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:
July 1st was National Wine Cooler Day. This called to mind Bartles & Jaymes. Others hear “wine cooler” and think Bruce Willis for Seagrams Golden Wine Coolers. “Cooler” led to “cool” and then to “Kool,” and therein lies a policy puzzle.
The rationale for attacking and seeking to effectively ban flavored or scented tobacco products is that the big evil corporations are illegally peddling their wares to minors. But wait, you say, every convenience store clerk has been drilled in verifying ID, scanned for authenticity, before selling any tobacco product. Ah, but an eligible purchaser is really buying for his or her under-age friends, we are told.
Are state and Congressional Republicans playing into Democrats’ hands once again, helping Democrats realize their vision of a permanent electoral majority coalition of people herded into identity groups? Is there any good reason to abandon and alienate the youngest, newest segment of voters? Would we do better to treat all competent adults as adults, whose support we would like in 2020?
Current politics and culture feature contradictory claims about young people. On the one hand, we are considering treating young adults as wards of the state (free college for all). These young people are being encouraged to live in a state of emotional fragility, fearful of a discouraging word. On the other hand, the same politicians are suggesting the voting age should be lowered to 16 and modern children’s crusades should be taken seriously (gun-grabbers and anthropogenic catastrophic climate change).
A Census Bureau study of 2018 midterm turn-out shows a significant change by the youngest voters:
I don’t think the left believes they can repeal the second amendment, or even significantly strengthen gun laws. I think they have adopted the model of the anti-tobacco movement: Taking a legal product and making it so socially disapproved that anyone who uses it is considered outside the pale of acceptability. That worked really well for tobacco, and we can see from the behavior of many large corporations that the approach has made significant inroads already. The technique of enlisting the medical profession to treat guns as a health and child-welfare issue is similarly effective.
Expect to lose your second amendment rights, not through the workings of the law or the democratic process, but through the cultural stranglehold of the bi-coastal elites and the support of their social media attack mobs. They don’t need to change the constitution, or change the laws. All they need to do is change enough hearts and minds that the law won’t matter anymore.
I cannot add words to make this any more ironic:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5335457/CDC-director-RESIGNS-buying-tobacco-stocks.html
There was a story my grandfather used to tell that is illustrative, in some way, of today. My grandfather was a heavy smoker and drinker. One day, while enjoying beers and smoking with some friends at a bar, another patron came up to his group. “Why are you still smoking? Don’t you know how bad that is for you? Don’t you know what utter garbage in in those things? Why, there’s carcinogens, horse manure, alfalfa, bird feathers, bug carcasses, and sawdust! How can you pollute your lungs this way?”
My grandfather sat back in his chair, took a long drag, and eased the smoke out in a long smooth fume, carefully tasting the smoke. “It’s funny,” he said, “you really can’t taste the alfalfa, when did they start adding it?.”
Last year at my blog Overlawyered I wrote about one of the rare instances in which a widely watched health indicator was headed rapidly in a favorable direction:
Actual cigarette smoking among teens, the kind that requires inhaling carcinogenic products of combustion, is down a startling 25 percent in one year and nearly 42 percent since 2011. The reason is the rapid substitution of vaping or e-cigarettes, which hold singular promise as a harm-reduction measure for those drawn to the nicotine habit. Great news, right?
Well, not great news if you’re the present leadership of the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC), whose director Thomas Frieden has railed against vaping, or the federal Food and Drug Administration, which has now published regulations likely to wipe out most or all of the vaping option in what Jacob Sullum describes as a “slow-motion ban.”
Americans who are trying to kick their nasty smoking habit have found healthier alternatives in e-cigarettes and vapor products that could, quite literally, save their lives. But the bureaucrats at the Food and Drug Administration are trying to put this $3.5 billion industry out of business.
Small mom-and-pop shops have sprung up across the country to meet the growing demand for vapor products, which allow users to refill their vaporizers with their favorite e-juices. Separately, big tobacco companies have invested in non-refillable e-cigarettes.
Though these products are not always tobacco-free; there’s no ash or smoke involved. But they do contain nicotine, which users can gradually reduce if they choose. E-cigarettes and vapor products contain far fewer chemicals and carcinogens than traditional tobacco cigarettes, making them safer for the users, as well as those around them. “[T]he levels of potentially problematic substances in e-cigarette aerosol,” Reason’s Jacob Sullum wrote in March, “are about the same as those detected in ambient air.”
Mark the day. It may never happen again, but it is time to make some common cause with the left. The Center for American Progress wants to scrap the ATF.
Of course the Center wants merely to see the ATF merge with the FBI. In truth, that won’t solve the problems. The ATF should be scrapped altogether.
The ‘war against tobacco’ has long since ceased to have much to do with saving lives. Here’s the latest bone-headed example:
(Reuters) – Swedish Match AB should not be allowed to alter the warning label on its snus smokeless tobacco products to claim they are less harmful than cigarettes, an advisory panel to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration concluded on Friday.
The Stockholm-based company is seeking FDA approval to remove warnings about mouth cancer, gum disease and tooth loss from its snus products and to state that they present a “substantially” lower risk than cigarettes.
