As if not unpopular enough, the Biden administration has announced plans to double down on the unwinnable drug war. This time, the alphabet boys are coming for the vapes.
“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued marketing denial orders (MDOs) to JUUL Labs Inc. for all of their products currently marketed in the United States. As a result, the company must stop selling and distributing these products. In addition, those currently on the U.S. market must be removed, or risk enforcement action.”
At the same time, the Biden administration is also proposing a rule to cap the maximum allowable nicotine levels in cigarettes.
Last year, the FDA moved to ban menthol cigarettes on grounds that they’re purportedly racist and homophobic. According to acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock explains:
“The FDA will help significantly reduce youth initiation, increase the chances of smoking cessation among current smokers, and address health disparities experienced by communities of color, low-income populations, and LGBTQ+ individuals, all of whom are far more likely to use these tobacco products.”
No flavors, no mint, no good hard tobacco kick – no fun for you. If you’re lucky, you’ll get diluted, gray government nicotine – or, else, nothing at all.
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The alleged motivations of the FDA/Biden administration bureaucrats are highly suspect. They’re on the job protecting your teenager from strawberry-flavored nicotine products. But, simultaneously, they’re more than willing to inject 6-month-olds with unnecessary and experimental gene therapies that don’t protect them from a virus that posed very little risk to them in the first place.
They’ll also shovel Ritalin and Adderall (an amphetamine salt which is, for all intents and purposes, essentially legal meth) down your kid’s throat so they’ll sit still in their public school library during drag queen story hour.
But they’ll protect them from the e-cigarettes that are already illegal to sell to minors.
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Even if an undeserved olive branch were extended, and the government’s motivations were assumed to be pure as the driven snow, the infantilization of the public is an insult to individual dignity.
If liberty means anything, it’s that adults are at liberty to take risks with their own health, safety, and even their lives. Protecting people from themselves – as a mother removes a AAA battery from her baby’s mouth – is not within the government’s purview.
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Moreover, even if the government’s pure intentions and right to assume moral authority over what adults are allowed to ingest, what does the historical record say about the government’s ability to regulate banned substances?
Drug arrests are the #1 driver of mass incarceration in the Land of the Free, which is itself the #1 incarcerator in the world both in raw numbers and on a per capita basis.
But, drug warriors will then argue, mass incarceration – which costs tens of thousands of dollars per prisoner per year, incubates a criminal subculture, and robs non-violent drug users of their future – might be a steep cost, but maybe it’s worthwhile if it produces less drug use. Right?
Source: Reason
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One of those lines is not like the other. Trillions of dollars later, drug addiction rates are roughly the same as 40 years ago.
In addition to failing to curb the appetite for the banned substance, prohibition also inevitably births new opportunities for entrepreneurs to operate outside of law in underground black markets:
“Though the advocates of prohibition had argued that banning sales of alcohol would reduce criminal activity, it in fact directly contributed to the rise of organized crime. After the Eighteenth Amendment went into force, bootlegging, or the illegal distillation and sale of alcoholic beverages, became widespread.”
Supply and demand always wins out. When an economic sector is pushed underground, all it produces, without exception, is more violence, more organized crime, dangerous/substandard products, and more destroyed futures.
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America can’t win any other war despite massive resources. Why would the drug war be any different?
The US government spent at least $2.3 trillion (of accounted money – the true figure is probably higher) on the Afghanistan war, only to abandon the project twenty years later, leaving behind a sea of sophisticated military equipment in the hands of the Taliban.
The US government spent another $2+ trillion in Iraq (based on Deep State lies), only to abandon that project as well, destabilizing the entire country, plunging it into bloody civil war, and handing over a huge swathe of territory to a violent theocratic terror state.
Which federal employee was ever held accountable for their monumental failure – despite obscene funding? Dick Cheney, Bush, and the neoconservative war criminals responsible for the Iraq War walk free. The foremost drug war proponent in the Senate, Joe Biden, was awarded with the presidency.
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If the drug war were a private enterprise, investors and other stakeholders would have demanded proof of some modicum of progress. Without proof of efficacy, they would never continue dumping trillions into the project.
But in America, in 2022, the American public (the theoretical stakeholder and funder) has no say in public policy. This is not rhetorical hyperbole but rather documented statistical reality.
It doesn’t matter how ineffective the government intervention is – whether the stated aim is to depose a foreign dictator or control domestic drug consumption.
In large part, the looting of the public treasury is the point. Excess, escalating funding as a reward for continued failure by the executors of the drug war is the feature, not the bug.
The inevitable result of the tobacco ban will be more of the same: your tax money will be squandered in a failed attempt to dissuade you from accessing desired goods by restricting your liberties – all in the service of ulterior motives.
What the ban is guaranteed to achieve is a more self-perpetuating bureaucracy that serves no one’s interests but its own.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose and/or Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter.
Ryan DeLarme is an American journalist navigating a labyrinth of political corruption, overreaching corporate influence, a burgeoning censorship-industrial complex, compromised media, and the planned destruction of our constitutional republic. He writes for Badlands Media and is also a Host and Founder at Vigilant News. Additionally, his writing has been featured in American Thinker, the Post-Liberal, Winter Watch, Underground Newswire, and Stillness in the Storm. He’s also writes for alt-media streaming platforms Dauntless Dialogue and Rise.tv. Ryan enjoys gardening, kung fu, creative writing and fighting to SAVE AMERICA
I have wondered for a long time about how the PTB have tried to force people off cigarettes, even though it was going to hurt states that have come to depend so heavily on the payout from the Big Tobacco settlement agreement.
Enter vaping. So many people quit the cigs and the many carcinogens from burning of tobacco and the resulting, cleared out lungs of the masses. I am among them as a 35 year smoker, turned 5 year vaper.
Now they have been pushing even HARDER against vaping than they did against cigarettes. I struggled to see their logic.
It really didn’t help that some capitalists, bought out by big tobacco, decided to create a USB sized pod system with highly jacked up levels of nicotine to entice the teens with. There’s always a party pooper !! (Someone willing to phuck it up for everyone else). Then there was the series of unfortunate events involving nefarious peddlers of THC pods that, like most skeezy dealers would do, use questionable substances to stretch out their profits. What I found most interesting is how all these people effected with the “Mysterious Lung Issue” all clamed it was from vaping NICOTINE E-JUICE, when it clearly wasn’t. It is almost as though they were all coerced to tow the line and parrot someone’s narrative, … But Why? I mean a lot of the locations of these instances were in states that had legalized Marijuana, so what was the incentive to LIE about using THC pods in their idiotic USB sized pod devices? Hmmm Makes one wonder does it not?
Things died down a bit after the TRUTH finally got through the MSM barrage of bullshit lies and it was all then summarily memory holed, aside from occasionally being cited in some BS propaganda piece, as they held it up as some shining example of why they need to pass more bans on vaping. (We’ll pretend their parents weren’t buying the vape systems FOR their own kids).
Now they are full on attacking Nicotine in general. Not just mandating the reduction of Nic in cigarettes, but also going after E-juices and plain old Nicotine concentrate that DIY ejuice vapers need to make their own juices. (Don’t even get me started on flavor bans, that is dumb AF !!)
The recent ban on JUUL, I found hilarious, because I disagreed with their existence from the onset. THey are an enabler for getting teens and even younger kids highly addicted to the very high levels of nicotine used in them. NO ONE needs 65mg per ml !! I would be completely fine if ALL closed pod systems, disposable vapes, even internal battery vapes and pod-mods in general, along with Disposable tanks used on conventional vape mods, were all Banned and left in the landfill once and for all.. Sorry, NOT SORRY !!
If someone can afford to buy a $65 JUUL system for their kids, then they can also get a $30 dual battery mod kit and a $10 battery charger and a set of four 18650’s for the same damn money !! THAT would eliminate ALL of their grievances, wouldn’t it ? THe vape mods would be larger and easier to spot, making In-School vaping a thing of the past, so kiddies protected, Shazaam !! And the rest of the drown ups in the room can be left along to vape By Choice to avoid going back to cigarettes. After all, there are plenty of studies that show there are actually benefits to Nicotine, just as there are to caffeine !! As with anything, too much of a good thing, … is a bad thing, so moderation is always key.
But I wondered, … why the assault on Nicotine? They achieved a large level of success getting people to switch from cigs to alternatives, … why attack the alternatives ?
After researching for a solid two years on the coronavirus, the plandemic, and the quaxxines, I discovered that the coof goes back years and is Nothing New. I also discovered that the covid receptors in the brain, … are ALSO the exact same one’s used by, … NICOTINE !!! Studies showed that Smokers And Vapers were far less likely to die from, be hospitalized with, or even contract Covid. (Can We Say Light Bulb ???)
Chew on that, .. let it stew a bit, … Then RESEARCH IT !!
The view of the Big Picture looks much different with a 30,000 foot view and it seems quite dastardly indeed. I have not been vaccinated, I refused to wear masks, I have NOT had covid and I refuse now to quit vaping.
Sorry if my writing seems out of rhythm or scattered, it was hammered out on the fly while anxious to get back to researching other topics.