Author’s note: Between Christian Schneider’s calls for legalizing teen boozing and my apologetics for cheap beer, smoking, and car sex, the Wisconsin contingent holds the standard of vice aloft in these Vice-less times. No doubt fellow cheesehead Dominic Pino will soon write about his trippy experiences aboard Amtrak’s Ayahuasca line.
The Biden administration and its friends at the FDA have declared the menthol cigarette too dangerous for John Q. Public’s consumption. For those unfamiliar with menthols, they’re the flavor equivalent of a generic cigarette falling tip-first into an open jar of Vicks VapoRub.
National Review‘s Brittany Bernstein reports:
The FDA, which is expected to publish a final rule in the fall, has touted the ban as having the “potential to significantly reduce disease and death from combusted tobacco product use” by “reducing youth experimentation and addiction and increasing the number of smokers that quit.”
The pending prohibition has elicited criticism not only from small-government types bemoaning federal ashtray-policing but also from racial-advocacy groups, who note that menthols are most popular with African Americans and that the rule will bring law-enforcement agencies to the doorsteps of said persons. But the government knows this, and paternalism is the point of the prohibition, as evidenced by comments from Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.
Becerra opines, “The proposed rules represent an important step to advance health equity by significantly reducing tobacco-related health disparities.”
This sort of hand-swatting is perhaps best understood as Granola Supremacy, the idea that crunchy liberals are endowed with superior insight into how one should live. If one were to ascribe an avatar to the federal government, it would be an androgynous 43-year-old Aspen resident driving a hybrid BMW i3 with HRC stickers who thinks guns are scary, snarfs CBD gummies for anxiety, and loves harassing Republican neighbors on NextDoor while filing IRS investigation requests against them, and spends a fair amount of time kicking down the doors of the poors and minorities to inform them that what they eat, drive, and smoke is wrong and that if they want to live long enough to see the local health conglomerate transition their eight-year-old grandsons into granddaughters, they’d better stop all the icky living.
Insidiously, while the menthols ban is a gross abuse of federal power, the abuse is directed at a product that most people either don’t care about, or that they’re fine with prohibiting, because they dislike smoking or have a class aversion to it. Personal taste should not decide whether government overreach is acceptable or not.
Flavored tobacco is unhealthy, yes. Tobacco is unhealthy. It is not the federal government’s place to say that a product, unchanged in all respects except its flavor, is no longer allowed — it’s like banning birthday-cake-flavored custard at Culver’s because kids might develop unhealthy diets or because the rotund Swedes of the area have a particular hankering. “Vanilla and chocolate only,” Becerra will say grimly as FBI goons armed with axes chop up multicolored pints of custard in the parking lot.
How absurd.