F.D.A. Plans to Seek a Ban on Menthol Cigarettes
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
As they and everyone knows, quiting smoking is a difficult task and suddenly prohibiting many peoples go-to fix would be cruel and possibly cause more harm than good.
>FDA officials—who want to curb use among youth while still encouraging adult cigarette smokers to switch to less harmful products like e-cigarettes—decided not to restrict sales of mint and menthol e-cigarettes because they didn’t want to create a situation in which cigarettes were more attractive to smokers who prefer menthol, senior agency officials said. [1]
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/fda-to-propose-ban-of-menthol-c...
FTA: Menthol has local anesthetic and counterirritant qualities, and it is widely used to relieve minor throat irritation.
This makes it easier to get new smokers going without the coughing / throat irritation.
It started with crazy canker sores all over my tongue and a few pimples. The timelines I read were fairly accurate (e.g. tastebuds coming back, etc), but the biggest struggle was breaking the pattern.
Vaping just wasn't the same from the ritual side, but I'm glad I quit tobacco itself. Unlike many, I have no plans to quit nicotine. For me it takes the edge off -- and I think a lot of people with depression and anxiety are in the same boat.
People who haven't quit smoking will never understand what its like to quit smoking -- but the same goes for any addiction.
I had so many friends who smoked, and our independent desires to quit were definitely not in sync. I don't doubt that this was one of the major factors in me drawing out my quitting process.
As with most things, saying is significantly easier than doing.
On a general note, I find it upsetting how many people cheer these things on due to misplaced righteousness. You can disagree with smoking and even recognize its societal harms that affect you without supporting making it illegal. If only the human lifecycle were twice as long, we'd have many remembering political victories built on prohibition platforms followed by state after state banning breweries on the way to the 18th amendment.
I believe the general war on tobacco to be rooted in health concerns, but I believe this action to be a test to confirm the societal acceptance of this approach.
What makes cigarettes so lethal is all the other toxins.
Which isn't to say that lozenges are likely to cause it - it's still primarily caused by inhaling irritants - just using it to illustrate how something that interferes with elastin production might affect your breathing, even if you aren't inhaling it.
It's the same mechanism that smoking damages your skin. Nicotine in your blood gets everywhere. It affects elastin production throughout your body.
Smoking is a multi-stage attack on alveoli. You're both physically damaging them with the smoke and inhibiting their ability to regenerate. But they're a high-use tissue. Even without the additional damage, you're harming their ability to regrow.
I was gonna say, tho, if they were gonna ban ALL caffeine for kids under 18, oh boy Coca Cola would have a shit fit I'm sure.
Yes, it is that addictive that he would knowingly switch to menthols to help him ramp back up again.
Also, salt in meat and vege stews ~ if you have nothing else in terms of flavour, salt makes it infinitely more appetizing.
I understand the rationale behind this prohibitionist, paternalistic approach (maintain a healthy work/consumption force, reduce burden on socialised healthcare, improve GDP), but the additional cost to the economy is already built in to these goods - smoke tax (it’s not just tobacco, it’s anything you could burn and inhale) in the uk more than covers the cost of smoking related illness.
...according to the people who sell cigarettes.
Smoking related illnesses in the UK cost the NHS (taxpayers) around £5Bn year, and taxes on tobacco raise around £9Bn. So it's pretty close, but that £4Bn gap will need to be made up from somewhere. Personally I'd legalise the wacky tobaccy and tax that, but there really ought to be equivalent taxes on vaping too.
Also if life expectancy goes up, there will be an even greater shortfall in pensions too.
No need to demonstrate health risks first?
They only include smokers. They don't include, for example, the children of smokers, who have many much more respiratory illness than other children.
The hospital admission costs only include this list, and only include them when these are the primary diagnosis of the admission episode.
Importantly, the cost used is the payment by results cost, not the actual cost to the treating trusts or GP surgeries.
> Smoking attributable admissions are defined as spells where the primary diagnosis of the admission episode is attributable to the following ICD-10 codes:
> malignant neoplasms: lip, oral cavity, pharynx (C00 to C14), oesophagus (C15), stomach (C16), pancreas (C25), larynx (C32), trachea, lung, bronchus (C33-C34), cervix uteri (C53), kidney and renal pelvis (C64 to C66, C68), urinary bladder (C67), acute myeloid leukaemia (C92), unspecified site (C80)
> cardiovascular diseases: ischaemic heart disease (I20 to I25), other heart disease (I00 to I09, I26 to I51), cerebrovascular disease (I60 to I69), atherosclerosis (I70), aortic aneurysm (I71), other arterial disease (I72 to I78)
> respiratory diseases: pneumonia, influenza (J10 to J18), bronchitis, emphysema (J40 to J43), chronic airway obstruction (J44)
> diseases of the digestive system: stomach ulcer, duodenal ulcer (K25 to K27), Crohn’s disease (K50), periodontal disease (K05)
> other diseases: age related cataract (H25), hip fracture (S72.0 to S72.2), spontaneous abortion (O03)
I literally only have Coca-Cola for an occasional treat these days - My Beloved Irn-Bru, 7up & San Pellegrino have all been adulterated with awful-tasting artificial sweeteners and are simply unenjoyable for me now.
It's a weird future I find myself in, where I will never drink any of these things again, punished because of some third party entity's paternalism where other third parties are concerned (I'm not personally fat nor enjoy a diet that would ever make me so).
The only problem is what they replace sale, sugar fat with can be worse.
Obviously sugar provides some calories, but no one is getting fat from the sugar in cigarettes. The caloric value is negligible.
Yup, ammonia will totally improve the taste.
https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Propositi...
Every vaper and ex-vaper I know or have ever met has used flavoured ecigs, including myself while I was quitting. A whiff of the vapour as they pass is enough to establish if they're using a fruity flavour etc. As I'm in my mid 50s and my friends are mostly 30s-60s I think it's safe to say we're not highschoolers.
The one and only time I tried a tobacco flavoured ecig I almost vomited it was so terrible. I think it's a flavour everyone tries as they switch. Tries just the once mostly - they are utterly unlike any cigarette.
1: https://www.europeanneuropsychopharmacology.com/article/S092...
People who vape know that flavors make it more attractive, and it's orders of magnitude better than smoking
> We enrolled 16 occasional/intermittent to light smokers (4 female; M = 27 years, range 19–45;
The paper _does_ link to a more to a more targeted study[1], but there is a fairly major limitation ("does not allow direct estimation of flavoring’s role in initiation of tobacco use among youth") and it does not necessarily suggest that flavouring is targeting the young per se and not merely being what users in general are looking for.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2464690
I know a number of people who have used flavored vapes for nicotine replacement therapy and haven’t had a cigarette in years. But I’ve also met some young people who’ve never smoked who started vaping because it’s “cool” and are now quite addicted to nicotine.
Juuls in particular are quite accessible for a non smoker (no getting through the body’s natural reaction to inhaling an irritant combined with being very discreet).
I guess I’m saying “why can’t it be both?”
Bizarre things like aerosol and glue sniffing had their phase of being a niche cool thing amongst kids. Seems like the few who must will always find something regardless of flavour or ease.
I still occasionally see school kids smoking regular cigarettes. How the hell they afford to beats me at over £10 for a 20 pack. But whether vaping or cigarettes there's far fewer kids bothering at all than say 20 or 40 years ago when it seemed like almost every school kid smoked. Besides I'd far rather a few kids were using a vape pen than those same kids on tobacco with all the additives and vastly worse health outcomes. Vapes are far easier to quit too as tobacco seems to have other more addictive components. Well, that was my feeling from having quit both.
I keep hearing of Juul as being something extra, more accessible, worse, more addictive, you name it! How are they different to the dozens of other brands of vapes and ecigs? I've yet to see one in the UK, if they're even sold here.
I don't think that people who needed their nicotine with candy flavor to tolerate it are switching to smoking in the numbers that smokers are moving in the other direction.
Disagree. Smoking products have addictive attributes that suck the user in and make it extremely difficult to quit. I support the banning of smoking in a similar fashion as tightly controlling the supply of opioids.
I was just reading about Wayne Wheeler [0]. He had a negative personal anecdotal experience with alcohol which he successfully used to justify its banning. (edit: sorry, last part was meant to address the anecdote you previously had there, and which many of us have experienced with the harms of smoking by loved ones)
Discouraging use and offering treatment is far more effective.
Smoking in the center of cities on the street should be illegal (like it is in most of Australia), because it causes harm to complete strangers.
I understand that secondhand smoke indoors is dangerous to others, but is there any real data on outdoor secondhand smoke?
How does it compare to the liters of exhaust per minute from diesel engines in trucks passing by on those same streets?
Perhaps more generally, at what ppm does second hand smoke start to have long term effects on unwitting participants, particularly compared to other major sources of toxins and their concentrations in an urban environment?
[edit: to be clear I’m genuinely curious, not trying to dismiss it or whatabout it. I’ve always thought most second hand smoke issues could be solved with good ventilation (aimed at properly exhausting the smoke) and it seems to me that trace amounts from smokers you pass by on the street are a completely different situation from sitting next to someone smoking indoors]
The data on close-quarters constant second-hand smoke (working in bars, having a partner that smokes) is sketchy, the idea that passing someone while walking outside and momentarily catching a whiff of smoke a couple of dozen times a day is a public health crisis that requires immediate worldwide prohibition is absurd, but common.
It's also a convenient piece of do-nothing legislation for local politicians to campaign on.
Okay, but the data on smoking is not sketchy at all, so it’s not a stretch to suggest that constant exposure to second hand smoke in a poorly ventilated environment is comparable to smoking. Unfortunately there’s no way to set up a classical controlled experiment to test that hypothesis ethically, so we have to make do with other experimental setups and data analysis.
We do have studies that assess the affects of air pollution in cities, so surely we can come up with some way of extrapolating, no?
> It's also a convenient piece of do-nothing legislation for local politicians to campaign on
Sure - cigarette smoke does not smell good to non-smokers so it’s an easy win these days since most people don’t smoke.
I’m just trying to come up with a way of legislating these things based on our best abilities to make conclusions based on data rather than feelings, but I feel as though the onslaught of information brought about by the internet is making it harder to disseminate the wheat while more disseminate the chaff. Not to mention all the ways one can make feelings look like data.
To describe the science on second-hand smoking to be anything other than solid is to simply lie about our knowledge on the health effects of smoking. To add to this, there is also significant evidence that SIDS is strongly correlated with parents who are smokers (and thus appears to be likely caused by smoking while pregnant, and second-hand smoke during infancy).
Nicotine isn't what most people are worried about, and presenting it this way is simply disingenuous. Tobacco smoke contains many other components than nicotine such as cyanide, benzene, arsenic, as well as 50 other known carcinogens. Literally nobody cares about your nicotine addiction, it's all of the other toxic components that are the problem.
The studies on second-hand smoking are very solid, and your calling them sketchy is very close to being an outright lie. Here is a summary of the many studies (dating back to the 80s) that all show the various impacts of second-hand smoking[1] -- it cites 194 papers. The WHO, CDC, American Cancer Society, American Lung Association, and many other groups (from other countries too) all concur that second-hand smoke is a very significant threat to the public's health.
Second-hand smoke is very likely one of the causes of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) for fucks' sake.
There is a specific law (I'm not sure if it's just in NSW or if it's nation-wide) about not being allowed to smoke within 4 meters of an exit to a building (because smokers tended to smoke right outside a building -- presumably because it's more convenient -- when indoor smoking became illegal). A large cluster of people smoking in front of a doorway is not much better than those same people just smoking in the lobby (and people who need to enter the building can't really avoid it).
There are other laws about smoke-free areas (my university campus is one of them). As a non-smoker I do appreciate this quite a bit (having lived in a country where smoking in public areas and indoors was very common), but I'm not sure about whether it is actually a significant improvement for non-smokers. The city's image is probably just as significant a motivator for such rules.
Regarding data, I did a quick Google search and found some articles[1,2,3] ranging in dates to 2007. I've only skimmed them, but one of them[1] specifically mentions doing comparison to pollution from cars.
[1]: http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/early/2016/05/26/13993003... [2]: https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/may9/smoking-050907.html [3]: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091118154619.h...
Are you saying that you want to model tobacco policy on the most unsuccessful public health policy of all time?
> If you research, you’ll see the opioid crisis was kicked off by doctors freely prescribing like it was candy.
I don't agree, nor do most serious drug policy researchers. Horrible problems with opioids have been waxing and waning for about 100 years in the United States, but were largely unknown prior to the Harrison Narcotics Act.
Your point is very sound that distributing highly concentrated forms of a drug in the midst of prohibition of more benign forms of that drug is likely to cause bad health outcomes. This is exactly what happened during alcohol prohibition, when consumption of beer dropped to nearly zero while consumption of whiskey soared.
Source? The FDA only regulates product marketing, not drug legality.
The next logical step would be to ban cigarettes, but allow people to continue to purchase loose leaf tobacco. But if that happened then smoking rates would likely fall enough that it'd no longer be a major health issue, so even if we are in a slippery slope situation it doesn't seem likely to me that criminalization is the logical conclusion.
Already most smoking deaths are in long term smokers. The 14% of Americans who still smoke are for the most part only smoking a few cigarettes per day (except the couple percent in the severely mentally ill population), so they're going to have nowhere near the same level of health outcomes as the folks who spent decades smoking multiple packs per day. I wouldn't personally ever use tobacco products because I place a high value on not being dead, but from a statistical perspective just looking at the number of current deaths would lead one to vastly overestimate the risks of tobacco use practices. I guess my point is that from a personal level you should definitely not smoke, but at a public policy level we'd hit the point of diminishing returns far before instating a complete ban.
I think there was a study that showed chain smokers are actually less of a burden on the public because they die relatively quickly, reducing their consumption of medical resources.
or search "smoking early death czech" for much more coverage of the Philip Morris study.
Smokers are mentally ill? Really? I’d say that people who see smokers as mentally ill are neurotic and have an authority complex, and probably have far greater issues than smokers.
Whether it is a health related choice or not is immaterial. 30 minutes of cardio per day is generally regarded as a healthy choice. Yet for obvious reasons we are not taking a collective vote on making mild exercise compulsory for all individuals.
We use terms like hindsight bias and selection bias all the time here; is there a name for the perception that the 'other side' of a wide ideological divide is more prevalent? Because I've read the same complaints about the libertarian attitudes here.
There are plenty of folks on both sides of the fence (or it'd be boring).
However, I would expect that entrepreneurs would generally have a free market bias. I create online businesses because I have an affinity for tech, and because the Internet has largely been an unregulated space.
I definitely see quite a few folks from both sides of the libertarian/authoritarian spectrum. I originally wrote a much longer comment talking about how free markets need at least government regulation in order to function (so people have faith in them) while too much regulation leads to high barrier of entry, but I'm sure you get the gist.
If we can't have that discussion without acrimonious downvotes and complaints to the moderator, then what are we doing here? I am inclined to go back to my original point about bias.
The US Federal Government is prohibitionist when it comes to cocaine, marijuana and nuclear weapons. But when you start proposing bans on products that earn billions for multinational conglomerates, out come the little guys pointing at their Constitution.
Each cigarette has 2000 toxins. Over 85% of smokers start at under 18. It's a life long addiction picked up by children that kills so companies can turn a profit. Not to mention the health care burden on society.
In no way or form should such a deadly substance be sold for consumption.
And some of them will get sick or die because of the prohibition on regulated manufacturing.
We know that because there isn't an epidemic of people going blind and dying after drinking alcohol contaminated with fermentation and distillation byproducts, but there is an epidemic of people dying from using "heroin" tainted by fentanyl analogs.
The only thing that has ever worked is legal regulated sale, which keeps the market sane with respect to quality control and safety, while making it easy for people to access health and addiction services.
Do you want a black market? Because that’s how you get a black market.
Tobacco is a public health crisis. Encouraging safer alternatives (eg e-cigarettes) and slowly making nicotine consumption socially unacceptable is how you make progress. You don’t solve it by just banning the substance entirely (see how that worked out with alcohol).
To add a finer point: nicotine, while an extremely addictive substance, seems to be fairly inoffensive. The delivery mechanism (eg smoking) is what gives you cancer etc. A bunch of people addicted to nicotine does not seem to be much of a public health problem if they’re all using inoffensive delivery mechanisms.
Known carcinogens present in cigarettes: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/t...
https://tobacco.ucsf.edu/cellular-evidence-how-nicotine-and-...
That’s not to say it’s the most toxic aspect of tobacco, but it can’t be good.
These plants are all related by the way. The Simpson’s ”Tomacco” episode isn’t so far fetched!
Not to mention its working principle is perfectly well understood.
> ban all of forms of nicotine for sale.
you can't do that as it would create a thriving black market. Look at the edges of the European Union, where EU taxes drove the prices of cigarettes sky high and people are illegally importing cigarettes from Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, etc..
You need to boil the frog. Slowly but surely, make consuming nicotine socially unacceptable (already is almost everywhere in the West wrt to smoking), expensive (but again, slowly, don't shock the market) and shitty (ban tobacco additives, flavors, make the product packaging look like a horror show). 1-3 generations tops and you'll not see anymore smokers.
The ban is to reduce consumption Black market is fine Just like prostitution
I like nicotine and smoking on occasion, but I have never been addicted. Maybe it's personality, behavioral, or some physical difference, I couldn't say. There have been about 30 cigarettes a year for more than a decade. I have no desire to "quit" or have the government tell me I have to.
Walking outside yesterday in Santa Clara was worse for my lifespan than anything I've smoked in the last 6 months.
When I think about the purpose of government, banning addictive substances does not fit the bill.
I can't remember where, but I saw a study that showed banning cigarettes would only make healthcare costs go up as people would me living much longer lives....
But yes, in a sense, smoking bans are making an implicit assumption that the gain in quality of life is far outweighed by the shortening of it.
More non-dead people also means more workers, more taxes revenue, more consumption, more growth.
When I have had an abysmal day, it can make everything seem ok and even stave off a panic attack.
When I am flying off the handle in anger it can calm me right down.
It can do this without dulling my abilities - actually improving them - unlike other legal and less than legal alternatives.
Is it prone to abuse, particularly in certain people? Absolutely. Is nicotine, particularly in conjunction with tobacco a carcinogen? Absolutely.
But to say there is no upside is dishonest.
As someone trying to quit (menthols particularly), I can see this move helping some (and I also see it incredibly frustrating for anyone not looking to quit, though they should be!). Part of my difficulty in quitting is how widely available smokes are - in my day to day life, they're only ever 5 minutes away, and that ease of access is a huge barrier in staying smoke-free. I've tried the non-menthols in my brand and I can't stand them. Banning menthols solves the availability problem (for me), and while I disagree with it ideologically, it's hard to argue with it practicality.
[0] https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/8xdx7k/are-menthol-ciga...
Since we share finite resources like insurance pools and the medical system, there's a case for society to restrict the actions of others.
As it is, FDA bureaucrats are appointed, not elected.
What are the costs of deferring individuals' choices to a mob's vote or to the whims of appointed bureaucrats?
Advocates of centrally planned societies will always point to the purported benefits of their authoritarian models.
At what point is the individual responsible for his own health? If we absolve the individual of all personal responsibility and replace it with a set of all encompassing dictates - What does it mean to be a free human being in such a society? How would this differ from being property of the state?
Your responsibility is to make sure they all live long, healthy, happy, and free.
There's a poisonous plant that sticks through the fence in a corner of the range. You tell all the chickens to stay away, that it will make them sick and kill them, but every year about 10-15% of them eat it anyway, and you're constantly dealing with the illness and death it causes. And you can't tear out the plant, because it's not growing on your property, it's just coming through the fence.
The problem, is that the plant didn't get there on it's own. A pack of wolves planted it, and at night they plaster the side of the coop with flyers saying how smooth and cool the plant is. But when you try to tear down the posters, or cut back the plant, all the libertarian chickens come out and yell about individual freedoms.
Humans aren't rational actors. We're emotional creatures of habit who are highly susceptible to advertising. If anything, we shouldn't ban the item in question, we should just make it really expensive, and disallow any forms of advertising. That means besides no TV, no magazines, no billboards, no visible smoking anywhere in media, not visible on shelves on any store anywhere, etc.
If we take away tobacco companies' power to emotionally manipulate humans, maybe not as many people will choose to throw their health away.
>Humans aren't rational actors. We're emotional creatures of habit who are highly susceptible to advertising
Adbusters would agree with your claim that:
>we should just make it really expensive, and disallow any forms of advertising. That means besides no TV, no magazines, no billboards, no visible smoking anywhere in media, not visible on shelves on any store anywhere, etc.
https://www.amazon.com/Phishing-Phools-Economics-Manipulatio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adbusters
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Athedailybell.com+adbu...
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amises.org+shiller
https://www.google.com/search?q=nobel+prize+in+economics+fak...
Your comparison of a farmer owning chickens for profit/consumption to a government benevolently lording over citizens is illustrative. For the sake of being explicit, I don't think humans should be regarded as chattel. If you find this an apt comparison, we may have to agree to disagree. Thanks.
Are you arguing that having health credits in the USA and legally mandated exercise is the only logical next step after banning menthol cigarettes? If you aren't, then you aren't using reducto ad absurdum. If you are, then it's trivial to disprove (in Australia, snuff has been illegal to sell since the late 1980s and we don't have "health credits" today -- many other substances bad for your health were made illegal in the US and you don't have "health credits" today).
I have posed a specific set of questions about the logic of prohibiting products for heath purposes. You have chosen to tilt by snark & technicality instead of answering these questions.
If we accept that the government (or a group of bureaucrats) knows what is best for the health of divers individuals, then why not?
If we accept that 30 minutes of exercise is good for health and that it is appropriate to compel individuals into healthy choices, then why not?
If we accept that two parallel lines will never intersect, then why should air traffic controllers worry?
It is plain and obvious where this logic leads. Claiming a slippery slope is a dodge imho.
To your point here, "then why not" isn't an example of a logical deduction.
You're also intentionally ignoring that the discussion here is the banning of a subset of products that we know for certain cause many incredibly serious health problems and is one of the leading causes of premature death in many countries around the world. Smoking is bad for everyone, so making decisions on a "divers[sic] set of individuals" is completely reasonable -- unless you're arguing that smoking is good for some peoples' health?
I agree that if the government (for instance) started banning high-fat foods that there would be reason to say that this is overstepping the mark. But that's not what's happening.
> and that it is appropriate to compel individuals into healthy choices
That's not what's happening.
> If we accept that two parallel lines will never intersect, then why should air traffic controllers worry?
Not only is this a non-sequitur, it's also an awful example of a logical deduction and actually undermines your other examples of "reasonable" questions.
A little levity in the form of a non-sequitur never hurt anyone.
If you endeavored to answer the questions I posed in good faith, you would have found that I am not predicting some nightmare 1984 scenario at the ski chalet. The answers are obvious and pedestrian. Principles are inevitably dismissed in the name of practicality and pragmatism. This is the reality of governance. This is "why not".
You admit as much when you speak of high fat foods. From where I stand, it is nothing more than an arbitrary hand wave. It is especially ironic after so many nitpicks (which I do not accept :P ) about the nature of argumentative logic.
From this point forward it is strictly subjective sausage making.
The US has found prohibition to be an untenable policy. As I understand, taxes on cigarettes in Australia make the price something like $20-$25 a pack. So how much for a truck load? How much does it cost to counterfeit? It is already happening in the US.
The US has had black markets for cigarettes for 50+ years. Increasing taxes and prohibiting products does not work. It only serves to dilute what little regulatory power the state does have. Eventually people stop caring and say: "Everything fun is illegal anyways", "Returning to prison is inevitable", "My lawyer knows how to fix this", or "What could be more righteous than shirking authority while profiting from my oppression?".
There is a lot of downside to smoking, but the shared burden is not it.
Edit: it looks like you've been posting a lot of unsubstantive comments to HN, as well as a lot of ideological comments. Both of those things are against the guidelines as well. If you'd please use the site as intended instead, we'd be grateful.
At the rate things are going, it’s only a matter of time.
No good do-gooders on a rampage to take away everything enjoyable in life.
Oh, sorry; I’m just a doctor. Maybe I should stay in my lane?
Consumption taxes are also implemented in many countries, but these have issues as well. Namely in regards to lobbying and how the taxes are chosen, and how they disproportionately affect low-income segments.
Personally I am torn on this subject. I highly appreciate the public smoking ban that has been implemented in restaurants, bars and other public venues, as well as on public transit and related facilities. I do respect smoking as a personal choice, just as I expect teetotalers to respect that I enjoy the consumption of alcohol, or vegetarians/vegans to respect that I enjoy consuming foods with meat in them. All of these have proven generally negative health effects, but I choose to partake in some of them, as an informed choice.
I also recognize that all of these activities have some negative effect on the world and society, in one way or another, yet it would be counterproductive to ban them outright.
What I don't like about smoking in particular is the stench and effects of passive smoking, and especially not being able to escape it. At least the public smoking ban did alleviate this, which certainly can be spun as a net societal gain.
https://www.thefix.com/content/former-german-chancellor-hoar...
And yes, menthol == mint.
It's interesting they chose flavored cigarettes and not flavored alcohol. The attack specifically on menthol is meant to target the major users of the product. Its not about the kids. And its not about righting some wrong by cigarettes advertisers. This is meant to target the people who use the product.
Whether there’s data to show that these effects are significant enough to justify a ban specifically on menthols, however, I don’t know.
They are just as bad as regular cigarettes, possibly worse, and yet people perceive them as less bad, causing overconsumption.
I have known many menthol smokers and have spent most of my life around smokers. I have literally never once heard the opinion menthol was somehow safer. In fact, I have often heard the opposite; with claims that the menthols have "fiber glass" in them.
“Menthol makes it seem less harsh, and also makes the body absorb more nicotine,” she said. “That means it’s easier to start smoking and harder to quit.”
So not more dangerous per se, but it mitigates barriers to its consumption.
At the time, people argued not including menthol in the ban was racist.
In fact, when Obama's FDA banned fruit- and candy-flavored cigarettes there was a group of black doctors who called on him to also ban menthol cigarettes. [2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/14/health/menthol-cigarettes... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/black-doctors-call-obam...
It's intresting they chose flavored cigarettes and not alcohol. One is a greater public safety issue than the other. The fact that they chose something so innocuous is the dead giveaway, that there is ulterior motive.
"Strict age verification with online sales". I would very much like to see how this is supposed to work.
*Possession would still be legal, because punishing people for using drugs is dumb.
in my view, this is an inevitable consequence of the shift towards socialized medicine. when every human body is a financial liability for the government, you can expect it to get a lot more interested in how you treat your body. good alignment of incentives for public health, but terrible for individual liberty.
i don't smoke anymore, but it still makes me very uncomfortable to see the government take another step forward in regulating how people treat their own bodies. the government rarely takes a step back.