FDA Moves to Ban All Menthol Cigarettes and Flavored Cigars
fda.gov
fda.gov
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tobacco companies already pay states a bunch of money from their 1998 settlement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...
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).
https://igentax.com/cigarette-tax-state/
Time to leave smokers alone. Many if not most of them got hooked as kids and as a society we just keep punishing them for their "moral failure."
A 10% increase in tobacco price results in a 4% decrease in tobacco demand: https://www.who.int/tobacco/economics/taxation/en/
I don't know if that counts as "ineffectual" in your book, but its not nothing.
A 10% increase in tobacco price results in a 4% decrease in tobacco demand: https://www.who.int/tobacco/economics/taxation/en/
2. When you increase taxes you get smuggling and illegal dealing with all the violence it brings.
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.
Isn't economics fun?
Assume that, on average, smokers die at 75, non smokers die at 80, and everyone gets social security pensions at 65.
Then smokers pensions only cost 67% of non smokers pension, even though they pay in 100% as much.
My numbers are surely wrong, but all that matters is that smokers die earlier than non smokers.
This is also the hard to realize way Social Security redistributes from the poor and unhealthy to the well off and healthy.
Funny clip from Yes, Prime Minister https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWxukctTlsY
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"?
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)
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.
I could go on and on and on...
You think all these Addy popping, Vyvanse downing, benzo-calming programmers aren't dying way earlier? You are fooling yourselves so hard.
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.
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.
LOL are they really doing that? That's funny considering that obesity and diabetes are both risk factors for poor COVID-19 outcomes.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/abc7ny.com/amp/free-food-vaccin...
You actually get a donut per day! The foundation of a healthy diet.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesity-overweight.htm
>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.
From the paper:
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.
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.
(I mean that seriously not as a joke...although there is some natural humor in it as well)
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.
[1] https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/cbhsq-report...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/disparities/african-americans/in...
[3] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/disparities/african-americans/in...
If one subscribes to that, why even bother with democracy at all?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Coincidence is not racism. Inventing a story from imagined assumptions isn't helpful for people disadvantaged by actual racism.
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).
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.
Tobacco can be consumed in moderation. I'll smoke a Wood Tip Wine Black and Mild about once a month, and my pipe on an occasional beautiful day.
The benefits are the extreme joy it brings me. It's one of my favorite things in life, and they're going to take it away.
Nicotine is amazingly pleasant and performance boosting unlike alternatives.
A good read:
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.
This is kind of a serious question. I haven't smoked one in twenty years, but now I have an intense craving.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
I will also note that my friends started when they were teens and no longer smoke menthols.
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.
Remember when Internet addiction was a big concern?
That is grossly unfair to the many of us who have absolutely nothing to do with the latest Social-Garbage-As-A-Service fads.
Just because VCs will only fund Internet Junk Food does not mean that all software that exists does that.
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. :)
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.
Just don't let the crazies make everything about race. About all policies are going affect some demographics more than other.
Banning menthol cigarettes is an easy choice if you accept some paternalistic policies. Big win for little cost.
> ...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...
Very, very good point. It's not the only measure, I think, but it's certainly one of the big ones.
This point raises a third issue: should one at all submit to the whims of the crab bucket , the benevolence of its motives notwithstanding?
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":
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/disparities/african-americans/in...
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.
https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/products-ingredients-co...
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
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?
- 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?
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.
Bingo. The state is dictating virtuousness for our own good.
I don't think that's why he was killed.
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.
We can build a city on a hill, but what's the point if we can't let loose in the way we want?
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.
I don't smoke, but I have no problem with allowing people to do so in private spaces. Why do we insist on micromanaging peoples lives?
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.
Externalized costs are the root of many seemingly insurmountable societal problems, and most can be fixed by simply accounting for the costs appropriately.
Now what? Your healthcare costs should go up because you like your eggs fried and with salt instead of hard boiled?
Just make sure you have a dividend that goes back to the poor to make up for the regressiveness of such taxes.
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.
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.
Yet tobacco costs 120 billion euros a year for only 16 billion in revenue (to the government). [1]
It is almost infeasible to tax cigarette to the equivalent of their burden on the health care system.
[0]: https://www.boursorama.com/patrimoine/actualites/les-taxes-s...
[1]: https://www.reseau-hopital-ght.fr/actualites/patients/campag...
"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."
https://taxfoundation.org/new-study-shows-smokers-and-obese-....
By this logic, there should be no tax (or indeed a subsidy) on cigarettes.
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.
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.
Unaware what countries have fully banned tobacco. Without looking it up at all...maybe singapore? They seem like the type.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
So ya healthcare.
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.
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?
There's a factor 30 of leeway on where to draw the line:
> How many cancer cases every year can be attributed to consumption of processed meat and red meat?
> about 34 000 cancer deaths per year worldwide are attributable to diets high in processed meat.
> ...
> about 1 million cancer deaths per year globally due to tobacco smoking
https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/cancer-carcinogenic...
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.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast...
If someone near you is smoking, so are you.
> Since the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report, 2.5 million adults who were nonsmokers died because they breathed secondhand smoke.
The better argument is that the actual social behavior of smoking is contagious, as any social behavior is.
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.
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.
Not least of which is it's incredibly addictive. Meaning that tobacco smokers often smoke a lot.
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
Some information here:
https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/mari...
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.
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?
It was, and still would be extremely unpopular. The public health reason is as strong as it's ever been.
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".
There's no evidence it ever had majority support, though: https://www.vox.com/2015/10/19/9566935/prohibition-myths-mis...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/inde...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Quite a few people would disagree. There's that whole consent of the governed thing, for example - and 50%+1 is certainly not it.
The messaging changes with the whims of society, but the authoritarian motivations remain the same.
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.
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.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151217165607.h...
tl;dr: they have different, but complementary effects.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
So tax evasion becomes a limiting factor in such taxes.
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.
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?
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.
It's hard for me to read this and not translate it as: "We found something non-white people enjoy and we're going to ruin it. For their own good."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/16/new-zealand-ai...
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.
You’d need a model like Portugal, where they fund treatment programs and social services along side liberal drug policy.
Maybe some small number of people do. But why should their problems result in everyone else being deprived of choice?
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?
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.
>but we should let folks kill themselves slowly with tobacco?
This is a very slippery slope. It's possible to responsibly smoke, just like it's possible to responsibly consume foods high in sugar.
Of course, people want to ban(or hate tax) sugar/high fat foods as well, so perhaps this is what you'd like to have happen.
"has started to" may not be quite correct; it sounds to me like this is a proposal that is being considered.
Sorta. We don’t have any randomized trials in people. Even harder to blind the participants for extra science.
We have tons of epidemiological evidence that it’s bad, but that’s piled with pesky cofounders.
Being the type of person that could become/does become dependent on tobacco does terrible things.
Being the type of person that can shake off that addiction does great things.
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.
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/keeping-bc-healthy...
Maybe requiring a license to sell tobacco, and limiting the number of licenses in a municipality based on population?
Or putting the stores in industrial zoned areas rather than commercial/residential?
Canadian bans on packaging and promotion are one solution. Another is to mandate tobacco products, or certain tobacco products, be mail ordered.
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.
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)
Edit: Typo fixed.
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.
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 [...]
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.
Is it possible that maybe there's a connection between over regulating people's choices and over policing peoples' lives?
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
https://reason.com/2021/04/29/the-fda-wants-to-lower-nicotin...
I bet the same thing would work for cigarettes.
Because this is how you make them more attractive to smokers.