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In the final days of his failed presidency, President Joe Biden’s Food and Drug Administration is moving ahead with an absurd and dangerous plan to all but ban the sale of tobacco in the United States. That should never be allowed.
A brilliant plan by the geniuses in Washington would reduce the level of nicotine in cigarettes to barely perceptible levels, rendering the product nearly useless. Let me tell you, nicotine itself is mostly harmless, but bureaucrats in the bureaucracy believe that the supply of deadly nicotine in cigarettes is too dangerous, even with high taxes and warning labels. . So, like many illiberal pencil promoters before them, their plan is simply to ban it.
Biden administration proposes ‘gift’ to cartels working to effectively ban tobacco in 11th hour, experts say
By the way, there are four fundamental reasons why the regulatory elimination of tobacco, a product that has been associated with our nation for centuries, should never happen.
First and most importantly, my choice to smoke, and the choice of over 25 million American adult smokers, has nothing to do with Biden. We all know it’s dangerous. This isn’t 1950, so celebrities aren’t running TV ads about which brand of cigarette 4 out of 5 doctors prefer.
Portrait of a middle-aged woman standing outdoors and smoking a cigarette. (St. Petersburg)
Indeed, it is a choice that is detrimental to your health. But so are obesity, alcohol consumption, and lack of exercise.
The difference is that smokers are treated as morally inferior for reasons that I can’t fully understand. No one would walk up to a fat guy eating a Big Mac and say, “What’s wrong? Don’t you know what you’re doing?” This happens regularly to smokers in public places.
But even if that person is a bigoted authoritarian who thinks the state should interfere with my after-dinner smoke, beware of the unintended consequences. This leads to reason number two. This policy creates a clear invitation to the black market.
The economic opportunities for criminal organizations here are huge, and in fact, cigarette smuggling is already a big problem in our country. Thankfully, it’s only available domestically so far.
Smugglers typically load up trucks with cheap cigars from low-tax states like Virginia or Indiana and sell them at a discount in high-tax states like New York or Illinois. In my Brooklyn neighborhood, three stores within five blocks of my home sold packs of cigarettes for $9 instead of the legal price of $15, and they always had a Virginia tax stamp on them.
President Joe Biden speaks at a reception for Democratic new members of Congress in the State Dining Room of the White House on Sunday, January 5, 2025 in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Seneta) (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Seneta)
This de facto national cigarette ban would introduce international smugglers into the U.S. cigarette market for the first time, which is the third reason why this FDA plan is completely derailed. .
“Biden’s ban is a bow and balloon gift to the organized crime cartels, whether it’s the cartels, whether it’s the Chinese organized crime syndicates, whether it’s the Russian mafia. It’s going to keep America in smoke. And the streets will become more violent,” Rich said. Marianos, former Deputy Director of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; Tobacco Law Enforcement Networktold FOX News Digital about the proposal.
This is an obvious truth we’ve known since the Prohibition era a century ago. Compounding this cycle, Mexican cartels are increasingly smuggling foreign cigarettes, many of them counterfeit products made in China, making it even harder to contain fentanyl and human trafficking at the border. That’s true.
The fourth and final reason why smokers are outraged by this proposed infringement is that it seems like there’s a new marijuana dispensary opening on every street corner in America every 10 minutes.
At nine o’clock in the morning, every big city in our country smells like a Grateful Dead concert or a Snoop Dogg den.
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Isn’t it interesting that the government is defending smoking marijuana? Smoking marijuana makes people lazy and docile, but smoking cigarettes and even nicotine makes them furious. I believe that Americans’ senses have been sharpened ever since Sir Walter Raleigh first ingested cannabis. puff?
Future President Dwight D. Eisenhower smoked four packs of cigarettes a day while leading the U.S. military during World War II. Thankfully, he wasn’t a sharp blunt.
It seems very likely that the FDA framed this failure of the program with good intentions, but wasn’t that a problem throughout the Biden administration? Once implemented, Biden’s good intentions always make things worse, from the economy to the border to Afghanistan to now tobacco.
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As smokers, we pay our taxes through our noses, swallow the mean comments about smelling like smoke, are driven onto icy roads by car, and are happy while sharing a cigarette on the corner of a bar or restaurant. Along with the story of our life.
The government will never take that away from smokers, and hopefully it never will, even when President-elect Donald Trump’s FDA leadership comes on board with smarter, more level-headed people.
Click here to read more David Marcus
