They’ve already banned menthol in California and it did nothing. Alternatives are already being marketed and sold and some of the better ones recreate the exact same effect but cost $1.20 more per pack at the low end. To put it simply, this is dumb as fuck.
Already banned where I live.
They now sell cigarettes with hollow filters in which a separately sold tiny filter fits, which is infused with menthol.
“According to the American Lung Association, the use of menthol cigarettes is highest among Black, brown and LGBTQ+ communities. Medical groups like the American Lung Association have long advocated for menthol cigarettes to be banned because they can make it easier to start smoking and disproportionately affect minority communities.”
Gonna save the minorities from the opression of racism and homophobia by specifically targeting them with a ban.
I’ve never really understood references to “the left eating itself” until I hit that paragraph. The absolute irony of the anti racist/homophobe sentiment being so overtly racist/homophobic kinda made the light bulb come on.
This adverse thing is adverse, so in order to reduce adversity among minorities, we’ll target the specific option they tend towards… to reduce discrimination against them, by discriminating their specific choice. Discriminating against them… to reduce discrimination…
And then you publish that shit? That’s kinda fucked IMHO.
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Nah, this ban accomplishes absolutely nothing except producing more expensive alternatives that do the exact same thing.
I’m glad you survived your battle, but this ban would only serve to disproportionately affect the poor.
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You’re both very welcome and a class act. It’s no small feat to kick cancer’s ass. Lol
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It’s my body; I get to decide what goes in it. Poison or not. This isn’t a win at all.
I just wish it was banned in public because I choose to not put poison in my body, yet I have to inhale everyone else’s poison that they are ingesting near me. In public and in cars is where I wish it was banned. There’s nothing worse than being stuck behind someone in traffic that is smoking and you have nowhere to go and nothing to do except inhale that shit.
I got bad news for you… cigarette smoke is the least of your worries when stuck in traffic. You’re inhaling exhauste fumes from every car near you…
Oh man if only there were laws in place to attempt to help mitigate that risk… placing the responsibility on the car owners to ensure their cars meet emissions regulations to reduce the impact upon third parties.
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I have to say, pot is getting like that too. While I support that it’s now decriminalized (where I live), now it’s becoming a nuisance. I shouldn’t have to breathe second hand smoke regardless of what you’re smoking
Also my opinion, and the outcome of prohibition would suggest that society at large generally believes this as well.
…with an obvious exception for minorities…
Which was my point. Apparently the politics of it, and decades of anti tobacco propaganda (and I dont intend the normally negative connotation the word has, it just is what it is) have made this acceptable somehow… for an obviously racial/homophobic exception to just be openly declared and apparently acceptable… it’s kinda weird to me.
No you don’t lmao the FDA is kind of the authority here. There’s nothing on store shelves that you can choose or not choose to put in your body that wasn’t already cleared by the FDA. You have an illusion of choice.
Menthol cigarettes just make it easier to get cancer than plain ones.
Were you a smoker, and did you ever smoke menthols? Menthols give a bit different feeling, but I wouldn’t say it’s that much “easier” to smoke.
The EU did the same thing to ban menthols a couple years ago, and yet I can still go to the store and buy cigarettes with menthol taste. These new fake-menthols surprisingly feel even smoother to smoke than classic menthols, but it’s still not a big difference compared to unflavored cigarettes IMO.
How do menthols make it easier to get cancer than regular smokes? Genuinely asking btw
Menthol makes it easier to start smoking, to continue being a smoker for longer than the person would have done otherwise, and to smoke more, because it makes smoking less irritating and tastes better. You are correct in that the menthol molecule itself is not a carcinogen.
Do you have a source for these claims? No one is smoking cigarettes for the taste, nor is “bad taste” a common reason for anyone to quit. Smoking is both a chemical addiction (nicotine and such) and a psychological habit (place and timing, having something in the mouth, forced breathing exercises, etc).
If we really wanted to hinder big tobacco, they’d start requiring producers to document all their ingredients, additives, and processing methods.
Exactly. It’s all about money & control and it always has been. If they wanted to get people to stop smoking, they’d mandate that the tobacco companies remove all of the chemicals from cigarettes that make the nicotine a free base form to increase their addictive properties.
You mean vaping lmao? They be wanting to ban that even more lmao
Nic Salts are the free base equivalent of cigarettes for the vaping world, but I agree that it’s a lot less harmful. The government would endorse vaping if they truly wanted to end smoking, since it has an incredibly high success rate as a smoking cessation device, like orders of magnitude higher than any other form. All of the other cessation methods (which are owned by the tobacco companies BTW), have a max success rate of about 3.5%. Vaping has a success rate of almost 70%! So yeah, their opposition to vaping makes my point even more clear.
No it doesn’t. It’s purely a preference. There are tons of smokers who can’t stand menthols but love regular cigarettes. I even know someone who smokes menthols because he said it makes people less likely to bum cigarettes off of him.
I even know someone who smokes menthols because he said it makes people less likely to bum cigarettes off of him.
That’s why I switched to menthols back when I smoked. That, and I just liked them more. I didn’t like the ultra menthol ones like Kools or Benson & Hedges, but Marlboro Milds were just about perfect, and the amount of “Oh…those are menthol? Nevermind” was the cherry on top.
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what a wanker take on it, cigarettes should be banned period, they do nothing good for anyoneand are an absolute blight for public health. Any step in making cigarettes worse for accessibility, as marginal as it is, is a step in the right the right direction. People who smoked in France had the same take when they upped the cigarette prices “ooooh it won’t stop the poor people smoking blah blah” “they’re just doing it for the money they don’t care about poor people it will just hurt the common man more”. Welll cookie it turns out that 10€ has forced a lot of people to stop and greatly reduced young people who start smoking in the first place. Granted now people have shifted to vaping but compared to cigarettes they’re heaven. You can’t even compare vaping to smoking.
So it’s totally fine to target minorities with a ban if it means forward progress in disincentivising tobacco use? I disagree on the ends justifying the means in this case.
No arguments at all on the merits of reducing tobacco use, just an objection to throwing minorities under the bus in pursuit of it. I would not actually object to taxation as a means. I wouldn’t object to an outright ban even. My objection is to the specificity to minorities… that’s not cricket…
Yes it is in the case of tobacco usage.
imagine a situation women drank more alcohol than men and then the government banned alcohol for everyone. So you would consider this bad because it’s immoral to impose any kind of ban on women?
So what then? Ban it for the rich, the middle class and white people and let the people at risk smoke themselves to death ?
Where are your morals in this ? Put down your ideologies for one second and be pragmatic.
If they banned all alcohol for everyone, its indiscriminate, and I would not consider it to be discrimination (I’d consider it a bad idea based on the obvious). In your example, a ban on wine, but not whiskey, with the publicly stated intention of reducing alcohol intake among women, would be the equivalent, and I’d absolutely consider that misogynistic. In the case of a wine ban, yes, it would be immoral to impose that ban, because it would be targeted at women specifically.
They aren’t banning cigarettes. They’re banning menthols, and the publicly stated intent is to affect use of cigarettes among minorities. The policy is specifically intended to affect a demographic. Not because I say so, or because I think it does… it’s what they’re citing as the basis of the policy… they published it as such.
The pragmatic solution is to ban cigarettes. That would still affect the minorities disparately, but it’s no longer an inherently racist proposal at that point, because it’s about tobacco use period, not just the tobacco use specific to the minorities.
Well agreed that they should ban all cigarettes. in the end this is a half arsed solution that they came up with to “help” minorities.
But to be honest, I’ve seen too many people die to tobacco. I don’t care if the proposal is racist or not. Anything that can merely annoy a smoker’s smoking habits for me is a step in the right direction.
That’s the tiny hill I’m willing to die on.
Menthol cigarettes are what are consumed by teens as well. Banning the sale of them is a restriction on teen smoking.
It’s racist to ban menthols? “The left eating itself”? Go touch grass.
It’s racist to specifically target a type favored by minorities if your intent is to target minorities, and the stated intent is specifically to target minorities with a ban… ironically, to protect them from being discriminated against by their chosen type of cigarettes.
They published that… they very publicly are saying that they’re going to protect these minorities by directly targeting them with a ban. It’s not me saying it’s a racist/homophobic ban, it’s the published premise itself. The entire basis of the ban is published as being to keep cigarettes from affecting blacks, browns, and LGBTQ+ people by eliminating their preferred type.
How on earth are there people who don’t understand this? Are you so tied to the politics that you cannot or will not see this objectively? It’s blatant.
Targeting something based on race and minority status is not necessarily racism. That’s kind of a bizarre jump.
The groups being targeted with the ban are, coincidentally, the groups for whom smoking rates are highest.
If you want to have the biggest impact, it makes sense to target the groups that are A) the majority of smokers and B) those least well-protected against starting smoking by current initiatives.
FWIW I’m against this ban on pure “people should be allowed to do what they want” grounds, but your specific angle of attack seems ill-informed.
It’s not a false analogy, it’s just brutally logical and completely disregards the merits of the situation…
Logging is the deadliest occupation on earth. Banning minorities from the logging industry would greatly improve their odds of survival. It’s exactly the same as banning their chosen cigarettes.
I don’t really have a preference on tobacco bans at all tbh. I do think people should have options, but I don’t disagree with the intent of smoking bans either… the issue here is, it’s not a choice between those two for everyone, it’s a selective ban that removes the options from a singular group, and the selection is based on race and orientation.
The merits of the ban are, in my opinion, not all that relevant. I don’t disagree with banning cigarettes entirely, I don’t disagree with onerous taxation as an incentive to reduce sales, I don’t object to any measures that are indiscriminate, because I don’t really care that much tbh, I switched to vapes in 2012.
I object to the specificity.
From another perspective, were talking about a ban on tobacco that selectively preserves tobacco use for straight white people… does that make it more clear why I object?
brutally logical
No it’s totally unrelated to the discussionl. I think your objection is very poorly thought out.
I used to smoke menthols and I’m white as the driven snow my man. Nothing racist about targeting the cigarettes preferred by the people who are majority smokers by percentage.
I also think “this doesn’t effect me so I don’t care” is a poor way of looking at governance.
Okay, I’m touching grass. Now what? It’s not doing anything and is boring.
So I totally forgot about this but, they banned them in Illinois and they just… They’re still there, no one around me has stopped selling them
There’s a story every couple years that the FDA has banned them. But I guess I never see the follow up where it doesn’t work.
Sue Dillion needs to make some calls
Good
LOL @ everyone in the comments
“bAnNiNg MeNtHoLs Is RaCiSt!”
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What how
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So if we ban minorities from the logging industry, that’s the opposite of racism? It’s the deadliest occupation on earth…
Fisherman, truck drivers, roofers… ban minorities from all of it to save their lives, because that’s the opposite of racism.
See the flaw in the logic here? Targeting a demographic is, by the simplest definition, an act of racism. Equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. Banning minorities from entire industries would be to their ultimate benefit, and is obviously racist. Like Jim Crow obvious.
Your point is very problematical.
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The bigot continues to spread misinformation and bigotry.
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Or, how about we let people put whatever they want into their own body?
Normally I’d agree, but cigarettes in particular are a product that is designed to be as addictive as possible with a laundry list of negative health impacts and virtually zero positive ones. Combine that with the fact that you aren’t just putting it in your body but the body of anyone within breathing distance of you, there’s a strong case to be made for banning them outright.
Put it another way, if cigarettes are legal then marijuana, LSD, MDMA, and a whole host of other drugs should be legal too.
Put it another way, if cigarettes are legal then marijuana, LSD, MDMA, and a whole host of other drugs should be legal too.
Yes. Yes they should.
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Combine that with the fact that you aren’t just putting it in your body but the body of anyone within breathing distance of you,
That’s part of responsible use. I’m ok with only letting smokers smoke in specialty ventilated & filtered areas. Easy for me to say, I don’t smoke. But if any adult wants to make an informed decision to, that should be their choice.
Put it another way, if cigarettes are legal then marijuana, LSD, MDMA, and a whole host of other drugs should be legal too.
I emphatically agree.
Maybe they could just regulate what they put in them instead? Good tobacco is pretty tasty and not insanely addictive. Why not just basically put them in legacy mode?
They’ve already hit a crazy stride with vapes. Maybe they could do a 5-10 year plan where the clean it up while also gaining the foothold that they have with younger people?
Good tobacco is … not insanely addictive
Nah, nicotine is very addictive by itself. But yes, the additives make it even worse.
I agree though, it’s disappointing that governments don’t have better labeling regulations on “sinful” products. Alcohol: why not require a list of ingredients and calories? Cigarettes: same thing, show what it has been processed with, etc? Like how the EU used to require showing how much tar and nicotine each cigarette contained, but realized all the producers started to fake the testing machines by designing holes in the filters (like “light” cigs) where the user’s lips would otherwise cover when smoking.
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So’s hemlock, what’s your point?
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Cigarettes != tobacco. Tobacco is an ingredient in cigarettes, and not the only one, not by a long shot. Literally dozens of additives are included in cigarettes, many of which are designed to make them more addictive.
Secondly, modern tobacco absolutely was “made” the way it is, first through selective breeding and then genetic modification to (among other things) increase Nicotine content. Much in the same way that modern weed is far stronger than the stuff grown 50 years ago, so too is tobacco.
Tell that to all the smokers trying to quit who wish their younger self had not started in the first place.
Because of the children, won’t someone think of the children?!
They already aren’t allowed to smoke!
But parents are allowed to expose them to the smoke.
Do we need to ban everything that a shitty parent might not be able to keep away from their kids?
Why not expand the definition of child abuse to include these things instead of punishing people who are never around kids?
Why not expand the definition of child abuse to include these things instead of punishing people who are never around kids?
That sounds like a great idea, but it’s going to be impossible to enforce.
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So if some can’t enjoy something responsibly, no one can?
Wtf is 3rd hand smoke?
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I mean, nicotine does saturate things when you smoke in an enclosed area. It’s impossible to paint over the stained walls of a smoker’s house without chemically stripping them first, because all the accumulated tar will just seep through the paint and leave brown stains. There’s no way that shit’s healthy.
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Are you suggesting that tar doesn’t contain nicotine or other harmful substances found in cigarettes? Because lol.
That’s okay though, I’m sure you are very special and immune to it.
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They would criminalize tobacco production and smuggling and there would 100*% be a black market.
Think of it more like a safety standard - prevent the sales of variations doing the most harm to public health
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Leave it to Lemmyists to downvote a comment saying that you shouldn’t be allowed to force other people to breathe poisonous smoke.
Come to Colorado! If it’s worth legalization, we are all about it.
(One of my post-legalization projects…)
There’s already too many people in Colorado.
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I’m glad I live in a country with universal healthcare. Your point is made completely erroneous by the fact that everyone’s taxes are paying for your cancer treatment. This “fuck you i’ll do what i want” mentality is literally antisocial conservative garbage.
Banning drugs or alcohol has never worked. The demand will still be there. People will turn to the black market instead if it gets banned.
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Yeah, which is why illegal drugs have more users than legal drugs (alcohol and tobacco). Except they don’t.
Their argument was that banning cigarettes wouldn’t eliminate their use, only drive people to continue doing it through other methods.
What does your comment have to do with that…? Nobody said there would somehow be more users than before, just that people would continue doing it…
My argument is that since illegal drugs have significantly fewer users, prohibition does reduce usage.
That logic doesn’t flow, though. You need to compare number of current illegal users vs number of users before it was illegal.
Have you heard of the US prohibition on alcohol? It’s a pretty famous counterexample to your argument showing that it absolutely does not reduce usage.
The same number of people, as a percentage, smoke marijuana as smoke cigarettes. Marijuana use is federally illegal and illegal in most states.
So no, it really doesn’t reduce usage. Price and perceived risk are the two factors that reduce usage the most.
I don’t know about the USA, but I see tobacco smokers every day and very rarely see marijuana smokers.
Most people smoking weed aren’t just doing it out in the open like tobacco users
Ok, I’ll bite. Why is banning only menthols racist?
Because African American smokers tend to favor menthol over other types of cigarettes.
“In the 1950s, less than 10% of Black smokers used menthol cigarettes. Today, after decades of tobacco industry targeting, that number is 85%. Menthol cigarettes continue to be heavily advertised, widely available and priced cheaper in Black communities."
https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/what-we-do/industry-watch/menthol-report
Because it’s doing the most harm to the most harmed demographic?
Black people tend to primarily smoke menthol, disproportionate to other races. I’m too lazy to link, but you can Google it and find studies pretty easily.
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This apparently is an objectionable point to bring up… not sure if your downvotes are the “all or nothing” aspect, or the spotlighting of the blatant racist aspect, but it seems people don’t want to see this at face value :/
I’m with you though. The selective targeting is wrong. Equal ban or no ban is the right position to take IMHO.
I down voted it because I don’t think the government should ban substances. Not cigarettes, not alcohol, not marijuana, not psychedelics, and probably not a bunch of other drugs too. The government’s job is not to play mommy and daddy for a nation of adults. Our citizens are entirely too eager to strip away their own liberty these days.
I agree with that.
The specific ban in question on this particular post isn’t a general matter though… it’s targeting minorities…
That kinda makes it a moot point in my opinion on wether or not prohibition is appropriate in general, because regardless of where you fall on the matter of bans or liberties, the specificity of the intended targets is wildly inappropriate, because it’s racist/homophobic, so I kinda disregarded the last point they made entirely :)
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It aint racist my guy. The chemical processes involved in menthol cigarettes increase the carcinogenic properties of the cig.
Yes, no shit cigs are bad. Menthol cigs are the worst offenders.
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https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna42237299
Edit: lol stay mad
