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FDA Seeks Ban On Menthol Cigarettes To Fight Teen Smoking (npr.org)
The Food and Drug Administration announced Thursday that it will seek a ban on the sale of menthol-flavored cigarettes. From a report: The announcement came as the agency officially released a detailed plan to also restrict the sale of flavored electronic cigarettes. It also wants to ban flavored cigars. In a statement, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb says the moves are aimed at fighting smoking among young people. Flavored e-cigarettes, menthol-flavored tobacco cigarettes and flavored cigars are all popular among teenagers. "Today, I'm pursuing actions aimed at addressing the disturbing trend of youth nicotine use and continuing to advance the historic declines we've achieved in recent years in the rates of combustible cigarette use among kids," Gottlieb says.
While cigarette smoking has hit a record low in the United States, vaping has been skyrocketing. That trend has raised concerns that a new generation of young people will become addicted to nicotine. Gottlieb says the moves were prompted by new data showing a 78 percent increase in e-cigarette use among high school students and a 48 percent increase among middle school students, from 2017 to 2018. "These data shock my conscience," Gottlieb says.
While cigarette smoking has hit a record low in the United States, vaping has been skyrocketing. That trend has raised concerns that a new generation of young people will become addicted to nicotine. Gottlieb says the moves were prompted by new data showing a 78 percent increase in e-cigarette use among high school students and a 48 percent increase among middle school students, from 2017 to 2018. "These data shock my conscience," Gottlieb says.
The argument against smoking is that it pollutes the air of non-smokers and affects their health. What's the issue now? I don't want ass flavored vapes, I moved away from smoking for a reason. Nicotine is so bad and yet you let people drink and push way more addicting medications. If I wanted a nanny, I would have hired one.
Really? I suspect it has nothing to do with teens smoking. Also, teenagers usually go for the taboo stuff first, if only to show off a sense of independence to their peers. If it isn't smoking, it'd likely be something else. Besides, teenagers have been smoking weed for nearly a century now, and at least on a recreational basis, that stuff is illegal as hell for kids to partake of.
Sometimes I wish that statists would just say outright what they want to do - it's not like eliminating smoking is a bad goal, and for once the honesty would be refreshing.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Fuck you, if they think they will take my Newports they better prepare for a fight. How about the parents you know... BE PARENTS!! Wtf is with people and their need to control what others do.
People say the solution to the tobacco use problem is to ban tobacco.
People say the solution to the illegal drug use problem is to legalize them.
Whenever a solution doesn't work perfectly, there's a knee-jerk reaction among people to suggest that the opposite of the current solution be tried. Such simplistic reasoning almost never works.
The supposed worry is that kids will become addicted to nicotine.
But that was never a health issue, the other aspects of smoking cigarettes are what lead to lung cancer, not the nicotine itself.
If you remove vaping, what will happen is kids will go back to cigarettes. How is that better??
Vaping has been amazingly helping in getting people OFF cigarettes and the FDA wants to un-spool all that benefit...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yep, being hard to make is why you don't find any street drugs anymore. They all went buh-bye with prohibition. Coke, meth, e, etc, all eradicated with your simple plan. We don't have gangs shooting each other over territory at all.
Fact check: The ACLU got most of the involuntary commitments released nationwide, then Reagan closed the empty loonie bins in California.
The ACLU wasn't wrong. 'Mental health' was used as a police state mechanism by many of the worst governments of the 19th and 20th centuries. Including the USA. The exceptions are nations that didn't bother with the pretense (e.g. Cambodia under Pol Pot).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
So, a man should not be allowed a steak just because a baby can't chew it?
Since you obviously don't know your history, allow me to enlighten you: prohibition *always* creates black markets, which funnel huge amounts of money and power into the hands of criminals, who use it to do terrible things. Further, it pushes tax dollars to enforcement of the ban, which is futile and robs us of the better uses on which those tax dollars could be spent.
Also, it is morally wrong. Freedom is an inalienable right. This includes the freedom to choose quality over quantity of life, and do things like smoke.
If teens are getting this illegally, the right answer is NOT to take it away from adults, who absolutely should have legal access to it. If the problem is extreme, then require that shops that sell tobacco disallow teens on the premises (even when accompanied by an adult). And STOP THERE. A certain degree of abuse is a price of freedom and it is a price worth paying!.
Here's a modest proposal: Ban all tobacco products completely.
Will never happen. Government makes too much money off tobacco to ban it.
...especially state government. How else can you tax the crap out of the poor (since they smoke way more than middle-class and rich folks do) and not get yelled at for it?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
What? That stopped because dealers were losing clients due to death. Fentanyl and heroin are both available in your nearest seedy part of town. This is literally the dumbest thing I've seen on slashdot..
The reason prohibition didn't work with alcohol is because it's easy to make.
Do you seriously think a significant fraction of the alcohol consumed during Prohibition was homemade? Yes, we've all heard of "bathtub gin", but the overwhelming majority of alcohol was smuggled in from outside the country.
That adds the menthol back in. Hood Riches AWAIT! :-P
There's another side to that coin, the anti-psychiatry movement (vague name, potentially inaccurate, maybe better termed psychiatry reform movement) and their promoters such as R. D. Laing caused a huge rise in the political correctness of mental illness so that now people with depression are treated on equal footing as people with schizophrenia. The rise in respectfulness for the mentally ill is a good side effect, the other side is that the rise in concept of "not a danger to himself or others at this exact moment so totally safe always" and near-total out patient treatment has lead to the closure of vast amounts of mental health facilities. And while that's good for all the supposed countless political prisoners (not that it didn't happen at all) who were used as a reason as to why they're dangerous facilities, the ultimate end result is now prisons are full of mentally ill people who get essentially no treatment at all.
Governments benefited more from the closures than any political prisoner or mentally ill person could: mental health facilities and asylums are bad because they waste money and only imprison the innocent and sane and the actual insane can be treated as out patients from underfunded clinics, so the state can save tons of money and all the rest and seemingly now vast majority of the mentally ill can live on the streets or sit in prison. Meanwhile more than a few mass shooters were considered "not a danger to himself or others" since they weren't in the middle of killing anyone at that exact moment, evidently.
Do you think that the United States is the only country where tobacco grows?!? Banning tobacco here would just create a huge black market. How's that "war on drugs" going nowadays?
It really shouldn't be up to the government in the first place...ESPECIALLY the Federal Govt.
I"m still trying to find in my copy of the Constitution one of the few enumerated powers and responsibilities of the federal govt to regulate what I ingest voluntarily.
They don't need to be telling people, grown adults what they can or cannot eat, smoke, snort, inject or rub into their bellies........
The government was not established to be your conscience or nanny....and I cannot fathom why we continue to go further down that rabbits hole of having the government rule your life rather than let you do as you wish with your body and live with the consequences.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Ports, dawg!
The junkies who stole your stuff are a small subset of users of illicit drugs. There are many other people who would like to steal your stuff that do not use any drugs at all.
Likewise, the shitters and pissers are composed of many different types of people, not all of them druggies, although there is a much larger correlation there, I think.
I think the parent's point is that for a very large number of people, there's no good reason they shouldn't be allowed to use whatever their drug of choice is.
I don't smoke but fuck off with your Puritanism.
First, yes, 2nd smoke is nasty and disgusting but people have a right to smoke in private.
Second, if people want to poison their bodies then no one else has the right to dictate how they abuse their bodies.
Third, banning is always a stupid "half-assed" solution (which never works) as opposed to education.
....and I cannot fathom why we continue to go further down that rabbits hole of having the government rule your life rather than let you do as you wish with your body and live with the consequences.
If you cannot fathom why, then you're part of the problem. But I'll say it, people are stupid. The narcissisistic, NIMBY lovin', greedy, i-got-mine-fuck-you attitude thats the result of amerkin culture continues to breed ignorant, civically uninvolved Joe Q. Publics that perpetuate the societal ills you suffer. Wish I had an answer to fix people short of killing most of them.
No reason to reply other than that my last cigarette was the 31st January this year and I haven't smoked one since. Best bit is I went completely cold turkey, no substitute. It is possible.
But banning subcategorties - e.g., flavored e-liquids or menthol cigarettes, while keeping the regular stuff around isn't a complete ban - if you must smoke or vape, you can. It's just they removed the attractants that make it feel less nasty or more appealing. So you can smoke and vape still.
They should do this for food. Ban all flavour. From now on everyone just gets bland protein chunks and scientifically formulated nutrition powder. After all there's an obesity epidemic going on, and Teh Gubberment Must Do Something! You can still eat, you just have to eat the legal federally mandated stuff.