“The Biden administration is considering requiring tobacco companies to lower the nicotine in all cigarettes sold in the U.S. to levels at which they are no longer addictive,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
This might be the stupidest idea Democrats have ever come up with, which is saying a lot.
If you decrease the amount of nicotine in a cigarette, what will people do to get their nicotine fix? They’ll smoke more cigarettes. So, if the asinine government forces tobacco companies to cut the nicotine to, say, one-third, people will have to smoke three cigarettes to get their fix instead of just one.
How stupid is that?
There are approximately 600 ingredients in cigarettes. When burned, cigarettes create more than 7,000 chemicals. At least 69 of these chemicals are known to cause cancer, and many are toxic.
In other words, people are going to inhale three times as much of 68 of those cancer causing chemicals to get the same amount of nicotine.
It gets sillier:
Research funded by the FDA and the National Institutes of Health has shown that when nicotine was nearly eliminated from cigarettes, smokers were more likely to quit or seek a nicotine fix from less harmful alternatives such as e-cigarettes or gum compared with smokers who continued using cigarettes with normal nicotine levels.
You have to love the government’s logic here, which is so twisted you’ll have to bear with me while I break it down…
We’ll start with the idea some people will quit. Okay, maybe some will. I doubt it… As a former smoker, I can tell you quitting is a muthah. Although I haven’t smoked in some 20 years, I’m craving one right now with my morning coffee — craving the perfectly soothing bite that comes from your first drag off a Newport.
But honestly, why would current smokers quit? Why wouldn’t they just smoke more cigarettes? Everyone who currently smokes knows the risks and chooses to take those risks. It says so right on the pack that smoking will kill you and still people open it and light up.
When I look back on my time as a smoker, it wasn’t just about the nicotine. There are many pleasures in smoking and lighting up two or three to get my nicotine fix would be an excuse to enjoy that pleasure all the more.
As far as the added cost of doubling or tripling your cigarette intake, people don’t quit addictions over cost. They find a way. And if the idea is to move them to the gum, look at the cost of the gum, and the gum is a lot more expensive in convenience stores.
Moving people to vaping is a good idea. Vaping has proven to help people quit smoking, but naturally the government has already gone to war with vaping because Democrats go to war with everything that’s fun. Remember riding a bike without a helmet? Vaping is somewhat cheaper than tobacco and apparently healthier, so why the war? I’ll tell you why…
All of this comes down to one thing, an increasingly fascist federal government disguising its fascism as do-goodery…
Riddle me this: Why is marijuana being legalized and socially accepted, a drug that alters your consciousness, that you inhale into your lungs, that is in many ways modified, while the war on tobacco marches on to such absurd lengths the government is thinking about outlawing cigarettes black people prefer as though that’s not racism?
While I wish no one would smoke, even if I had the power to, I wouldn’t dream of forcing anyone to stop. The government is exactly right when it comes to informing us of the risks and requiring tobacco companies to inform us of the risks right there on the product. Educating the public, exposing the risks, that’s all good stuff. But after that, the choice should be up to us (same with seat belts and masks). We’re Americans. We’re adults. We have a right to decide what risks we choose to take and we have a right to decide what the term “quality of life” personally means to us.
Regardless, I don’t see good intentions behind any of this. Legalizing a mind-altering drug like marijuana while seeking to outlaw tobacco which, unlike marijuana, does not make you any more dangerous behind the wheel of a car or become a gateway to the bigger highs offered by stronger drugs, is not the work of good intentions. It is, however, the work of people who want a narcotized and more compliant population.
Finally, once menthol and full-nicotine cigarettes are outlawed, the only thing that’s going to thrive is a black market. Just as we saw with Prohibition in the 1920s and see with illegal drugs today, people are going to produce or smuggle in a product other people enjoy. And what happens then? More laws means more law enforcement contacts means more incarceration, etc.
I thought we were trying to get away from all that, especially in the black community?
Until it interferes with someone else’s rights, people should be allowed to live their lives however they wish.
Why is that such a difficult concept for some people to live with?
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