Would these people like you to take away their preferred cigarettes, even so?
Not any smoker I've met. Not me when I smoked. It would just make me a little bit more unhappy. It isn't uncommon for smokers to scrounge butts from ashtrays in dire need; making menthols illegal isn't going to make them go "gee I guess I'll quit now."
Also, I object in principle to characterizing minorities as children who can't be trusted to run their own lives — "prey on minority communities" by letting adults make their own decisions?
I'm not sure one can speak about the experience of cigarette smoking if one is not or has never been a smoker. (But kudos for that.)
Smoking is EXTREMELY pleasurable. I only smoked briefly and less than a quarter pack a day, but I had had no idea beforehand of how pleasurable it really is, because the smoke from others used to repel me. Absolutely, the addiction is part of that pleasure. Nicotine feels good in my brain.
(Nicotine gum is not pleasurable. So it's not just the nicotine.)
And yes, I quit. For logical reasons. Not because I didn't *like* them.
Cigarattes are addictive, certainly -- my late mother being exhibit "A" -- but thinking that people don't enjoy them is absurd.
How many people made friends, got laid, maybe even met their future wife/husband through a smoking interaction/rituial? How many people reading this might not ever have been born without nicotine? (The same goes double dog for alcohol, of course.)
Dour sermonizing about all the "harm" and "lives lost" to these mild vices always seems to presume that the people, the smokers, were hapless victims of corporate propaganda. Especially, it assumes they never, ever, ENJOYED smoking.
Well, they did. Smoking is great. So what if you die at 60? Any remaining years would be sad and decaying anyway, who wants to live 90 years if you can't enjoy any of it?
Well, at least I know what my mother would have said to any child who tried to tell her she couldn't smoke. Probably would make Ben Kingsley blush.
And as for telling her to wear a surgical mask in public, the withering stare that person would get, would have stopped the whole Covid panic right then and there.
This has got to be one of the best (joke) threads of the month, easily in contention for thread of the fall season; it's perfect, right on the borderline between slightly believable and super-clandestine troll humor.
Can you explain? I was thinking something along the lines of "the obvious intent of the writers and of the voters was to keep the 24 week ban, so judges will interpret the text in that context". How would you describe that, and how would you describe originalism?
By the way, trivial warning (1% of ban) for doing the thing where you accuse someone of being wrong but give no explanation.
Originalism means we interpret the law according not to what was in the heads of the legislators (or what we want it to mean), but according to what the words of the law meant at the time. This amendment has a current plain-language meaning. That that's in contradiction to "you know what we mean" would mean nothing to an originalist. Wikipedia: 'Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that interpreting what was meant by someone who wrote a law was not trying to "get into his mind" because the issue was "not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker of English, using them in the circumstances in which they were used." This is the essential precept of modern originalism.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism#Original_meaning
It looks like that article describes two kinds of originalism - original meaning and original intent. Is the thing I'm describing original intent? If not, is there a name for it?
Yes, I would call that original intent. It's dumb, for precisely this kind of reason, and not what pretty much anybody means by "originalism" nowadays.
Is it dumb? It seems like all the law professors quoted expect people to use it to interpret this California law (and that they would be right to do so, if they don't want voters accidentally implementing a plan that none of them want).
It is dumb because, for one thing, it makes it impossible for a regular citizen to know what the law means just by reading it. It makes the *text* of the law useless, and the presumed, inferred, and unformalized "intent" of the legislators (which how would you even know was uniform?) the *true* law. It's rule by "you know what we mean."
Justice Scalia's greatest achievement was sweeping away "original intent" originalism in favor of "original public meaning" originalism. That is by far the dominant approach today, to the point that original intent is largely regarded as just another form of purposivism.
I thought that in addition to what else has been said, this study was somewhat of a killing blow to the validity of original-intent-style originalism, at least for interpreting the US constitution
The TL;DR is that the authors say "to tell whether original meaning or original intent is better originalism, let's look at what methods the people who originally wrote the constitution used" and they find that there was a consensus *against* using the intent of the writers of things at the time. Which renders original-intent-style originalism basically incoherent--their intent would not have been to have their intent interpreted.
But this could be reversed for things added later, I suppose. Perhaps, if something is added to a constitution with the intent of having its intent interpreted, we should interpret it. Or perhaps not, if we don't care about intent.
Yeah, the meanings have shifted. First "originalism" meant "original intent" and what I describe was "textualism." Now what was called "textualism" is now called "originalism." Hard to blame anyone for being confused.
That is: if the meaning of the words has changed then the constitution or law has substantively changed under current meaning, but has not under original meaning.
In the senses that we've been using them, Scalia et. al. would say both originalism and textualism have been abused, and advocates strictly following both: you must follow what's actually written (not what lawmakers said they intended), and you must use the original meaning of the words (not ways they've evolved over time).
You cannot use what lawmakers said, even at the time, because often different lawmakers will have different understandings of the same wording, and may agree only because the language is ambiguous. (To put it another way: If lawmakers had intended a specific meaning, they would have passed that as part of the law. That which is omitted from the law was likely done so for a reason.)
And hopefully the argument for not letting the meaning of the plain language of the words change is self-evident.
The authoritative text on this is Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts by Scalia and Garner.
Yes, it does. Because all you've got to do is stuff like look in contemporary dictionaries to see what the words meant at that time. You don't have to guess at what someone was thinking when he/they drafted/finalized/voted for (which one? All three)? the law in question. Especially since they may have been lying about their intent in order to get the wording they wanted passed, or different people may have had different motivations for voting for it.
So you are saying we can look up a word in a dictionary and preclude any dispute about it? I get the idea but not really sure it simplifies things much. It’s the old pound of flesh rabbit hole.
Not all dispute, but you can certainly narrow it down.
All of adjudication involves interpretation and exercise of judgment. Originalism isn't some mechanistic method that is guaranteed to get the same answer from every jurist. But it grossly limits the scope of the debate. It says judges can't make up new meanings for old words in order to change the law to their liking, and they don't have to try to divine what the legislators *wanted* something to mean. Instead, they debate what the law actually meant in the language of the day. Moreover, it means that laws are meant to be able to be understood on their face, without having to consult a soothsayer to divine their *true* meaning.
I don't know what Shylock's case has to do with this. That wasn't an issue of interpretation of the law; he entered into an illegal contract.
I admit to also being confused about the implications of Amendment 1, though it seems worth noting that the US Constitution has lots of absolutist statements ("Congress shall make no law...") but we still have defamation, false advertising, etc. as limits on free speech; likewise for the Second Amendment, but we still have gun restrictions like *trails off mumbling*.
We have copyright as a limit on free speech; copyright is in the constitution, but was amended *by the first amendment*.
Defamation is in common law; Congress didn't make a defamation law, as there already was one. [Yeah, I don't like that argument either, but it's an argument that people have made]
Originalism is a theory of constitutional interpretation -- it's about how to interpret old but still binding textual provisions, where the alternative theory is that those provisions should be interpreted in light of subsequent experience and legal development.
I don't know that it makes much sense to talk about "originalism" when we're talking about how a new provision should be interpreted by courts shortly after its enactment. That's really just a general question of textual construction: what are the background assumptions any reasonable legislator would have about the legal effect of this language?
I think if you're talking about a court construing a recently enacted statute, it makes sense to juxtapose textualist vs. purposivist approaches to interpretation.
I don't know that it makes sense to call either of those two approaches "originalist," or to say that they represent two varieties of "originalism."
But first off, we're not talking about a statue, but a Constitutional provision. Secondly, should we interpret laws differently depending on how old they are?
>[S]hould we interpret laws differently depending on how old they are?
Yes, obviously. Older laws cannot account for unanticipated technological developments since they were passed and therefore there has to be an interpretive schema for how they apply. There is no such need for that schema for newer laws.
What? You can't see how making a product a more appealing alternative could incentivize a switch?
Flavored vape juice is what got me off tobacco and eventually off nicotine altogether. I object in the strongest possible terms to a) preventing adults from buying a product they want because "think of the children" *when it's already not sold to children* (†), and b) making illegal the only thing that ever worked for me and my friends to make the single biggest and best change in our lives.
(†)Edit: To be clear, I am aware that the argument is that kids will somehow get vapes anyway and be more incentivized to do so by the flavor, and somehow they will find a way that they couldn't find if there was no tantalizing flavor.
To my mind, this is a) misunderstanding teenagers (it's not the flavor, it's the rebellious cool adultness: no teenager thinks cigarettes or cheap liquor taste good), and b) sort of like saying "yes, we prevent kids from driving, but cool cars might make them want to drive anyway, so no adults can have a cool car.
Flavoring the vapes was the only thing that got me to quit smoking cigarettes. Flavorless vapes are not a better experience than cigarettes, and roughly equivalent to the gum, which never helped me quit. Flavored vapes are a lot more fun than cigarettes, and I quit smoking cigarettes when I bought my first disposable green-apple vape. To be honest I think the lack of public health messaging around how much safer and cheaper vapes are is astounding. If every cigarette smoker switched to vaping tomorrow it would be a massive improvement, and curtailing this switch in any way seems really destructive and small-minded to me.
There has been something double-speakish going on with the government and cigarettes, way before vapes arrived. Perhaps they like cigarette taxes?
I tried a couple of cigarettes when suffocated by my artsy friends smoking, years ago. I am certain that if cigarettes were legally allowed to be sold singly as "loosies," far fewer people would ever have become addicted.
The minimum 20 pack seems perfectly calibrated to turn a curious smoker into an addict. Few people smoke a couple, then throw the pack away. No, they "clean their plates."
They do like the taxes and like the lottery they have the advantage of taxing only the willing. I am a binge smoker and I liked that in Mexico almost every corner store sold loosies. Because once I start I will smoke em till they’re done.
Ah, I can answer that, as I have used vapes to help quit a quarter pack a day habit. Tobacco flavored vapes are vile and repellant. Not going to happen. Menthol vapes are acceptable. Mint vapes are best but apparently only criminals would propose such a thing. Hey, little girl, want some candy?
Like many commenters, I fail to see how it is anyone else's business which flavor vape I prefer. The classic "let's save the children!" argument has been discredited by the research I have seen. Young people smoke much less than previous generations. They vaped for a bit while it was trendy. Now even that is dropping in spite of the fact that they immediately found workarounds for the "making an example" of Juul.
That sounds nice, but outlawing things doesn't deprive addicts of them; addicts find a way to feed their addictions. Instead, it turns addicts into criminals (or, at least, patrons of criminals), causes prices to skyrocket (leading addicts to become criminals to feed their habit), fills our courts and prisons with people who engaged in consensual behavior, and increases the power and reach of the police. Prohibition has not worked well in this county, or anywhere else I'm aware of.
Stopping the vape industry from producing more does hurt existing addicts. They'll just switch to cigarettes, or drive long distances to get them, or get black-market products. That's exactly what I'd have done, certainly.
Also: nobody would pay such a high premium for a vape? My friend, exactly this happened in my state — and people died from improperly-made juice.
And what about the murder rate? Even if we accept your numbers, is it desirable to exchange deaths from voluntary (and, at least in many cases, desired) behavior for deaths due to criminal activity?
I dunno; I'm skeptical. It appears, on a cursory examination, that I cannot access more than the abstract there, but the graph of homicide rate decreasing for "selected cities" (and adjusted for some unclear measure of enforcement rather than the obvious markers of "Prohibition begins/ends"), seems — without being able to view the rationale — sort of like cherry-picking.
E.g., homicides as a whole rose during Prohibition, and fell after repeal; the effect is clearly visible, and significant. It was rising before Prohibition too, but a) less steeply and b) with fluctuation up and down — an effect not observed after Prohibition began; and it is possible, but quite a coincidence, that it would immediately fall after repeal if this was entirely due to some exogenous factor.
You can see some justification for looking at the effect in places wherein Prohibition was most strongly enforced; but we wouldn't expect effects on homicide rate to be entirely delimited thereby — e.g., consider displacement effects, smuggling and brewing routes and locations, organized crime moving more visible operations outside these cities and operating clandestinely inside them, etc., as well as mechanisms we aren't even thinking of. It seems at least arguable that the clearest view of effect on homicide would be presented by looking at the bigger picture.
Too, it's possible this paper is completely legit and unassailable, but I checked a few cities famous for Prohibition-era enforcement and results (Chicago, say), and *they* also don't show a decrease in homicide rate but the opposite.
As said, maybe this really does reverse if you have a reliable measure of enforcement, good arguments for why nothing outside these cities should be affected, and look at every city with strong enforcement all together; but... I'm skeptical.
Do you have a link to a write-up on this? I have never heard anyone argue that prohibition was net positive and I’m interested to learn more about this position.
1. That prohibition decreased alcohol consumption. This seems obvious to me and I haven't encountered anyone arguing the opposite. Some benefits flow from this; for example a decrease in domestic violence (a bigger effect than I was previously aware of), and the obvious health benefits.
2. Prohibition decreased crime. The general argument I am familiar with against prohibition is that it caused a big increase in organized crime. The article argues that on net (including things like domestic abuse and other alcohol-related violence) crime actually decreased. This isn't really substantiated though. The study that is linked as supposedly supporting this actually says in its abstract "Alcohol prohibition decreased homicides for two years after enactment, but had no effect after two years." which sounds to me like it's compatible with "organized crime took a little while to ramp up, and then counteracted any benefits from prohibition". Still, based on my priors I'd have expected to see a more measurable negative effect here, so I think I need to update somewhat on this information.
Even if we do accept this result on its face (crime was shifted from domestic abuse and bar fights to organized crime, without changing the level), I think that still does not bode very well for Prohibition. You'd need to show a pretty big crime reduction to persuade me that this policy's benefits outweigh the costs of 1) harming users by putting them in jail or fining them, 2) reducing people's ability to enjoy their preferred activities (most alcohol users are not addicts/abusers), not to mention 3) creating the opportunity for selective enforcement of these laws by racist cops, thus harming marginalized communities.
If all you're getting net utility from is a health benefit, sure, that's a benefit in some sense, but you can't (or at least, I won't) mandate people be healthy at the expense of their liberty; the same logic would lead you to forcing overweight people onto daily treadmill sessions to get into shape, and I would be surprised if many people bite that bullet.
Prohibition might not be worth it in this particular case, but the argument that bans don’t work proves far too much; banning things usually makes people less likely to do them. Maybe the decrease isn’t worth it, but I find it extremely unlikely that out of the uncountably infinite number of reals, we just happened to land on exactly the number 0 for this effect size.
Okay, let's narrow the claim: Bans don't work for *helping addicts.* The decrease in consumption is almost entirely in social or casual users. Addicts find a way to have their fix, and so bans simply make their lives worse.
Actually, no, I stand by my original claim: Prohibition doesn't work well. It benefits basically nobody except criminals and bureaucrats. The ones who stop consuming are those who were not being harmed by it, casual users who presumably saw some benefit in consuming it. Addicts, with few exceptions, do *not* stop consuming; instead they ruin their lives trying to find their next fix, engage in criminal activity to get what they need, switch to harder stuff since it's generally cheaper per unit of addiction-satisfaction, and risk being injured by impure product (sometimes produced by the government). Plus now "pushers" have the incentive to try to *create* addicts, as addicts are most of their business.
Add into this the additional societal knock-on detriments of massive increases in the police state, government intrusion into private affairs (awfully hard to uncover crimes nobody reports!), massive increases in crime, in government power, in government spending that has no effect, in caseloads in courts and in prison overcrowding…yes, I'm going to call prohibition a net negative, every time.
So no, the effect size isn't zero; it's *predictably negative,* if what you're measuring is social welfare.
Question: does prohibition work to reduce the number of new addicts? The mechanism I have in mind would be along the lines of "it's harder to get addicted to a substance when it's expensive and hard to get," but it's pure armchair speculation on my part.
That's a good question. I can find no data on addiction rates; probably not surprising, given that it would be very hard to measure.
It's possible it would, for just the reasons you mention. Set against that is the possibility that dealers (and others, like pimps) now have incentive to create addiction in order to maintain or increase their market (given that, unlike in a legal environment, addicts are likely to be the majority of their business).
Well okay but I don’t feel comfortable dictating to adults what they can get addicted to. And really, nicotine isn’t any worse than coffee. Nicotine gum is sold OTC and doesn’t even require ID. It’s the particulates from the tobacco that kills people. Tobacco is really rough on the body so if people want to vape I say let them.
As long as we ban coffee (addictive) while we are at it. Vapes do not appear to cause high levels of harm. It's not the addictive nicotine that is harmful, it is the products of cigarette combustion. Smoking coffee beans would probably be a bad idea, too.
Vaping is fairly harmless; being addicted to nicotine when you're vaping isn't unpleasant at all, in my experience.
It also seems weird to me to say "people might make a decision that causes them to experience something sort of unpleasant for a little bit, so we need to make even those who would be completely fine unable to make this decision." Surely there is a better way.
(I also really, really don't want to set a precedent that the legal system should start making choices for adults. Slippery slope and all that.)
Also also, nicotine has a small but measurable positive effect on lots of stuff: it's the only nootropic that actually appears to increase intelligence (e.g., caffeine increases *alertness,* as does nicotine, but *only* nicotine increases # of problems solved correctly on Raven's); it is protective against certain forms of cognitive decline; it is a mild stimulant; etc.
Being addicted is unpleasant if the thing you're addicted to is harmful, and expensive if it's heavily taxed or is illegal (or naturally expensive to produce).
The non-paternalistic policy would be to neither ban tobacco or vape, nor tax them exceptionally. The ideal paternalistic policy (optimizing for people's average health, regardless of their own preferences) is probably to ban or heavily restrict smoked tobacco products, but allow vaping with low taxes. Any benefit from banning vaping in reducing the total number of nicotine users is probably more than erased if it results in some people continuing smoking who would otherwise switch to vaping.
Leaded gasoline is a wholly different matter than nicotine (except perhaps under fully paternalistic assumptions, where hurting one's own health is regarded as bad as hurting a non-consenting party's health) because leaded gasoline hurts everyone, while nicotine only hurts its users (and to a small extent other consenting parties).
Agreed! One major reason I quit my mild smoking habit (still with difficulty) is that I just dislike being addicted to anything and craving it. Air and water I accept.
I think I tried smoking because I am very open to experience and curious. I respect that it takes strength to quit. It is great to quit!
Yet I so strongly agree that this decision is best when it comes from the individual, not imposed by government. I see the government's role as ensuring that accurate information is available to its citizens.
I am completely addicted to smoking. I feel like I was born with a Camel straight in my mouth. A victim of the James dean and Humphrey Bogart generation.
You're right; "Hardly any" was an error and I'll edit the comment. The main thing is around 85% of vape products are flavored, so I suspect this would backfire by making vape products less appealing substitutes.
Having read through, it's got some big problems. The study there only compares tobacco sales in a single city (San Francisco) before and after a ban on menthol cigarettes. However, because there's no comparison to other cities, it's essentially worthless; tobacco sales throughout the US dropped at this time, and I don't know how this compares.
The study I referred to was pretty close to the gold standard--it's an experiment that surveys smokers' preferences, then models their choices with and without a flavor ban. The statistics are great, which is honestly shocking to me, since it's the first time I've said this about an experiment in... ever.
It's worth noting that the FDA is already planning to ban flavored cigarettes and cigars, so the law will probably only end up affecting vapes:
I just want to say this about menthol cigarettes: black people use the word "menthol" and "cigarette" interchangably, there is no distinction, all cigarettes are menthol flavored.
This observation comes from spending 9 months in a halfway house with 2 or three black roommates. I even asked G why they only smoked menthols and he didn't even understand the question.
Closer to "every African American smoker I have met in the last ten years." When I ask, "So why do black folks all smoke menthols?", most just look either sheepish or puzzled, and say something like, "It's just a thing I guess."
For a while I was very curious about this and asked people like on subway platforms, "What's up with menthols?" So small sample but better that *some* behavioral studies.
For me the mystery is why it's ubiquitous yet nobody knows why or it never occurred to them.
Vaping is a lot less bad than cigarettes. Menthols are smoked mostly by blacks in my experience. In the Bay Area outside of Oakland their numbers aren’t great. To me it just seems like Karens running a nanny state.
I vote NO as strongly as I've ever voted for anything, although I'm not in California so this does nothing.
Still, it boggles my mind that Scott — an individual I *previously* held in high esteem (kidding, kidding! about the "previously" part, I mean) — would even consider this. In what world is it a good idea to make a healthier product (one that personally probably saved my life) a worse alternative AND encourage the use of blanket bans from above to regulate the life choices of adults?!
I don't think he grasped that this was about vaping. He only talks about cigarettes in the post. As the FDA has proposed banning menthol cigarettes, I assume that's what he thought was going on here.
I admit that I was extremely surprised about Scott's choice, in this case especially, too. Overall, it did seem as though his immersion in Californian values is normalizing authoritarianism more than he realizes.
I lived in and loved California for most of my adult life. One does not realize how f'ed up that beautiful, productive state is, in many ways, until one leaves the groupthink.
I can walk to California from Oregon along the coast now, and find it incomprehensible that some of my friends live on the CA side of that border. The taxes. The stifling, micromanaging regulation. (The CA side features crime, meth and vagrancy, even in that remote and beautiful outpost.)
Prediction: Only in California will it even seem plausible that Newsom has a prayer as Presidential candidate.
I am pretty sure that the focus on flavored vaping products is just a flag of convenience for the real goal of using the FDA to outlaw existing companies' competitors.
I have done some work for a vaping company here in Los Angeles. My boss is personal friends with the owner(s) and we helped install the clean room for their packaging line.
Whatever you think of vaping, playing rope-a-dope with business owners whose whole investment can be wiped out by government caprice backed by lobbyists, is a really crappy thing. See also: california marijuana legalization.
People wonder why politics is so intense now: it's because so much is at stake, the govt now is the biggest player in almost every facet of society and the economy.
Thank you for pointing this out with a concise and clear explanation. Voters in California do not realize that the direct initiative process is gamed like this and believe that they are making actual policy choices about discrete things. It's a shame because California is such a heavyweight in the nation's marketplace that when they do something, it creates quite the downward pressure for other states to follow along.
Yes. It was terrible how the government targeted Juul, made an example of them.
I would never have guessed in the late 20th century that the powerful lesson of authoritarian command economies would just swirl down the drain, forgotten.
You wouldn’t have? Even with every university teaching that free markets bring pain and suffering to populations and at the very least we need mixed markets, but really command economies can work now and are great because algorithms and AI? Because they’ve been doing that worse and worse for over half a century and it’s clearly had an effect.
All of the people who know better are busy. All of the parasites spend all of their time spending our money and teaching their bullshit, while infesting every institution with a modicum of power (and now the multinationals). Say thanks to the bankers, who funded Marxists for race & gender agitation (to marginalize the Occupy stuff they were actually scared of).
Well, yes, that is what has happened. I started worrying about it in the 21st century though there were hints with political correctness in the late 20th.
There are a lot of parasites. We have such a productive society that we have been able to carry them, but they may be getting strong enough to kill the host. I wish these folks would turn their fevered energies toward creative pursuits, though sometimes I do feel inundated with bad art.
It will be very interesting to see how the widely misunderstood and misrepresented Elon Musk does with Twitter.
It’s nightmare Earth. I could go on and on. We’ll get a good shellacking from inflation (not even close to done), lose a lot of people to death and poverty, and possibly have to fight a world war, but it’ll (the country) probably truck on in some form.
I’m not sure I trust Elon yet. He feels like the the rest of the dialectic, but we’ll see.
Yeah I vape and the ban is annoying as hell. It doesn't actually work at all, you just have to go to the head shop and talk to the guy for like 10 minutes until he pulls out the secret box under the counter where he has flavored vape juice. OH, and you can also still buy flavored nicotine free juice and unflavored nicotine solution and mix them, which is a pain in the ass. All in all, as always, prohibition is stupid and creates stupid work arounds which just make everything more annoying.
See the discussion at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-california-ballot-2022/comment/10213198 - curious what you think.
In your edit on this topic: "Apparently more complicated, see comment thread here", the "here" link goes to a paper, not a comment thread.
Another way to say that is "this measure discriminates against minorities by targeting something they particularly like."
They like them more than they like regular cigarettes, or they would buy regular cigarettes.
Would these people like you to take away their preferred cigarettes, even so?
Not any smoker I've met. Not me when I smoked. It would just make me a little bit more unhappy. It isn't uncommon for smokers to scrounge butts from ashtrays in dire need; making menthols illegal isn't going to make them go "gee I guess I'll quit now."
Also, I object in principle to characterizing minorities as children who can't be trusted to run their own lives — "prey on minority communities" by letting adults make their own decisions?
Good comment.
I'm not sure one can speak about the experience of cigarette smoking if one is not or has never been a smoker. (But kudos for that.)
Smoking is EXTREMELY pleasurable. I only smoked briefly and less than a quarter pack a day, but I had had no idea beforehand of how pleasurable it really is, because the smoke from others used to repel me. Absolutely, the addiction is part of that pleasure. Nicotine feels good in my brain.
(Nicotine gum is not pleasurable. So it's not just the nicotine.)
And yes, I quit. For logical reasons. Not because I didn't *like* them.
Giving police yet another reason to hassle minority communities doesn't seem like a policy designed to make things better.
And with every prohibition comes with a black market.
Cigarattes are addictive, certainly -- my late mother being exhibit "A" -- but thinking that people don't enjoy them is absurd.
How many people made friends, got laid, maybe even met their future wife/husband through a smoking interaction/rituial? How many people reading this might not ever have been born without nicotine? (The same goes double dog for alcohol, of course.)
Dour sermonizing about all the "harm" and "lives lost" to these mild vices always seems to presume that the people, the smokers, were hapless victims of corporate propaganda. Especially, it assumes they never, ever, ENJOYED smoking.
Well, they did. Smoking is great. So what if you die at 60? Any remaining years would be sad and decaying anyway, who wants to live 90 years if you can't enjoy any of it?
Well, at least I know what my mother would have said to any child who tried to tell her she couldn't smoke. Probably would make Ben Kingsley blush.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu_xTC5Gc2U
And as for telling her to wear a surgical mask in public, the withering stare that person would get, would have stopped the whole Covid panic right then and there.
Collegially,
BR :-)
Remember, something having a negative effect on black people makes it much worse
I knew this was coming. I’ve seen discussions where you’re racist if you support the ban and racist if you’re not.
The racism singularity!
Who is this why is this on my feed
This is a Substack. Presumably you subscribed to it at some point, or whoever manages your feed added it.
How do I remove it I’m only following one person on my feet that I want to hear from
I think if you're using the Substack app, you can follow the instructions at https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/4474826883732-How-do-I-unsubscribe-from-a-publication-on-the-Substack-iOS-app- . If it's a different kind of feed, I'm not sure, sorry.
I'm really impressed with the customer service here.
Lmao at the incongruity of one of the largest writers on Substack politely helping someone deal with a basic technology issue.
Keep doing God’s work Scott, or whatever we Jews are supposed to say to get across the same meaning as that Christian aphorism.
Hey I got deleted for being a smart Alec! I was just joshing the guy.
"You're a mensch" would work here.
Excellent suggestion
I know right? He could have said thanks.
This has got to be one of the best (joke) threads of the month, easily in contention for thread of the fall season; it's perfect, right on the borderline between slightly believable and super-clandestine troll humor.
I have been wondering since this was the only comment whether it was real or a joke.
I read it and thought it was meant along the lines of "Who are you and what have you done with Scott?"
But nope, guy's just not sure how this blog got on his feed.
Umm…ignoring the text of the document in favor of the norms prevailing at the time is *not* originalism.
Can you explain? I was thinking something along the lines of "the obvious intent of the writers and of the voters was to keep the 24 week ban, so judges will interpret the text in that context". How would you describe that, and how would you describe originalism?
By the way, trivial warning (1% of ban) for doing the thing where you accuse someone of being wrong but give no explanation.
Ouch. Fair.
Originalism means we interpret the law according not to what was in the heads of the legislators (or what we want it to mean), but according to what the words of the law meant at the time. This amendment has a current plain-language meaning. That that's in contradiction to "you know what we mean" would mean nothing to an originalist. Wikipedia: 'Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that interpreting what was meant by someone who wrote a law was not trying to "get into his mind" because the issue was "not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker of English, using them in the circumstances in which they were used." This is the essential precept of modern originalism.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism#Original_meaning
It looks like that article describes two kinds of originalism - original meaning and original intent. Is the thing I'm describing original intent? If not, is there a name for it?
Yes, I would call that original intent. It's dumb, for precisely this kind of reason, and not what pretty much anybody means by "originalism" nowadays.
Is it dumb? It seems like all the law professors quoted expect people to use it to interpret this California law (and that they would be right to do so, if they don't want voters accidentally implementing a plan that none of them want).
It is dumb because, for one thing, it makes it impossible for a regular citizen to know what the law means just by reading it. It makes the *text* of the law useless, and the presumed, inferred, and unformalized "intent" of the legislators (which how would you even know was uniform?) the *true* law. It's rule by "you know what we mean."
Justice Scalia's greatest achievement was sweeping away "original intent" originalism in favor of "original public meaning" originalism. That is by far the dominant approach today, to the point that original intent is largely regarded as just another form of purposivism.
Source: am originalist
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1379&context=nulr
I thought that in addition to what else has been said, this study was somewhat of a killing blow to the validity of original-intent-style originalism, at least for interpreting the US constitution
The TL;DR is that the authors say "to tell whether original meaning or original intent is better originalism, let's look at what methods the people who originally wrote the constitution used" and they find that there was a consensus *against* using the intent of the writers of things at the time. Which renders original-intent-style originalism basically incoherent--their intent would not have been to have their intent interpreted.
But this could be reversed for things added later, I suppose. Perhaps, if something is added to a constitution with the intent of having its intent interpreted, we should interpret it. Or perhaps not, if we don't care about intent.
Yes; however, textualism (here called original meaning) is the most popular form of originalism by far.
Yeah, the meanings have shifted. First "originalism" meant "original intent" and what I describe was "textualism." Now what was called "textualism" is now called "originalism." Hard to blame anyone for being confused.
Should we rely on the original intent or the original textual usage for the meaning of "originalism?"
I thought textualism was _current_ meaning?
That is: if the meaning of the words has changed then the constitution or law has substantively changed under current meaning, but has not under original meaning.
In the senses that we've been using them, Scalia et. al. would say both originalism and textualism have been abused, and advocates strictly following both: you must follow what's actually written (not what lawmakers said they intended), and you must use the original meaning of the words (not ways they've evolved over time).
You cannot use what lawmakers said, even at the time, because often different lawmakers will have different understandings of the same wording, and may agree only because the language is ambiguous. (To put it another way: If lawmakers had intended a specific meaning, they would have passed that as part of the law. That which is omitted from the law was likely done so for a reason.)
And hopefully the argument for not letting the meaning of the plain language of the words change is self-evident.
The authoritative text on this is Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts by Scalia and Garner.
> not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker of English
You mean trying to get into someone else’s mind who’s saying the same thing?
That really streamlines the inquiry…
Yes, it does. Because all you've got to do is stuff like look in contemporary dictionaries to see what the words meant at that time. You don't have to guess at what someone was thinking when he/they drafted/finalized/voted for (which one? All three)? the law in question. Especially since they may have been lying about their intent in order to get the wording they wanted passed, or different people may have had different motivations for voting for it.
So you are saying we can look up a word in a dictionary and preclude any dispute about it? I get the idea but not really sure it simplifies things much. It’s the old pound of flesh rabbit hole.
Not all dispute, but you can certainly narrow it down.
All of adjudication involves interpretation and exercise of judgment. Originalism isn't some mechanistic method that is guaranteed to get the same answer from every jurist. But it grossly limits the scope of the debate. It says judges can't make up new meanings for old words in order to change the law to their liking, and they don't have to try to divine what the legislators *wanted* something to mean. Instead, they debate what the law actually meant in the language of the day. Moreover, it means that laws are meant to be able to be understood on their face, without having to consult a soothsayer to divine their *true* meaning.
I don't know what Shylock's case has to do with this. That wasn't an issue of interpretation of the law; he entered into an illegal contract.
I guess the theory is that it’s easier to get into a generic someone’s mind than a specific someone’s.
I admit to also being confused about the implications of Amendment 1, though it seems worth noting that the US Constitution has lots of absolutist statements ("Congress shall make no law...") but we still have defamation, false advertising, etc. as limits on free speech; likewise for the Second Amendment, but we still have gun restrictions like *trails off mumbling*.
I believe the original intent was to have *Congress* make no law at all about such things, but to leave defamation, etc. to the States.
The 1st Amendment (like most of the Bill of Rights) has been extended to apply to the states via the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause.
Right, but my point is that it was intended to be absolutist.
We have copyright as a limit on free speech; copyright is in the constitution, but was amended *by the first amendment*.
Defamation is in common law; Congress didn't make a defamation law, as there already was one. [Yeah, I don't like that argument either, but it's an argument that people have made]
We certainly have restrictions on ownership of explosives, which are usually classed as arms when we say what arms dealers sell.
Originalism is a theory of constitutional interpretation -- it's about how to interpret old but still binding textual provisions, where the alternative theory is that those provisions should be interpreted in light of subsequent experience and legal development.
I don't know that it makes much sense to talk about "originalism" when we're talking about how a new provision should be interpreted by courts shortly after its enactment. That's really just a general question of textual construction: what are the background assumptions any reasonable legislator would have about the legal effect of this language?
Well, that's just the question here: Which sort of originalism are we using? Scott's referring to original *intent,* not original *meaning.*
I think if you're talking about a court construing a recently enacted statute, it makes sense to juxtapose textualist vs. purposivist approaches to interpretation.
I don't know that it makes sense to call either of those two approaches "originalist," or to say that they represent two varieties of "originalism."
Those two have, for better or worse, been folded into two types of originalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism
But first off, we're not talking about a statue, but a Constitutional provision. Secondly, should we interpret laws differently depending on how old they are?
>[S]hould we interpret laws differently depending on how old they are?
Yes, obviously. Older laws cannot account for unanticipated technological developments since they were passed and therefore there has to be an interpretive schema for how they apply. There is no such need for that schema for newer laws.
The flavored tobacco ban is mostly a ban on vaping; the vast majority of vape products are flavored, while most cigarettes aren't.
I'm personally voting no because screw tobacco, I want people to vape instead.
It can also serve to attract current cigarette smokers if vapes are allowed to be flavored but cigarettes aren't.
What? You can't see how making a product a more appealing alternative could incentivize a switch?
Flavored vape juice is what got me off tobacco and eventually off nicotine altogether. I object in the strongest possible terms to a) preventing adults from buying a product they want because "think of the children" *when it's already not sold to children* (†), and b) making illegal the only thing that ever worked for me and my friends to make the single biggest and best change in our lives.
(†)Edit: To be clear, I am aware that the argument is that kids will somehow get vapes anyway and be more incentivized to do so by the flavor, and somehow they will find a way that they couldn't find if there was no tantalizing flavor.
To my mind, this is a) misunderstanding teenagers (it's not the flavor, it's the rebellious cool adultness: no teenager thinks cigarettes or cheap liquor taste good), and b) sort of like saying "yes, we prevent kids from driving, but cool cars might make them want to drive anyway, so no adults can have a cool car.
Thanks for making this very clear argument.
Flavoring the vapes was the only thing that got me to quit smoking cigarettes. Flavorless vapes are not a better experience than cigarettes, and roughly equivalent to the gum, which never helped me quit. Flavored vapes are a lot more fun than cigarettes, and I quit smoking cigarettes when I bought my first disposable green-apple vape. To be honest I think the lack of public health messaging around how much safer and cheaper vapes are is astounding. If every cigarette smoker switched to vaping tomorrow it would be a massive improvement, and curtailing this switch in any way seems really destructive and small-minded to me.
There has been something double-speakish going on with the government and cigarettes, way before vapes arrived. Perhaps they like cigarette taxes?
I tried a couple of cigarettes when suffocated by my artsy friends smoking, years ago. I am certain that if cigarettes were legally allowed to be sold singly as "loosies," far fewer people would ever have become addicted.
The minimum 20 pack seems perfectly calibrated to turn a curious smoker into an addict. Few people smoke a couple, then throw the pack away. No, they "clean their plates."
They do like the taxes and like the lottery they have the advantage of taxing only the willing. I am a binge smoker and I liked that in Mexico almost every corner store sold loosies. Because once I start I will smoke em till they’re done.
Ah, I can answer that, as I have used vapes to help quit a quarter pack a day habit. Tobacco flavored vapes are vile and repellant. Not going to happen. Menthol vapes are acceptable. Mint vapes are best but apparently only criminals would propose such a thing. Hey, little girl, want some candy?
Like many commenters, I fail to see how it is anyone else's business which flavor vape I prefer. The classic "let's save the children!" argument has been discredited by the research I have seen. Young people smoke much less than previous generations. They vaped for a bit while it was trendy. Now even that is dropping in spite of the fact that they immediately found workarounds for the "making an example" of Juul.
I don’t disagree in theory, but I’m skeptical that vaping fails the cost/benefit test. It *definitely* doesn’t while smoking’s still around, though.
That sounds nice, but outlawing things doesn't deprive addicts of them; addicts find a way to feed their addictions. Instead, it turns addicts into criminals (or, at least, patrons of criminals), causes prices to skyrocket (leading addicts to become criminals to feed their habit), fills our courts and prisons with people who engaged in consensual behavior, and increases the power and reach of the police. Prohibition has not worked well in this county, or anywhere else I'm aware of.
Stopping the vape industry from producing more does hurt existing addicts. They'll just switch to cigarettes, or drive long distances to get them, or get black-market products. That's exactly what I'd have done, certainly.
Also: nobody would pay such a high premium for a vape? My friend, exactly this happened in my state — and people died from improperly-made juice.
And what about the murder rate? Even if we accept your numbers, is it desirable to exchange deaths from voluntary (and, at least in many cases, desired) behavior for deaths due to criminal activity?
I dunno; I'm skeptical. It appears, on a cursory examination, that I cannot access more than the abstract there, but the graph of homicide rate decreasing for "selected cities" (and adjusted for some unclear measure of enforcement rather than the obvious markers of "Prohibition begins/ends"), seems — without being able to view the rationale — sort of like cherry-picking.
E.g., homicides as a whole rose during Prohibition, and fell after repeal; the effect is clearly visible, and significant. It was rising before Prohibition too, but a) less steeply and b) with fluctuation up and down — an effect not observed after Prohibition began; and it is possible, but quite a coincidence, that it would immediately fall after repeal if this was entirely due to some exogenous factor.
You can see some justification for looking at the effect in places wherein Prohibition was most strongly enforced; but we wouldn't expect effects on homicide rate to be entirely delimited thereby — e.g., consider displacement effects, smuggling and brewing routes and locations, organized crime moving more visible operations outside these cities and operating clandestinely inside them, etc., as well as mechanisms we aren't even thinking of. It seems at least arguable that the clearest view of effect on homicide would be presented by looking at the bigger picture.
Too, it's possible this paper is completely legit and unassailable, but I checked a few cities famous for Prohibition-era enforcement and results (Chicago, say), and *they* also don't show a decrease in homicide rate but the opposite.
As said, maybe this really does reverse if you have a reliable measure of enforcement, good arguments for why nothing outside these cities should be affected, and look at every city with strong enforcement all together; but... I'm skeptical.
Do you have a link to a write-up on this? I have never heard anyone argue that prohibition was net positive and I’m interested to learn more about this position.
Thanks! This seems to make two claims:
1. That prohibition decreased alcohol consumption. This seems obvious to me and I haven't encountered anyone arguing the opposite. Some benefits flow from this; for example a decrease in domestic violence (a bigger effect than I was previously aware of), and the obvious health benefits.
2. Prohibition decreased crime. The general argument I am familiar with against prohibition is that it caused a big increase in organized crime. The article argues that on net (including things like domestic abuse and other alcohol-related violence) crime actually decreased. This isn't really substantiated though. The study that is linked as supposedly supporting this actually says in its abstract "Alcohol prohibition decreased homicides for two years after enactment, but had no effect after two years." which sounds to me like it's compatible with "organized crime took a little while to ramp up, and then counteracted any benefits from prohibition". Still, based on my priors I'd have expected to see a more measurable negative effect here, so I think I need to update somewhat on this information.
Even if we do accept this result on its face (crime was shifted from domestic abuse and bar fights to organized crime, without changing the level), I think that still does not bode very well for Prohibition. You'd need to show a pretty big crime reduction to persuade me that this policy's benefits outweigh the costs of 1) harming users by putting them in jail or fining them, 2) reducing people's ability to enjoy their preferred activities (most alcohol users are not addicts/abusers), not to mention 3) creating the opportunity for selective enforcement of these laws by racist cops, thus harming marginalized communities.
If all you're getting net utility from is a health benefit, sure, that's a benefit in some sense, but you can't (or at least, I won't) mandate people be healthy at the expense of their liberty; the same logic would lead you to forcing overweight people onto daily treadmill sessions to get into shape, and I would be surprised if many people bite that bullet.
No it hasn’t. After WWII when they had tobacco rationing in Europe organized crime stepped in. People were literally killed over cigarettes.
Prohibition might not be worth it in this particular case, but the argument that bans don’t work proves far too much; banning things usually makes people less likely to do them. Maybe the decrease isn’t worth it, but I find it extremely unlikely that out of the uncountably infinite number of reals, we just happened to land on exactly the number 0 for this effect size.
> banning things usually makes people less likely to do them.
I accept that it might weed out the fringe element but only by hugely increasing the cost of those who persist,
and introducing all the new costs of policing the ban. We need a study, but I’m leaning away from your proposal.
Okay, let's narrow the claim: Bans don't work for *helping addicts.* The decrease in consumption is almost entirely in social or casual users. Addicts find a way to have their fix, and so bans simply make their lives worse.
Actually, no, I stand by my original claim: Prohibition doesn't work well. It benefits basically nobody except criminals and bureaucrats. The ones who stop consuming are those who were not being harmed by it, casual users who presumably saw some benefit in consuming it. Addicts, with few exceptions, do *not* stop consuming; instead they ruin their lives trying to find their next fix, engage in criminal activity to get what they need, switch to harder stuff since it's generally cheaper per unit of addiction-satisfaction, and risk being injured by impure product (sometimes produced by the government). Plus now "pushers" have the incentive to try to *create* addicts, as addicts are most of their business.
Add into this the additional societal knock-on detriments of massive increases in the police state, government intrusion into private affairs (awfully hard to uncover crimes nobody reports!), massive increases in crime, in government power, in government spending that has no effect, in caseloads in courts and in prison overcrowding…yes, I'm going to call prohibition a net negative, every time.
So no, the effect size isn't zero; it's *predictably negative,* if what you're measuring is social welfare.
Question: does prohibition work to reduce the number of new addicts? The mechanism I have in mind would be along the lines of "it's harder to get addicted to a substance when it's expensive and hard to get," but it's pure armchair speculation on my part.
That's a good question. I can find no data on addiction rates; probably not surprising, given that it would be very hard to measure.
It's possible it would, for just the reasons you mention. Set against that is the possibility that dealers (and others, like pimps) now have incentive to create addiction in order to maintain or increase their market (given that, unlike in a legal environment, addicts are likely to be the majority of their business).
Well okay but I don’t feel comfortable dictating to adults what they can get addicted to. And really, nicotine isn’t any worse than coffee. Nicotine gum is sold OTC and doesn’t even require ID. It’s the particulates from the tobacco that kills people. Tobacco is really rough on the body so if people want to vape I say let them.
As long as we ban coffee (addictive) while we are at it. Vapes do not appear to cause high levels of harm. It's not the addictive nicotine that is harmful, it is the products of cigarette combustion. Smoking coffee beans would probably be a bad idea, too.
I had worse physical effects from quitting coffee than quitting nicotine. It was *easier*, but definitely more unpleasant.
Let's make it so adults can't decide to drink coffee! It's for their own good! Everyone is a mewling child now! :-)
> Smoking coffee beans would probably be a bad idea, too.
Dammit -- now I want to try this! Why did you have to put this idea in my head?
(I'm only 2/3rd's joking. Maybe.)
Vaping is fairly harmless; being addicted to nicotine when you're vaping isn't unpleasant at all, in my experience.
It also seems weird to me to say "people might make a decision that causes them to experience something sort of unpleasant for a little bit, so we need to make even those who would be completely fine unable to make this decision." Surely there is a better way.
(I also really, really don't want to set a precedent that the legal system should start making choices for adults. Slippery slope and all that.)
Also also, nicotine has a small but measurable positive effect on lots of stuff: it's the only nootropic that actually appears to increase intelligence (e.g., caffeine increases *alertness,* as does nicotine, but *only* nicotine increases # of problems solved correctly on Raven's); it is protective against certain forms of cognitive decline; it is a mild stimulant; etc.
Being addicted is unpleasant if the thing you're addicted to is harmful, and expensive if it's heavily taxed or is illegal (or naturally expensive to produce).
The non-paternalistic policy would be to neither ban tobacco or vape, nor tax them exceptionally. The ideal paternalistic policy (optimizing for people's average health, regardless of their own preferences) is probably to ban or heavily restrict smoked tobacco products, but allow vaping with low taxes. Any benefit from banning vaping in reducing the total number of nicotine users is probably more than erased if it results in some people continuing smoking who would otherwise switch to vaping.
Leaded gasoline is a wholly different matter than nicotine (except perhaps under fully paternalistic assumptions, where hurting one's own health is regarded as bad as hurting a non-consenting party's health) because leaded gasoline hurts everyone, while nicotine only hurts its users (and to a small extent other consenting parties).
> Being addicted is (I am told) a very unpleasant and expensive thing;
I think it gets worse on both counts when you throw in a black market and criminal sanctions.
Agreed! One major reason I quit my mild smoking habit (still with difficulty) is that I just dislike being addicted to anything and craving it. Air and water I accept.
I think I tried smoking because I am very open to experience and curious. I respect that it takes strength to quit. It is great to quit!
Yet I so strongly agree that this decision is best when it comes from the individual, not imposed by government. I see the government's role as ensuring that accurate information is available to its citizens.
I am completely addicted to smoking. I feel like I was born with a Camel straight in my mouth. A victim of the James dean and Humphrey Bogart generation.
Is this true? Google tells me 37% of cigarettes are menthol-flavored.
You're right; "Hardly any" was an error and I'll edit the comment. The main thing is around 85% of vape products are flavored, so I suspect this would backfire by making vape products less appealing substitutes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/06/teen-vaping-cdc-fda-study/
Apparently economists have done the experiments to verify this, and concluded that a ban on flavored tobacco would increase cigarette consumption.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29807947/
Here's a probably terrible study saying the opposite - https://ldi.upenn.edu/our-work/research-updates/when-they-cant-buy-flavored-tobacco-kids-are-less-likely-to-smoke-or-vape/ - I've added a note of caution in the post and will try to have more of an opinion on this in time for the Open Thread.
Having read through, it's got some big problems. The study there only compares tobacco sales in a single city (San Francisco) before and after a ban on menthol cigarettes. However, because there's no comparison to other cities, it's essentially worthless; tobacco sales throughout the US dropped at this time, and I don't know how this compares.
The study I referred to was pretty close to the gold standard--it's an experiment that surveys smokers' preferences, then models their choices with and without a flavor ban. The statistics are great, which is honestly shocking to me, since it's the first time I've said this about an experiment in... ever.
It's worth noting that the FDA is already planning to ban flavored cigarettes and cigars, so the law will probably only end up affecting vapes:
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-proposes-rules-prohibiting-menthol-cigarettes-and-flavored-cigars-prevent-youth-initiation
Scott, your "note of caution" doesn't link to this chat thread (as it said it should), it links to the pubmed study.
Thanks, fixed.
I just want to say this about menthol cigarettes: black people use the word "menthol" and "cigarette" interchangably, there is no distinction, all cigarettes are menthol flavored.
This observation comes from spending 9 months in a halfway house with 2 or three black roommates. I even asked G why they only smoked menthols and he didn't even understand the question.
Sometimes the map is also the territory.
By "black people", do you mean "two or three black people"?
Closer to "every African American smoker I have met in the last ten years." When I ask, "So why do black folks all smoke menthols?", most just look either sheepish or puzzled, and say something like, "It's just a thing I guess."
For a while I was very curious about this and asked people like on subway platforms, "What's up with menthols?" So small sample but better that *some* behavioral studies.
For me the mystery is why it's ubiquitous yet nobody knows why or it never occurred to them.
Vaping is a lot less bad than cigarettes. Menthols are smoked mostly by blacks in my experience. In the Bay Area outside of Oakland their numbers aren’t great. To me it just seems like Karens running a nanny state.
I vote NO as strongly as I've ever voted for anything, although I'm not in California so this does nothing.
Still, it boggles my mind that Scott — an individual I *previously* held in high esteem (kidding, kidding! about the "previously" part, I mean) — would even consider this. In what world is it a good idea to make a healthier product (one that personally probably saved my life) a worse alternative AND encourage the use of blanket bans from above to regulate the life choices of adults?!
I don't think he grasped that this was about vaping. He only talks about cigarettes in the post. As the FDA has proposed banning menthol cigarettes, I assume that's what he thought was going on here.
I admit that I was extremely surprised about Scott's choice, in this case especially, too. Overall, it did seem as though his immersion in Californian values is normalizing authoritarianism more than he realizes.
I lived in and loved California for most of my adult life. One does not realize how f'ed up that beautiful, productive state is, in many ways, until one leaves the groupthink.
I can walk to California from Oregon along the coast now, and find it incomprehensible that some of my friends live on the CA side of that border. The taxes. The stifling, micromanaging regulation. (The CA side features crime, meth and vagrancy, even in that remote and beautiful outpost.)
Prediction: Only in California will it even seem plausible that Newsom has a prayer as Presidential candidate.
I am pretty sure that the focus on flavored vaping products is just a flag of convenience for the real goal of using the FDA to outlaw existing companies' competitors.
I have done some work for a vaping company here in Los Angeles. My boss is personal friends with the owner(s) and we helped install the clean room for their packaging line.
Whatever you think of vaping, playing rope-a-dope with business owners whose whole investment can be wiped out by government caprice backed by lobbyists, is a really crappy thing. See also: california marijuana legalization.
People wonder why politics is so intense now: it's because so much is at stake, the govt now is the biggest player in almost every facet of society and the economy.
Thank you for pointing this out with a concise and clear explanation. Voters in California do not realize that the direct initiative process is gamed like this and believe that they are making actual policy choices about discrete things. It's a shame because California is such a heavyweight in the nation's marketplace that when they do something, it creates quite the downward pressure for other states to follow along.
Yes. It was terrible how the government targeted Juul, made an example of them.
I would never have guessed in the late 20th century that the powerful lesson of authoritarian command economies would just swirl down the drain, forgotten.
You wouldn’t have? Even with every university teaching that free markets bring pain and suffering to populations and at the very least we need mixed markets, but really command economies can work now and are great because algorithms and AI? Because they’ve been doing that worse and worse for over half a century and it’s clearly had an effect.
All of the people who know better are busy. All of the parasites spend all of their time spending our money and teaching their bullshit, while infesting every institution with a modicum of power (and now the multinationals). Say thanks to the bankers, who funded Marxists for race & gender agitation (to marginalize the Occupy stuff they were actually scared of).
Well, yes, that is what has happened. I started worrying about it in the 21st century though there were hints with political correctness in the late 20th.
There are a lot of parasites. We have such a productive society that we have been able to carry them, but they may be getting strong enough to kill the host. I wish these folks would turn their fevered energies toward creative pursuits, though sometimes I do feel inundated with bad art.
It will be very interesting to see how the widely misunderstood and misrepresented Elon Musk does with Twitter.
It’s nightmare Earth. I could go on and on. We’ll get a good shellacking from inflation (not even close to done), lose a lot of people to death and poverty, and possibly have to fight a world war, but it’ll (the country) probably truck on in some form.
I’m not sure I trust Elon yet. He feels like the the rest of the dialectic, but we’ll see.
Yeah I vape and the ban is annoying as hell. It doesn't actually work at all, you just have to go to the head shop and talk to the guy for like 10 minutes until he pulls out the secret box under the counter where he has flavored vape juice. OH, and you can also still buy flavored nicotine free juice and unflavored nicotine solution and mix them, which is a pain in the ass. All in all, as always, prohibition is stupid and creates stupid work arounds which just make everything more annoying.