things more expensive and inconvenient to purchase. But that's a harder sell than banning flavored tobacco products.
Meanwhile, alcohol comes in numerous pleasant and sweet varieties and you can buy cookies with enough THC to knock out an elephant. It's a bit of a double standard to go after tobacco products, even if they have fewer redeeming qualities and low potential for responsible use.
> But man, “ban menthols because Black people like them” sure feels a little weird.
> Like, I get that’s not exactly what’s going on. But.. it’s a little bit what’s going on?
Like other flavors have been, they are banned because of the youth impact.
The racial skew, and whose youth regulators previously were and weren’t concerned about, is why menthols were previously excluded from the flavor ban, but its kind of weird to call out eliminating the racially-motivated discrepancy as a problem.
I don’t buy into the ban having racist roots but I am concerned about the result of the ban increasing race problems. There was a famous case in the past few years of a big black guy being killed during a police interaction and the underlying reason for the interaction was that he was selling loose cigarettes on the street.
Prohibition and the failed drug war have shown us that making something illegal won’t stop demand or supply. So now a bunch of black people who are physically hooked on a specific product are going to have it taken away (I smoked, it was a nightmare fight to quit) and for sure people are going to start selling bootleg product (unless menthol can’t be bootlegged, I know nothing about the creation of this product) and most of them will be black since most of the menthol demand is in black communities.
Unless the police don’t intend to try and stop this we would expect it to increase the amount of police interactions and then naturally increase the number of violent interactions leading to death.
A drop of mint flavoring from the baking aisle at the nearest store on the filter, and a few drops on the unflavored pipe tobacco. It ain't the same, but nobody's gonna complain when the alternative is raw.
Flavors aren't effective at hooking young people, nicotine is. Nobody smokes because it tastes good, menthol or not. This is just another ban that makes some people feel good about themselves while pissing off the rest. I lean pretty far left, but this is the kind of meaningless ban that makes people hate Democrats.
> Flavors aren't effective at hooking young people, nicotine is.
Wrong. Flavors are simply really effective at hooking everybody.
I watched this with a friend of mine who absolutely thought the same way as you. We got him a couple different flavored ones to try--all non-nicotine.
His reaction: "Alright, you win. You have to physically take the strawberry ones away as I will absolutely drain them all."
The flavors allow the industry to find the one that you personally find agreeable. Add nicotine on top of that and you have a device for personalized maximal addiction.
I commend you for your integrity. However the exceptions are a rounding error in terms of market cap, because today's tech industry is all about creating addicts and profiting from their addiction directly or selling access to them to a third party. Sometimes both. It's not a coincidence that we're one of only two industries that refers to customers as users.
While its probably hard to disagree about market cap, there are a lot of people writing software that backs your laptop/desktop, runs your bank, plans logistics delivery routes, runs medical equipment, etc.
There is a lot of software out there that isn't dedicated to triggering human dopamine receptors. You don't hear a lot about it as it's just part of the job.
And I didn't choose to have integrity--it's just that nobody ever offered me enough money to compromise it. :)
>Nobody smokes because it tastes good, menthol or not.
I was just talking with some online friends yesterday who smoke and say they would never have started if it weren't for menthols, so I think you're wrong about this.
Yes but most cigarettes are not menthols. And a good portion of the people I know who smoke hate menthols... so there's that anecdote. I only know one person who smokes menthols, and the rest just smoke regular cigarettes and did not start by smoking menthols.
Harm reduction? Why not ban alcohol? Why not cap cars at 55mph? People have lost money in the stock market, so I assume you'd like that banned as well. What is your limiting principle?
I don't understand all the downvotes to this. Any harm reduction initiative is by nature paternalistic and somewhat arbitrary.
In most societies, a "vice" is a just a habit that the upper middle class disapproves of. In the 1950's, the upper middle class enjoyed smoking cigarettes so that was fine and dandy, but marijuana was the devil. Today, the upper middle class loves marijuana and finds cigarettes distasteful, so we have smoking bans alongside marijuana legalization.
Excatly. I get the feeling the same group of people in favor of this ban is heavily overlapping with the large population segment that wants legal marijuana? Like, its gotta be all or nothing here, you want this stuff legal, or not? Otherwise your gonna get contraband, perverse incentives, and very likely excessively harsh punishment on petty drug crimes....
All of these things are okay in moderation and have some driving principle that weighs cost versus benefit. Same with cigarettes. Hugely harmful with a long tail of harmfulness and external effects on society with little or no gain. Seems like a good risk analysis to me in this case.
This ban also includes flavored cigars, which most users only smoke occasionally. But even so, why is society bothered with someone's individual choice to smoke a menthol cigarette away from others? I don't see the "external effects" you're alluding to, so it feels like the "long tail" is small in magnitude.
If I have to take a guess, you might be thinking of healthcare costs and having to subsidize smokers. But if that's a concern, I feel we should avoid universal healthcare proposals (like Medicare for All) and instead let people choose what insurance coverage they want from private companies, from a menu of choices, so that they pay for what the coverage they want based on who they are and the habits they have. I suggest this path because everyone has a different idea about what they want covered. Some may not want to subsidize smokers, some may not want to subsidize abortions, some may not want to subsidize healthcare for the obese, some may not want to subsidize puberty blockers for children, and so on.
Ultimately, all of this is leading us back to what I feel the US got right in the past - favoring choice, control, and responsibility at the individual level instead of increased government size, regulation, and paternalism.
I mean, the short answer is risk vs. reward. Smoking is insanely bad for you, very addictive, and the benefits are, uh, marginal.
To walk down your list:
- Alcohol can be safely consumed in moderation, and is less prone to addiction. This comes the closest, though.
- Cars have lots of places where they can be safely operated above that speed, and fast travel has lots of benefits.
- The potential benefits of the stock market are fairly obvious. The risks are extremely, immediately obvious, including to the person doing the money-losing.
> But man, “ban menthols because Black people like them” sure feels a little weird.
Because it's patronizing and soft bigotry of low expectations - something most of these policies either are ignorant towards or is the exact intention. It's a fact that menthol cigarettes attract youth. It's also a fact that "On average, African Americans initiate smoking at a later age compared to Whites." and "African Americans smoke fewer cigarettes per day":
So most adult blacks are making conscious decisions themselves to start smoking when they are adults. And since 86% of blacks and 46% of hispanics prefer menthol cigarettes over regular ones, the adults enjoy that flavour. But this ban is patronizing them as if the adult blacks are too stupid to think for themselves, so the politicians must treat them as they treat kids and make the decisions to take away bad things from them.
Instead of making changes so that youth can't get a hand on it, they are banning it because according to their own set standards, somehow adult blacks and hispanics are unable to think for themselves.
Anecdotal but when I immigrated, it was the patronizing comments and policies which I found the most "offensive". It's like being treated as kids instead of grown adults who can make decisions and achieve great things on my own.
Also this ban will result in the same consequences as the "war on drugs" and weed bans. Intentionally or unintentionally, it will end up locking more blacks just like it happened in 1980s and 1990s.
Saying this as someone who's neither touched a cigarette in my entire life, nor do I like the smell of it or weed. But I find any such overreach by the federal government to be useless with bad consequences. Better solutions would be to legalize weed, menthol cigarettes etc and put efforts towards stopping youth from getting their hands on them.
What's weird is the way the government decides to deliver these messages.
Why do government responses have to be framed as "arm over your shoulder" do-gooder decisions rather than evidence-based decisions when there's already lots of data?
IDK, maybe the "think of the children!" line and knee-deep assumptions of helping disadvantaged groups is all that's needed to stir government policy vs analyzing perspectives from a scientific approach.
I mean, it's still good overall, and it's a net benefit to reduce long-term smoking.
Well, that's the same Libertarian argument whether black people are involved or not. Every vice is something that people like. That's what the concept of a vice means, as opposed to diseases, crimes, or tragedies. The "is it paternalistic to change other people's willful behavior" question is one that has dogged every prohibition debate since time immemorial.
I must have missed the memo that Prohibition worked after we banned alcohol and weed.
This is a ridiculous overreach. The end game is for people to stop smoking altogether, and while that would be good for American health, this is so unnecessary. It is not the prerogative of our peers to maintain our health.
It is our free right to poison ourselves in the ways we desire. In ten years from now when cigarettes are fully illegal and those "darn ignorant poor people who just can't help themselves because they don't know any better" continue to swell up and die from overeating, are we, the wealthy class, going to dictate what they are allowed to eat?
I wish these were rhetorical questions but as we continue to socialize the cost of medicine we need to be very explicit that we are OK paying for others' bad decisions as part of the package. If not, we should not socialize the cost. Dictating what risky behavior is allowed is the wrong move, because there is no limiting principle.
For example, in a world where we dictate like this, how long until we ban climbing rope because it makes it too easy to climb rock faces, which leads to injury and socialized health-care costs?
This ban is a serious assault on American freedom and a return to puritan morality.
EDIT: some phrasing, may affect the comment below :(
They are banning sale, not use. It seems totally reasonable to say we don’t want anyone to profit from selling highly addictive health damaging products. This is ok. Your argument boils down to “I want the right to poison myself and the convenience to do it at easily accessible retail outlets.”
The suggestion that we should restrict healthcare based on the degree to which a person is culpable for their disease is a terrible idea, and impossible to implement.
>Your argument boils down to “I want the right to poison myself and the convenience to do it at easily accessible retail outlets.”
Yes this is my argument.
>The suggestion that we should restrict healthcare based on the degree to which a person is culpable for their disease is a terrible idea, and impossible to implement.
We talked past each other here.
I did not mean that we should remove an individual's access to healthcare due to their habits.
My intent is that if we're OK with spreading out the cost of health care to every citizen, we must also be OK with the fact that some people will cost more due to their habits. If we feel the need to dictate which habits are proper in order to make the costs more lean, maybe we should reconsider spreading out the costs at all, and hold off on socializing medicine.
Socializing the cost of medicine is not a bad idea, but telling people which habits are proper in order to make the costs more lean is a dangerous idea with no limiting principle.
I don't find this very convincing, considering the large downsides for the individual and community. I work in healthcare, so perhaps I have a different perspective to you.
I may not work in healthcare, but I work in health-tech, most of my family worked at a health insurance company for most of their lives, and previous generations were tobacco farmers in KY.
We can build a city on a hill, but what's the point if we can't let loose in the way we want?
>Your argument boils down to “I want the right to poison myself and the convenience to do it at easily accessible retail outlets.”
So when do we ban highly processed foods that are killing far more people every day? Not sure what the difference is aside from it's acceptible to play Mommy to smokers but not the overweight/obese.
>Your argument boils down to “I want the right to poison myself and the convenience to do it at easily accessible retail outlets.”
That is the argument, and I find that it holds up just fine. It's not like cigarettes appeared on the market yesterday, their dangers are well known. Adults should have the ability to make their own decisions, even if those decisions are harmful to themselves.
> Adults should have the ability to make their own decisions
How many people actually really make their own decisions, and have all of the information available to do so? Does the right of those people to take that decision and have their chosen product available cheaply and conveniently outweigh the incremental harm that accrues to everyone else merely tempted by the cheapness and convinence?
Eric Garner was killed because of the policies that created the a huge black market for cigarettes in NYC. the absurdity is they are banning flavor which isn't the harmful element. at the same time they are legalizing marijuana including edibles across this country. in a free country you have to allow people the liberty to make poor choices. putting out health information and reasonable restrictions is as far as the govt should go.
Two parts to this:
- You are highlighting the negative consequences of a ban. There are of course negative consequences to a ban, the black market issue is far from the most important one. But as inidicated in the press release, smoking is a huge health problem causing untold suffering, loss of income, loss of productivity, unnecessary healthcare costs etc etc. These pros and cons of a ban need to be compared in a sane manner.
- The 'Whatabout' argument, whatabout alcohol, marijuana, gambling etc. This is not an argument which can guide us on what to do with tobacco. If the question is, why are we doing something about tobacco but not any other X problems, the basic answer is because tobacco causes a huge burden of problems, and there are only very small upsides to smoking for an individual, and very large downsides for the individual and almost everyone else.
I think there is a lot of research showing that 'putting out health information and reasonable restrictions' doesn't achieve much. If you are agreeing that something rather than nothing should be done, why do something that doesn't really work?
>the basic answer is because tobacco causes a huge burden of problems, and there are only very small upsides to smoking for an individual
Doubtful. The real answer is that public opinion on smoking has turned so strongly against it that these bans won't create enough vocal opposition. The anti-vice authoritarians only stop here because they would be eviscerated if they tried to ban something like alcohol. But we should be careful about emboldening the moral busybodies with national victories.
>The anti-vice authoritarians only stop here because they would be eviscerated if they tried to ban something like alcohol. But we should be careful about emboldening the moral busybodies with national victories.
Bingo. The state is dictating virtuousness for our own good.
I agree with your sentiment but I'm not sure it will be the same. The companies that make cigarettes are few and far between and are much more likely to obey government rules to make sure they stay in good graces of the government and can keep selling their other highly profitable products. With alcohol people could make it in stills in their basements and with pot it came from across the border - maybe menthols will too but I'm not sure it's a high value enough product to do so that I would consider it a 1:1 comparison to pot.
It’s a public health issue on the same order of magnitude as COVID-19, but happening every year: “Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure. This is about one in five deaths annually, or 1,300 deaths every day.” [0]
They both put tar in your lungs. A tobacco smoker generally smokes far more cigarettes than a cannabis smoker. Per-breath, cannabis seems to put more tar in your lungs, since it's generally unfiltered. But a tobacco smoker takes many more breaths of smoke.
As far as I can tell, vaping is far, far safer than inhaling smoke, for both tobacco and cannabis. The healthiest strategy is to avoid all of these things of course.
Yes. This is a common misconception. It’s not that inhaling any kind of smoke is inherently dangerous. It’s specifically the oxidative damage that tobacco causes that makes it so uniquely deleterious. Reactive oxygen species are no joke.
By contrast cannabis is a natural anti-oxidant. Smoking cannabis might be correlated with more bronchitis but none of the cancer, heart disease, [insert every other tobacco harm]. BTW I seem to recall particle size is different between tobacco and cannabis smoke but I think the oxidative damage is the main reason
Even if I take those numbers at face value, it's disengenuous to mix in those from 1964 and up until we banned public smoking nearly everywhere you can imagine. The last place you can smoke freely is your home, and this doesn't address that.
Honestly the secondhand smoke research is very sketchy. Actually anything that becomes a public health issue ends up getting distorted by the public health establishment. Case in point: flu vaccines. They’re so ineffective that no rational person would ever waste time taking them, yet many of us do: https://www.cochrane.org/CD001269/ARI_vaccines-prevent-influ... (note: the “no rational person” is slight hyperbole)
The better argument is that the actual social behavior of smoking is contagious, as any social behavior is.
The victims of secondhand smoke aren't someone standing on the street next to a smoker but people (and pets) who grow up in a household with smokers. Whether or not the numbers are what they are claimed to be it's hard to argue against the reality that thousands of children are subjected to the very real harms of secondhand smoke their entire childhood with no recourse, especially when they are most vulnerable.
I don't say this to say we should ban tobacco because "think of the children" but I genuinely think people seriously overlook this aspect. Someone smoking near you as an adult might be obnoxious but children in smoking households suffer and develop lifelong health problems for a vice that is entirely out of their control that many people don't even really see as a problem or think about.
Ha, I hear this argument all the time and it’s actually completely wrong. All social behaviors are contagious. They do spread exponentially. Especially drug consumption / smoking.
Note: it’s not relevant but to be clear I oppose all drug bans (incl tobacco) and all the COVID restrictions. So don’t interpret my pointing out that social behaviors are contagious to be justifying the menthol ban.
This misses the point of what makes a contagion so bad. An outbreak of a contagious disease is bad because victims do not (usually) consent to them and often has limited or no means of protecting themselves against infection. A nicotine addiction is nothing like that.
COVID-19 is scary because you can't reasonably eliminate your risk of contracting it without significant mental, social, and economic sacrifice. But I'm not worried about getting lung cancer because I just don't smoke. You can't just accidentally give lung cancer or a nicotine addiction to someone at a social gathering.
It's impossible to smoke in the United States without knowing the addictive and carcinogenic nature of it. The warnings are plastered all over the ads, the counter, and the product itself. If you know all that and still choose to smoke, that's on you. People take risks with their lives for things that make them happy all the time. As long as you know the risks up front and you aren't bothering me with it, why should I care?
> but they're also in favor of legalizing marijuana? Very weird.
In every state that it's been legalized in, weed is heavily regulated. Weed must be tested for adulterants, heavy metals and mold contamination before it is sold. Some states even regulate the amount of active compounds that are present in the marijuana.
In the states I'm familiar with, it's also illegal to package, market or sell marijuana in manners that might entice children to use it. Sometimes that means banning THC laden candies or vapes that children can recognize, and banning the use of colorful advertising or cartoons, as well.
> in favor of prohibiting the use of menthol cigarettes, but they're also in favor of legalizing marijuana
Cigarettes are sold at every convenience store in flashy packaging. They are made by deep-pocketed multinationals with generations of lobbying experience.
Legal marijuana, on the other hand, is sold with minimal advertising in licensed, purpose-built stores. If you gave tobacco companies a choice between banning menthol and forcing the sale of cigarettes in tobacco stores only, I think I know which one they'd pick.
Agreed. Unfortunately the social perception of alcohol is still at a place where banning it would be impossible, though. People don't even want to talk about making it more expensive. Alcohol still doesn't have nutritional labels in the US!
The Prohibition wasn't extremely unpopular back when it was passed. Indeed, it was passed due to heavy pressure from the progressive public at the time, with grassroots campaigning advocating for such measures on all levels of government.
It became extremely unpopular when it became law, and people found out what this actually means - a large black market for organized crime to cultivate, and heavy-handed enforcement with plenty of "collateral damage".
>The Prohibition wasn't extremely unpopular back when it was passed. Indeed, it was passed due to heavy pressure from the progressive public at the time, with grassroots campaigning advocating for such measures on all levels of government.
The campaign was effective at getting an unpopular law passed. I think that's how we should read prohibition.
Besides which, we don't have to go all the way to prohibition to make a dent here. A pigouvian tax would be good enough to start with, and maybe better education on the effects of alcohol.
Unlike other drugs, it is legal to grow your own tobacco in the US - even if you’re too young to buy it. They’re restricting what big corporations can sell, not what individual people can do. There’s nothing in this change stopping anyone from buying loose tobacco, adding their own flavor, and rolling cigarettes with it.
I do wonder how hard it is to add menthol to existing cigarettes. Will we see Head Shops where you buy a pack of cigarettes and on the counter are menthol drops you can sprinkle on, and it's all technically legal since they're separate products?
> Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure. This is about one in five deaths annually, or 1,300 deaths every day.[1]
> The tobacco industry spends billions of dollars each year on marketing cigarettes.[2]
> Each day, about 1,600 youth try their first cigarette.[2]
> In 2015, nearly 7 in 10 (68.0%) adult cigarette smokers wanted to stop smoking.[1]
> In 2018, more than half (55.1%) adult cigarette smokers had made a quit attempt in the past year.[1]
> In 2018, more than [only] 7 out of every 100 (7.5%) people who tried to quit succeeded.[1]
Smoking legislation isn't about micromanaging the lives of people who fully understand the risk choose to smoke anyway. It's about preventing cigarette manufacturers from preying on those who don't fully understand the risk or didn't when they started, but are now addicted.
There's a huge difference between regulation and criminalization.
I think you'd find that most people who support abolishing the war on drugs, and who support drug legalization, are also supportive of regulation the legalized drugs.
The lack of regulation and criminalization are two reasons that the US has a fentanyl epidemic. It's too risky to import heroin because it weighs a lot, while 1 gram of fentanyl is 10,000+ doses.
Meanwhile, regulated heroin that's used in hospitals is pure and free of adulterants.
If you are going to provide any kind free or discounted health care, the best way to make that cheaper is to restrict people from doing damaging things.
The problem here is everyone dies, and having people die of lung cancer at an early age costs the healthcare system less than having them die of some other form of diabetes/cancer/heart disease 15 years later. The studies that talk about the costs of treating cancers related to smoking are not giving you a picture of what else the same people would be treated for before they die. Really the worst thing for any healthcare system is to have lots of elderly people going through expensive treatments to prolong their life, and after you end all smoking, you'll find you have even more elderly people going through expensive treatment, except the types of cancers will be more evenly distributed.
it's entirely possible that smokers have lower lifetime healthcare costs due to living significantly shorter lives on average. they certainly draw less social security.
Agreed. It's a balance though, you don't want to create a black market for the things you make illegal. For some reason I don't see menthol cigarettes becoming a black market but I can't say the same for flavored vape cartridges.
Because our tax dollars pay for Medicare/Medicaid, so for those people who don't have private insurance, they're saddling society with the costs of their choices.
In general I lean libertarian and agree that banning things isn't great, but if you want to make your own choices, you have to bear the costs of those choices. If you want to waive your right to government funded healthcare, then you ought to be able to make whatever unhealthy choices you want.
That’s the problem with socialized medicine. Once you institute it now your body belongs to the state. You’re not allowed to put something deemed bad in your body because the “people” have to pay for it.
Prohibition is wrong. It’s not just unethical but impractical.
And congrats, now cops aren’t just going to claim they smell weed in my car, they’re going to claim they smell menthol too.
—
Also your “waive your right to gov funded healthcare” argument doesn’t make sense. Because I still have to pay for the other guy’s healthcare too.
What makes sense is to socialise medicine, and then have the body responsible for running that:
1. Run public health awareness campaigns to make sure that people (especially children / young people) are aware of the health risks. You can do similar things around healthy eating.
2. Treat drug usage and addiction as medical rather than criminal issue (so the police might confiscate your weed if they catch you with it, but they won't charge you with anything).
Both of these minimise healthcare costs without actually banning anything.
Socialized medicine by definition increases healthcare costs because it divorces the person creating the cost from bearing the results. This applies in basically every socialist system not just socialized medicine.
It’s also worth mentioning that public health awareness campaigns frequently stretch the science in the quest to moralize more effectively. Case in point: saturated fats, pretending everyone is equally vulnerable to AIDS, etc
> Socialized medicine by definition increases healthcare costs because it divorces the person creating the cost from bearing the results
Then why are healthcare costs in the UK (socialised) and Europe (typically private, but highly regulated with a social option) dramatically lower than US (private) healthcare costs despite similar levels of care? Unless you have evidence that it increases costs, I would suggest that you viewpoint is just ideology, and you may wish to consider revising it.
> It’s also worth mentioning that public health awareness campaigns frequently stretch the science in the quest to moralize more effectively
They also often do a lot of good despite this. There is a very successful public health campaign promoting the eating of 5 fruits and vegetables a day. It's not quite accurate. The science suggested we should be eating 9. But it's lead to people eating a lot more fruit and veg than they would otherwise have done, which is a good thing all round.
> Then why are healthcare costs in the UK (socialised) and Europe (typically private, but highly regulated with a social option) dramatically lower than US (private) healthcare costs despite similar levels of care?
They don’t have similar levels of care, that’s why. Wait times are longer and the care is overall of lower quality.
It’s also hard to compare countries directly. In the USA we have a big “underclass” of very unhealthy people (that falls along both socioeconomic and racial lines), which the countries you’re pointing out largely don’t.
>You’re not allowed to put something deemed bad in your body because the “people” have to pay for it.
Has any country with socialized medicine actually banned tobacco fully? Genuinely curious.
If they haven't then I don't understand why regulation isn't continuous with the current regime, where smokers have to pay a lot more for health insurance. These problems do not go away in a free market system, insurance companies will always try to incentivize you to take on less risk.
Being incentivized by paying for your increased risk via decentralized market dynamics is fine. Being banned from consuming a substance because your body no longer belongs to you but rather is property of the state is not fine.
Unaware what countries have fully banned tobacco. Without looking it up at all...maybe singapore? They seem like the type.
>Being banned from consuming a substance because your body no longer belongs to you but rather is property of the state is not fine.
Sure but that's not really what's being discussed here right now, and there doesn't seem to be evidence that this has happened. From another perspective, governments are trying to do their best to protect their citizens from the malign interests of private entities who sell dangerous products. I agree that banning tobacco entirely would be too coercive, though.
Apparently Bhutan is the only country where tobacco is illegal. I understand your concerns with regards to prohibition but I think this is a slippery slope argument without a better example or a more compelling explanation.
Once you go down this road you end up with social credit scores. First it’s the obvious stuff like tobacco, then not exercising enough, then not sleeping enough, and eventually you reach the paradox that free will is a lie anyway and there’s no functional difference between insomnia and “choosing” to eat a donut
Just tax cigarettes to the equivalent or greater than the amount of dollars of burden they place on the healthcare system. Make smokers pay for their own choices.
Externalized costs are the root of many seemingly insurmountable societal problems, and most can be fixed by simply accounting for the costs appropriately.
Smokers save Governments money on healthcare, because they die earlier.
"According to the research, a person of normal weight costs on average £210,000 over their lifetime, a smoker just £165,000 and an obese person £187,000."
I mean things probably will go that way as tracking of individual behaviors gets easier right? For example, I believe some healthcare providers will give free fitbits to users (I think the State of Nevada does) to get them to exercise more, so not a direct fee but they are incentivizing a certain behavior. Then you've got all the car insurers now that are looking at more details of your driving above and beyond the standard 1) how old are you 2) have you been in any accidents
I think that in situations like that, you ought to cover the cost of a potential rescue up front, either by paying for an insurance policy or putting down a deposit. People search until your deposit/insurance runs out, then they stop. If you don't survive, that's on you. There's just absolutely no reason that anyone's tax dollars should be spent to help someone who performs a totally needless and incredibly dangerous activity of their own volition.
The issue is that, when you get down to it, it’s just going out into the wilderness and climbing a rock. If you regulate that, you’ve made a wrong turn.
Same goes for surfing, or having consensual, unprotected sex. Both dangerous, or at least much more dangerous than the average human activity, but both too basic and natural to consider regulating. In my opinion.
This is the view I am most sympathetic with. I actually did advocacy work to increase tobacco taxes but got frustrated because almost everyone in the field wanted governments to outright ban products, and as someone who believes in freedom of choice that didn't sit well with me. I advocated for governments to find out how much "cost" a pack of cigarettes actually inflicted (e.g. cost to the healthcare system from the smoker, if they smoke indoors to their family, from lower productivity and therefore lower earnings/taxes, etc.) and increase the tax to cover that price
> Because our tax dollars pay for Medicare/Medicaid, so for those people who don't have private insurance, they're saddling society with the costs of their choices.
This may sound pedantic, but I think it's an important distinction: Society has saddled society with the costs of their choices. It's not the self-destructive choice maker's fault.
If a child in public school willfully refuses to practice cursive, they may require additional instruction and resources. I wouldn't say that child is "saddling society with the costs of their choices". They're just living the life they were born to, and society is obsessing over them.
I generally feel similarly, but I'd rather go the taxation route than the control route. If people want to use hazardous substances, tax the substances to help fund the government subsidized health care.
Smoking is really, really, really bad for you. It’s much worse, and much harder to stop, the earlier you start. Banning flavors 1) stops some overall consumption 2) especially stops youth consumption.
Lifetime healthcare costs for the negative externalities of a pack-a-day smoker can reach into seven figures. And most people, frankly, don’t pay that themselves. It’s a tremendous burden on our healthcare system.
We ban lead paint, even though it’s super cheap and makes for vibrant colors. I honestly don’t see how this is any different.
>We ban lead paint, even though it’s super cheap and makes for vibrant colors. I honestly don’t see how this is any different.
That's totally different. Lead paint leads to a ton of environmental exposure to unwitting people. Smokers by contrast have made a choice to smoke.
Do you want them to ban bacon and soda too? Where's the line? Should we ban motorcycles because they're more dangerous than cars? What about recreational diving, skydiving and recreational pilots? Backyard swimming pools are incredibly dangerous statistically, shall we ban them too?
People have an inherent right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The government can ban smokers from smoking in a way that exposes you, but what right do they have to say you aren't allowed to do something dangerous if you so choose to do it?
Not entirely different. Smokers may choose to smoke and that is their choice but the people around them don't. Some of them may have control over their exposure but children (and pets) in smoking households are victims with little to no control over their exposure.
I don't think we should ban tobaccos outright, regardless of that fact, but smoking has real consequences for people other than the smoker themselves.
At what point do we say that we've just given up on the concept of freedom?
For what behaviors will we say: "That's a really bad idea, but go ahead and suffer the consequences if you want to do it"?
It seems we are moving in the direction of zero consequences first. By the time you have medical bills from smoking too much, you're on medicare, so it's not coming out of your children's inheritance.
And then after the consequences are pushed onto other people, we say that you can't have the freedom any more.
Seems like a good way to just eliminate freedom completely.
Oddly enough smoking actually saves the State money in the long run. Smoking citizens don't live as long and thus save money on medical care and entitlement payments.
Financially, isn't the even bigger factor the large amount of sin taxes smokers pay into the system over their lifetime? I read that it is usually more than the added healthcare cost.
Seems like a really oversimplified idea of what freedom is. It's not a binary where you're free or you aren't. You're never _completely_ free, or you wouldn't be able to pulled over by cops, forced to file taxes, or whatever, anyway.
Like, yeah, you could stick to the "absolute freedom all the time" principle and do nothing to make people healthier, but if you had just done it anyway life would be better for everyone involved. And you're stuck with your rigid adherence to principles saying "well at least we were free" while the world is crappy compared to what it could be. Give me the slightly paternalistic government that makes its people healthier and happier every time.
The problem is that your definition of "slightly" might not agree with that of the majority - and then you end up being targeted for your lifestyle choices.
As far as freedom not being a binary... true, but insofar as it's a function of social arrangements, it's possible to find (or at least strive to find) a global maximum where everybody is as free as possible.
That response comes up a lot: that a particular choice of what the government does won't be agreeable to everyone. But like, so what? That's abstractly the point of democracy. It is kind of fine if governments do things their citizens don't like. There are correction mechanisms also but it's just approximate, it's not supposed to appease everyone completely.
High-level you would like the government to mostly do things that the citizens mostly like. Then the citizens will mostly consent to have a government that mostly leaves them free. But it's all approximate. It doesn't extrapolate to always doing things that all citizens like. That doesn't work at all, for obvious reasons like the government being licensed to tax or imprison people.
But, again, you can, at least, try to minimize the number of people who do not like what the government is doing. Which is very different from declaring that a simple (or even qualified) majority gets to decide for everybody simply by virtue of being a majority.
Freedoms are fine until companies are doing whatever they can to make something so addictive it's near impossible for someone to quit without suffering or spending lots of money.
It's not just a someone choses to smoke. It's they got hooked, usually by deceptive advertising or peer pressure.
Are you also against seatbelts? The police? Building codes?
>"Are you also against seatbelts? The police? Building codes?"
Obviously not, but those are different arguments about the concept of "freedom" and government regulation. A more relevant comparison would be about outlawing trans-fats, regulating the size of soda, portion sizes, flavored e-cigs, etc.
>and address health disparities experienced by communities of color, low-income populations, and LGBTQ+ individuals, all of whom are far more likely to use these tobacco products
The messaging changes with the whims of society, but the authoritarian motivations remain the same.
I wonder if there’s ever been a study comparing the effects of banning compared to ultra high taxation of products.
I understand that there are groups that are negatively affected but is banning even effective in improving health outcomes in this case?
In my imaginary world the tax would be extremely high and diverted to things in the same area that have the opposite effect: e.g make cheeseburgers more expensive and subsidize leafy greens and produce with the same funds on a municipal level.
The problem is for the people it doesn’t reduce consumption of. Plenty of people will happily spend less on their children or education or safer products or whatever to continue their dependence instead.
There are solutions to these issues, but governments love to say “see, we have scientific proof that this tax is good for you”.
Similarly, a common anti-diarrheal (loperamide) is believed to help reduce opiate withdrawals if you eat a massive number of tablets (like 50-100). It doesn’t. But the FDA still “asked” manufacturers to only sell in smaller packs. Now that my family has gone through their bottle of 200 after several years, it costs me 5x more than last time. Meanwhile, anyone in opiate withdrawal will do anything to ward off those withdrawals. Logic will go out the window. Cost is irrelevant and anything will be done to get the funds/materials required.
My point is less about the tax and more about the money being used to help in the same community directly using the tax revenue from bad things directly.
I mean we could just ban everything that produces poor outcomes even in moderation: gambling, smoking, certain types of alcohol, vaping, etc.
If we can’t trust our own citizens to do things in moderation then what?
People will rationalize the choice (since it's still available) and end up spending more on the same item, which doesn't reduce usage - it just means the people using this item now have less money than before.
So, if the goal is to remove the item entirely, it has to be banned from production/import rather than highly taxed.
I don't really think bans are great either - we're all adults and can make our own choices. Provide better education about the effects/impacts of the choice, then let the informed adults make their own decision.
The point isn’t just to tax, but to use the funds to create things that are significantly cheaper and reverse the effect.
Taxing obviously affects the demand and cost of consumption but that money should go somewhere useful, ideally not into the ether that is government spending.
Your plan falls apart when it comes to the "vices" and "Sin Taxes", in my opinion.
You won't prevent people from indulging in their choice of "vice" or "sin", you'll just make those people more poor than before. People who smoke and are addicted won't suddenly substitute smoking with chewing bubble gum or eating salads simply because those are cheaper options...
It’s not about those specific people, it’s about the aggregate. They probably won’t chew gum, but you can probably help other poor people in the same community.
Compared to what- banning it which creates some level of a black market and more waste by policing what was previously a legal activity. Not to mention fining or otherwise enforcing the new law also makes those poor people even poorer and removes choice.
Or you could just not try to Social Engineer society...
It rarely works anyway, and often leads to unintended consequences.
Educate people about the choices and why it might be bad for them to choose one way over the other - then hands off, let the now-educated adults make their own decisions.
We can look at smoking as a good example of this. Decades of hard-core educational efforts about the negative effects have inarguably led to a massive reduction in smoking. Has it eliminated it entirely? No... but it certainly has reduced it to benign levels when compared to historical smoking.
When someone considers trying cigarettes for the first time, do they consider the costs of an addiction/habit - or do they consider the effects on their own health? The massive taxes on a pack of cigarettes has little-to-zero impact on the choice to smoke the first one...
The broader term is a pigovian tax and there's tons of (economic) studies on the effects of them. The problem with crazy high taxes is it also increases the incentive to circumvent them, legal or otherwise. One easy example off the top of my head is a person could stop buying them from a corner store and start directly importing them from outside the US.
According to the press release at least one study suggests it would lead to 923,000 smokers to quit, which is a definite health improvement.
Honestly I completely agree. Taxation seems to be the only way to actual instigate change. Too high though you would likely lead to the same result as a full ban.
I could see no real reason for a "blackmarket" to exist for menthol cigarettes as the consumption of them has remained pretty much the same over the last 10 years.
Make the tax high enough and you just create illegal markets. We should have learned from Prohibition and the War on Drugs that if people want to get high, they will find a way, and other people will be happy to provide what they are looking for.
At a certain point of taxation, banning is more effective because it's much harder to tell if you have an untaxed menthol cigarette than to tell if you have a menthol cigarette.
So tax evasion becomes a limiting factor in such taxes.
I’d like to imagine an alternative universe where the federal government bans wood burning fireplaces. After all fireplaces produce an enormous quantity of indoor air pollution, and sitting by a fire for the night is about the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes.
How would this policy proposal be received? My guess is that the public would be up in arms and decry the move as ridiculous government over reach.
The only operative difference between this and the menthol ban is that fireplaces are associated with rich people living in upscale houses. The thought experiment tells me that at some level we’re more willing to force paternalism on low status poor people.
Well, at least in the SF Bay Area, you are not allowed to install a new wood burning fireplace. And you are not allowed to operate one on “spare the air” says, unless it is your only source of heat.
New Zealand has an age requirement for tobacco, and has also (edit: proposed) to ban sales of it entirely based on birth year (2004 and forward) to phase out its consumption. I’d say this doesn’t go far enough. We’ve known for over half a century the damage tobacco consumption does to a person’s body.
I'm of the opinion you can ruin your own body all you want. As long as you don't breath it into my face, have at it. I wouldn't advise anyone to take up smoking though.
I think you should be able to buy cocaine (as an example) as easily as tobacco.
I have seen too many addicts slowly kill themselves (tobacco, opioids, cocaine) to be able to morally maintain this position. It’s easy to say when you assume everyone is of sound mind and capable of self regulation, which is not the case. People have demons and mental health challenges that make them vulnerable.
You’d need a model like Portugal, where they fund treatment programs and social services along side liberal drug policy.
Who decides you're too vulnerable to make your own decisions.
At what percentage of the overall populace being classified as vulnerable do we start removing the decision from the whole population.
But yes, something similar to Portugal would be my preference. Health treatment provided by government, possibly a "Health Premium" tax paid on tobacco, drugs, alcohol, etc at point-of-sale to help cover costs. Different tax rates based on how "bad" for your health it is.
Governments - even democratic ones - do not exactly have a good track record on that. For example, it was mostly democratic governments that enacted compulsory sterilization laws back in the day.
But of how unsound a mind must someone be before we say "I know better than you?"
There are 10s of thousands of addicts on the street that the government does not feel it has the grounds to institutionalize. So we trust them to make every decision except which psychoactive chemicals that aren't alcohol they can consume?
On the one hand, I understand that complete prohibition for drugs and alcohol just don't work. But I have a difficult time squaring that against my feelings towards tobacco, where I feel it would be so much easier for me to quit if I wasn't tempted by its availability at every corner store.
What are your thoughts on a retail cigarette sale system such as in Canada, where they may be available in every convenience store, but there can be absolutely no signage or advertising, and they're kept in an opaque cabinet with no labels on it?
By switching to flavored vape cartridges, which the FDA then helpfully made illegal in a fit of moral panic.
Pity, because as far as anyone can tell, vaping is at least two orders of magnitude less deleterious to health than smoking.
So these days I refill my old cartridges and nurse a grudge against FDA. I haven't backslid to smoking, but if they ban high-nicotine salt juice entirely, I don't know what I'm going to do.
I oppose prohibition for the moral reason that adults ought to be allowed to make these choices for themselves and the practical reason that it doesn't seem to work well anyway. but that's a fair point. this might actually be a good use case for zoning. imo the happy medium is "manufacturers are allowed to sell X, as long as they make it as safe as it intrinsically can be" and "you're allowed to buy X, but you might have to go out of your way to do it". people that want to avoid X or pretend it doesn't exist would have that option too.
What if you could buy individual cigarettes instead of a pack of 20? I feel like 20 is the exact amount you need to smoke to get hooked. If you could go buy like 1 or 2 so that you could enjoy a drink and social smoke with a friend, I feel like the rest of the pack would not be sitting around your house tempting you. Like why the fuck is it illegal for me to buy just 1 cigarette?! Why is it that I need to buy a pack of 20?
According to Wikipedia taxes make up 42.5% of the cost of a pack of cigarettes in the US. In New Zealand it is as best I can work it out, around 72% (including both excise tax and sale tax). One cigarette costs US$0.96 in New Zealand. Menthol is still allowed.
This, along with bans on smoking inside public buildings including restaurants and bars, ban on advertising (they can't even be displayed in stores), and marketing has lead to significant falls in smoking.
The downside is there is a growing blackmarket and robberies of convenient stores because they are worth so much and easily converted to cash.
(I don't smoke and prices may have changed since I last read about it)
Bingo... my "modern press release Bingo card with all the CJT terms" is full. Can't just talk about how it's better for humans, have to ensure it's disproportionally going to impact disadvantaged groups and such.
I've no particular problem with banning flavored cigars, because they're quite vile as far as I'm concerned. I've had one or two by mistake or when someone gave me something, and if you're used to a good tobacco blend, the... whatever they put in them is not very good.
With cigarettes up around $8/box, though, I've no idea why more people don't switch to pipes. A pound of good pipe tobacco lasts for months of regular smoking (longer if it's infrequent), and $30 will get you a pound of some legitimately good stuff. You can get a good pipe and tobacco for the cost of a few weeks of cigarettes, it's a lot harder to chain smoke pipes, and an awful lot classier.
In general I am not a fan of the government banning things. People should be allowed the freedom to make individual choices and live their life unencumbered. Living in a state where everything is controlled, allowed, or disallowed by governments and corporations imposing their own morality and values is not living freely. Why is it anyone's business if someone smokes a flavored cigar? It makes even less sense when you consider that this government is allowing a free flow of drugs and criminals through an open southern border, including substances that are much more dangerous like meth or fentanyl.
Lastly, I am just completely frustrated and exhausted by the continual hammering of "equity" and "justice" word salads used in every single press release coming out of this administration and the progressive/activist machine more broadly. Does anyone take sentences like this seriously:
> [...] address health disparities experienced by communities of color, low-income populations, and LGBTQ+ individuals, all of whom are far more likely to use these tobacco products [...]
I feel like adults are giving away their liberties bit by bit in the name of "protecting the children". I am sympathetic to the issue of kids getting addicted to smoking/vaping, but to ban any and all flavors seems like a horrible idea.
A drinker can go any liquor store and buy fruit flavored vodka. A recreational cannabis smoker can go to a local dispensary and buy fruit flavored weed - hell, even gummy bears!
As an adult I want these choices available and it doesn't make any sense to me that only some adult vices aren't allowed to have flavors while all the rest of them do.
These policies are almost always celebrated on the basis of the goal of the policy but not the reality of the enforcement. What happens when someone gets busted with a menthol cigarette? Or, worse yet, selling a "loosie" menthol on the street, much like Eric Garner did?
Is it possible that maybe there's a connection between over regulating people's choices and over policing peoples' lives?
If you agree with this but disagree with the war on drugs then you are a hypocrite who probably doesn’t have the ability to form his own opinion from first principles.
I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. At this point, if you start smoking that's on you. It's not like there's any shortage of proof that tobacco is bad for you at this point.
The various personal freedom takes on regulation like this seem ring hollow.
Regulations like this impose constraints on economic and commercial activities, not personal ones. No one will be prevented from rolling a mint leaf into their own cigar. It was perfectly legal to walk around New York under Bloomberg with a bucket of homemade sugar-water and a straw.
The thing curtailed is profiting from activities which create undue harm. Should we feel our inability to buy a poorly-insulated household appliance, or a car without seatbelts[1] as a loss of personal freedoms? Should the market decide the appropriate level of inflammability for home furniture? I think we generally recognize that allowing the profit motive to justify a failure to prevent harm as immoral and socially undesirable. Why should limiting the motivation to induce harmful activity in others be viewed as paternalistic and patronizing?
[1]: sidestepping the question of seatbelt-use regulations, which are arguably a restriction on _personal_ freedoms
They banned menthol vape juice in my state so I bought a big bottle of menthol flavoring and some "Koolada" flavor that I just add to some tobacco juice.
But man, “ban menthols because Black people like them” sure feels a little weird.
Like, I get that’s not exactly what’s going on. But.. it’s a little bit what’s going on?
I guess it’s just worth watching closely any time someone talks about protecting disadvantaged groups. I think that is actually what’s happening here, but it’s suuuuch a short rhetorical jump to “well, the under classes can’t be trusted with lottery tickets!” and so on.
Edit: just to make it abundantly clear: I don't think the FDA is actually banning menthols because Black people enjoy them. But I think their reasoning isn't too far from that, and it's worth being watchful for that sort of paternalism, IMO.