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So why not ban them all? If 81% of menthol users are black that is great to get those 81% to maybe quit. But what about the percentage of other races that are smoking other crap. Let's ban all tobacco.
Because prohibition doesn't work. We tried it with alcohol, it didn't work. We've tried it with most other drugs for decades, it didn't work.
Prohibition just creates a black market for whatever drug is banned. The drug will still be available. It will also be adulterated and untested for purity.
If they were banned, cigarettes would become more like modern heroin. The contents of them would be unknown. In addition to the harms of tobacco, there would be the harms of whatever adulterants the black market sellers put into them.
Instead of dying over the course of decades of consumption, the smokers of Black Market cigarettes would also potentially be dying immediately from whatever random stuff people put in the cigarettes.
We Americans seem to have done a great job on smoking over the past few decades. We've made it socially unacceptable, and that's had serious impact. Let's not go too radical and waste political capital. I don't want to lose any more Democratic votes over shit like this. We'll get there in time.
One of the rare things Trump did right was raising the purchase age to 21. Kids have less understanding of risk than adults. Given another couple of years, I may have not started in '87. Of course, I was just as much a dumbass then as now.
Alas, it was the last thing Melania got any input on before being relegated to the background. Still unhappy with her anti-vape stance. Been vaping for 10+ years, got me off a 20+ year cigarette habit. My wife quit smoking right after we met and I turned her onto vaping. She's stunned at how much healthier she feels.
Funny thing, Hitler was also very anti-tobacco. Broken clock and all that. :)
Banning them will only get some to quit. In reality it is just making another black market.
Because of the massive amount of tax dollars gained from them, and that everyone in the senate is good friends with people who smoke. Who isn't friends or relatives of at least one smoker?
But yes. Banning just menthol is dumb. It's also pointless. Menthol is all flavored into the filter of a cigarette. You can buy $10 worth of pure menthol crystals, $5 worth of alcohol to dissolve the crystals in, use a toothpick to dip in the solution and then poke into the filter, and have enough there to make thousands of unflavored cigarettes menthol. You can convert an entire pack in 2 minutes.
You can even buy cigarette rolling machines and make them for less than half the price in the store
I smoke cigars when the weather is nice. Maybe a few dozen a year. Not enough to get addicted or have adverse health effects (not saying they are good for you but statistically one cigar per day has a negligible effect on health). I use tobacco responsibly, so I'm not sure why I should have that taken away.
I know a number of people who don't smoke cigarettes but do when they go out to the bar. I haven't done the research because I've never smoked one, but I'd imagine that's in a similarly low category of risk.
So I'd prefer not to see it banned altogether or taxed to oblivion. If it happens that's not the end of the world, but I don't think it's right. The problem is unhealthy addiction, not use. Find a way to target that and I think we're onto something. But you'd need an exact definition of unhealthy addiction and I don't know that there is consensus on that.
Because Biden's approval with black voters is in the tank, and if Pop-Pop can't get his smokes by election day, it won't go well for Biden.