Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Anti-Tobacco Fanatics Lie like a Cheap Rug
Yes. They lie. Their lies, coming from allegedly left and right (social conservative) positions, are swathed in “good intentions” and focus on “the children.” Yet, any citizen, any member of Congress, any judge, Article II or Article III, and any president who has merely been alert to their environment as they walked past, at least, a hotel bar, knows the basic claim is a flat-out lie. Why? See for yourself:
Every single bottle is an infused, flavored vodka. This is no upscale bar. It is a dive bar, visually so and described as such in Yelp and Google. There are whipped cream, cotton candy, fruity, and even herbal/ botanical vodkas in this scruffy working-class bar. This is the current normal.
The big lie is that vape/ e-cigarette nicotine systems and all “flavored” tobacco products are “targeting children.” Lie. Lie. Lie. The truth, which everyone knows at some level, is that American adults’ palette has shifted to sweet and flavored drinks. That holds true from coffee to booze in every form. You know this. You see it every day.
My local veteran’s organization canteen (bar) made this perfectly clear to me today. The largest local “craft” brewery had bottled a seasonal run of coffee porter. It wasn’t selling so well, so it went on special… Meanwhile, the bar manager added a second peanut butter flavored whiskey to the liquor line-up. Yes, peanut butter. The first, Skrewball, is aggressively peanut-y. You would hardly know there was whiskey underneath the nut flavor. The new addition, Rams Point, strikes a more moderate position, letting whiskey drinkers venture into a specialty entry that can go into cocktails without being overpowering.
Naturally, I saw the possibility of a “shot and a chaser” here: coffee porter (beer) with peanut butter flavored whiskey. Yes, it works for this dude who is on the north side of double nickels. Indeed, I immediately informed the bar manager that he needed to bring in a chocolate porter. Because everyone knows that peanut butter and chocolate go together. Notice that this is not “kids” focused booze. The legal age is 21, as it has been for most of my adult life.
No booze merchant, no brewer or distiller, is being hassled or restricted on the wild variety of customer-driven flavors they offer. Vodka, rum, even whiskey are all frantically competing for the American adult sweet-tooth. Yes, there are traditional vodkas, gins, rums, and whiskeys. They sell, but do not offer market and sales growth in this era. Give the customer what they want, or someone else will.
So, pipe, cigar, vape, and even cigarette (at the margin) customers, who are full-grown adults, demand flavors beyond the subtleties of the leaves, just as grains’ and grapes’ variations are not enough, just as coffee beans are nowhere near enough for most suburban moms. We all know this.* You know this. So, why comply with the lie?
Since all booze and all nicotine is now restricted to 21 and over, each and every attack on nicotine products, if it has any “age” component,” necessarily is an attack on alcohol, and indirectly on caffeine. You did realize that caffeine changes neurochemistry, right?
Sadly, President Trump made no promises in 2016 on this issue area. Sadly, Congress critters on both sides of the aisle love the next shake-down and the next incremental assault on the Constitution and the underlying Declaration of Independence they faithlessly “uphold.” The only real chance for halting the next administrative state assault is for a bloc of voters, in states critical to electoral college math, becoming loud in the next two or three months, driving President Trump to re-calibrate the executive branch’s position and to press legislators to defy Coffin Mitch McConnell and Big Cigarettes.
___
* You cannot even get your teeth cleaned without being offered multiple flavors of fluoride treatment.
Published in Domestic Policy
Yes.
If the government doesn’t pay for health care, you are correct.
And that is the most fundamental evil of socialism. It empowers people to control others. What is no one else’s business becomes everyone’s business and an imperative is created to control others’ lives. It’s perverse to take my money only to make it possible to allow others to tell me what to do.
Whoops. Wrong thread!
Where government pays for health care, they support vaping as a lower risk, lower medical cost on the whole, alternative to cigarette smoking’s higher frequency higher cost health effects.
Whenever an alternative to a harmful activity appears it seems to instantly generate concerned parents, heroic politicians eager to make the tough choices in disallowing other people their choices, alarmist think-piecists, scientists/doctors who are more eager to get quoted than to start up some research, and members of alphabet agencies who can’t wait to ask for funding to help combat the scourge of whatever hip new thing is a-scourging.
Eventually we will get long term studies and we may find out that we should ban sales of this stuff and the mods it rode in on. I very much doubt that the facts will support banning.
Weird to me is the Puritan quality of anti-vapists – they’re not the usual suspects. Is it possible that Puritanism is secretly some kind of virus and that Americans have low resistance?
Or take up care of survivors.
Nurse Kravitz, put down that vape pen. How many times do I have to tell you you are setting a poor example for the children.
Now, get inside. It’s time to show the third graders how to put a condom on a banana.