NY governor 'test markets' ban on cigarette sales

Governor Kathy Hochul's administration is gauging support for a ban on cigarette sales in New York state. 

NY Gov. Kathy Hochul ‘test-marketing’ a ban on all tobacco sales | New York Post - Rich Calder:

April 22, 2023 - "The ...  Hochul administration is quietly trying to fire up support for a complete ban on the sale of tobacco products in New York, The Post has learned. The state Health Department commissioned a new survey aimed at gauging support for an all-out prohibition — despite Gov. Hochul’s failure to secure support from state legislators to include a ban on menthol cigarettes and other flavored tobacco products in the yet-to-be-approved state budget.

"'What is your opinion about a policy that would end the sale of all tobacco products in New York within 10 years?' were among the questions asked last week in the 'New York Local Opinion Leaders Survey,' examined by the Post. Another asks: 'What is your opinion about a policy that would ban the sale of all tobacco products to those born after a certain date? For example, those born after the year 2010 or later would never be sold tobacco.'

"The poll also solicited input on whether there’s backing for other tobacco-related measures, including capping the number of retailers who can sell 'products in a community' and prohibiting its sales near schools.

"The survey, conducted by nonprofit research organization RTI International, was distributed to 'community leaders' statewide, including 'county legislators and county directors of public health,' according to an April 13 memo to prospective participants....

"Hochul’s own budget proposal noted banning flavored tobacco products [see video] would cost the state $133 million in lost tax revenues this fiscal year, which began April 1.

"It’s obvious the Health Department is 'test marketing' potential new smoking policies, and such surveys are not typically funded by taxpayers but through private companies, think tanks, or political campaigns, an Albany insider said.... 'And I’ve never seen anything like this where [the state] uses this kind of focus grouping, alliance building, momentum building.'

"Kent Sopris, president of the New York Association of Convenience Store Owners, predicted a ban would put many stores out of business but wouldn’t stop tobacco use because smokers would just buy cigarettes out of state, online, or illegally on the black market. 'I think it would be bizarre for the state to create another category of illegal product that could lead to more conflict between law enforcement and the community,' he said."  

Read more: https://nypost.com/2023/04/22/kathy-hochul-test-marketing-ban-on-all-ny-tobacco-sales/

"The possible banning of menthol cigarettes in New York," WGRZ-TV, February 16, 2023:

Biden plan to ban menthol cigarettes unpopular

The GOP’s Newest Midterm Issue: Menthols? | Washington Free Beacon - Collin Anderson: 

April 25, 2022 - "With voters across the country already sour on Joe Biden's handling of immigration, foreign policy, and the economy, Republicans have identified another issue to rally midterm voters against Democrats: the president's proposed menthol cigarette ban. 

"According to an April Echelon Insights poll obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, swing-state voters in Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina widely disapprove of the ... ban. Fifty-two percent of Georgia and Nevada voters and 50 percent of North Carolina voters say the administration should keep menthols legal. Just 28, 31, and 30 percent of voters, meanwhile, want to ban the flavored cigarettes in Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina, respectively.... 

""Forty-nine percent of Nevada voters — including 60 percent of Hispanic voters in the state — would be less likely to support a candidate who 'vocally supported' a menthol ban, the poll shows. Just 21 percent of Silver State voters would be more likely to back a menthol ban supporter, according to the poll.

"The Biden administration announced its intention to ban menthol cigarettes on April 29, 2021.... Roughly one year later, however, the proposed ban is still in limbo, and the Biden administration's delay has not helped sell the move to voters ... nearly 90 percent of voters in Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina believe the administration should not 'spend their time banning menthol cigarettes,' the Echelon poll shows. As a result, more than 60 percent of voters in the three states believe Biden should take a pause on the ban....

"According to the Echelon poll, roughly two-thirds of Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina voters oppose the ban because they feel it would be ineffective. More than 60 percent of voters in the three states, meanwhile, believe the ban would 'push the product out of legitimate stores and onto street corners where gangs and violent criminals sell and generate profit for organized crime.' That number includes 77 percent of Hispanic voters in Nevada, 60 percent of Democratic voters in Georgia, and 64 percent of independent voters in North Carolina.

"The American Civil Liberties Union voiced a similar concern last year, calling the ban a 'policy disaster waiting to happen' because it would create 'large, underground illegal markets' and cause 'a massive law enforcement problem for states, counties, and cities.' Earlier this month, ... Democratic power broker Al Sharpton penned a letter to the Biden administration that said a menthol ban would 'expose consumers to dangerous contraband cigarettes' and 'promote criminal activity.'"

Read more: https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/the-gops-newest-midterm-issue-menthols/amp/

The "terrible science" behind smoking bans

We Used Terrible Science to Justify Smoking Bans - Jacob Grier, Slate:

February 13, 2017 - "In the early 2000's, as jurisdictions across the country fought over expanding smoking bans to bars and restaurants, anti-smoking advocates seized on ... research showing that secondhand smoke exposure can affect coronary functions to promote fear of secondhand smoke..... A decade later ... better studies with much larger sample sizes have found little to no correlation between smoking bans and short-term incidence of heart attacks....

"England, which implemented a smoking ban nationwide, presented the first opportunity to study the matter on a national scale. Researchers there credited the ban with a heart attack reduction of just over 2 percent nationwide.

"A 2008 study covering the entire country of New Zealand — a population smaller than England’s, but bigger than the American towns previously studied — found no significant effects on heart attacks or unstable angina in the year following implementation of a smoking ban; hospitalizations for the former had actually increased....

"A clever study led by researchers at RAND Corp. in 2010 tested the possibility that the large reductions identified in small communities were due to chance.... The conclusion of the study was blunt: 'We find no evidence that legislated U.S. smoking bans were associated with short-term reductions in hospital admissions for acute myocardial infarction or other diseases in the elderly, children or working age adults'

"A 2012 study of six American states that had instituted smoking bans came to a similar conclusion. So did a 2014 study, which is notable for being co-authored by some of the same researchers who had previously published papers suggesting that the Colorado towns of Pueblo and Greeley had experienced reduced rates of heart attacks after implementing smoking bans. When Colorado enacted a statewide ban, the authors had an opportunity to see if their earlier results could be duplicated across the larger population of nearly 5 million people. No effect appeared. As an additional test, they re-examined the data excluding 11 jurisdictions that had already implemented comprehensive smoking bans: The statewide ban still showed no effect....

"Rates of heart attack are not the only possible negative of secondhand smoke exposure.... There are also potential impacts on respiratory health, and of course lung cancer....

"'No clear link between passive smoking and lung cancer,' read a 2013 headline in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, hardly a pro-tobacco publication. That was a report on a cohort study tracking 76,000 women that failed to detect a link between the disease and secondhand smoke. The finding comports with existing literature suggesting that the effect is borderline and concentrated on long-term, high levels of exposure....

"There were good reasons from the beginning to doubt that smoking bans could really deliver the promised results, but anti-smoking advocacy groups eagerly embraced alarmism to shape public perception. Today’s tobacco control movement is guided by ideology as much as it is by science, prone to hyping politically convenient studies regardless of their merit and ostracizing detractors.

"This has important implications for journalism. As health journalists take on topics such as outdoor smoking bans, discrimination against smokers in employment or adoption, and the ever-evolving regulation of e-cigarettes, they should consider that however well-intentioned the aims of the tobacco control movement are, its willingness to sacrifice the means of good science to the end of restricting behavior calls for skeptical scrutiny."

Read more: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2017/02/secondhand_smoke_isn_t_as_bad_as_we_thought.html
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As smoking drops, FDA declares war on vaping

Today's Teens Say No to Drugs and Tobacco, Yes to Vaping | Generation Opportunity - Brittany Hunter:

December 12, 2016 - "According to a recent report released by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ... annual Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) fewer teens are having sex and using drugs or alcohol..... Even more shocking is the declining number of teenagers who say they smoke cigarettes.... [I]n 1991, 27.5 percent of the teens surveyed said they considered themselves smokers. In the latest report, only 10.8 percent of teenagers polled said they would label themselves as smokers.

"Though there are potentially several reasons for this decline, another finding in the report suggests that one of the biggest factor’s involved is the rise of e-cigarettes. Though this is the first YRBSS report that includes any data on teens and their use of vaping devices, 44.9 percent of the teenagers surveyed said they have used a vaping device....

"Recently, the FDA has passed new regulations which classify e-liquid, the substance used in vape devices, as a tobacco product. These new regulations require that each vaping device be put through a “Pre-Market Tobacco Applications” (PMTA) process before it can be sold on the market.... For each separate device needing approval, it will take the FDA upwards of 1,700 hours and cost the manufacturer millions of dollars.

"Continuing its war on the vaping industry, the Department of Health and Human Services just launched a campaign to persuade teens and young adults to 'just say no' to vaping. The campaign’s website claims that since nicotine is found in tobacco products, vaping still comes with the same risks as tobacco.... Even though there have been many studies which have shown e-cigarettes to be a healthier option than cigarette use, especially considering that e-liquid contains absolutely no tobacco, the federal government insists this is not the case and has even prohibited vaping devices from listing the health benefits of vaping on their product’s packaging.....

"According to the extensive research done by Britain’s Royal College of Physicians, using vaping devices instead of traditional cigarettes will, 'prevent almost all of the harm from smoking'.... Britain’s Royal College of Physicians was one of the first organizations to find the link between lung cancer and smoking cigarettes, a finding that the United States government denied until two years after....

"Though many opponents of the vaping industry have insisted that e-cigarettes will serve as a 'gateway to smoking,' as the latest YRBBS report has shown, teen smoking is down dramatically while at the same time, the use of vaping is up. If anything, the rise of vaping is actually doing more to deter teens from smoking.

"The same is true for the adult population. From 2005 to 2014, the adult smoking rate decreased from 20.9 percent to 16.9 percent, which also happens to coincides with the rise of vape use. This dramatic shift from cigarettes use to vaping should be celebrated, especially since fewer and fewer teens are finding themselves addicted to cigarettes."

Read more: http://blog.generationopportunity.org/articles/2016/12/12/todays-teens-say-no-to-drugs-and-tobacco-yes-to-vaping/
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Why Eric Garner was innocent

Eric Garner: 100% innocent under libertarian law - Ilana Mercer, Return to Reason, World Net Daily:

December 11, 2014 - "Eric Garner was doing nothing naturally illicit when he was tackled and placed in the chokehold that killed him. It can be argued, if anything, that Garner was being entrepreneurial. He had been trading untaxed cigarettes in defiance of the state’s 'slave patrol' and 'Comrade' Andrew Cuomo’s 'Cigarette Strike Force'.... Had Garner’s naturally licit trade not been criminalized by today’s Tammany Hall, he’d be alive today....

"Garner was selling his own cigarettes. The 'law' he violated was one that violated Garner’s individual, natural right to dispose of his own property – 'loosies' – at will.

"In libertarian law, Garner is thus 100 percent innocent, for the good libertarian abides by the axiom of non-aggression. When enforcers of the shakedown syndicate came around to bust him, Garner raised his voice, gestured and turned to walk away from his harassers. He did not aggress against or hurt any of the goons.

"To plagiarize myself in 'Tasers ‘R’ Us,' 'Liberty is a simple thing. It’s the unassailable right to shout, flail your arms, even verbally provoke a politician [or policeman] unmolested. Tyranny is when those small things can get you assaulted, incarcerated, injured, even killed.'

"Again: Garner had obeyed the libertarian, natural law absolutely. He was trading peacefully. In the same spirit, he turned to walk away from a confrontation. Befitting this pacific pattern, Garner had broken up a street fight prior to his murder....

"The government has a monopoly over making and enforcing law – it decides what is legal and what isn’t. Thus it behooves thinking people to question the monopolist and his laws. After all, cautioned the great Southern constitutional scholar James McClellan, 'What is legally just, may not be what is naturally just'....

"Unlike the positive law, which is state-created; natural law [is] not enacted. Rather, it is a higher law – a system of ethics – knowable through reason, revelation and experience. 'By natural law,' propounded McClellan in Liberty, Order, And Justice, 'we mean those principles which are inherent in man’s nature as a rational, moral, and social being, and which cannot be casually ignored.'

"Eric Garner was on 'public' property. Had he been trespassing on private property, the proprietor would have been in his right to remove him. However, Garner was not violating anyone’s rights or harming anyone by standing on a street corner and peddling his wares – that is unless the malevolent competition that sicced the cops on him has a property right in their prior profits. They don’t."

Read more: http://www.wnd.com/2014/12/eric-garner-100-innocent-under-libertarian-law/
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Reduce government, reduce police brutality

Reduce government, reduce police brutality | Anthony Furey | Opinion | Winnipeg Sun:

December 5, 2014 - "The first few times I watched the Eric Garner video it was the end part that I focused on. How can one not? That’s the point where Garner is placed in the chokehold by the police officer. He later died from the complications of that hold.... But after a few views I started to really hear what was happening at the beginning of the video, when a couple officers surround Garner.

"He appears genuinely frustrated. At his wits’ end. He says he wasn’t doing anything. He certainly doesn’t look like he was doing anything.

"'Every time you see me you want to mess with me,' he cries out.

"It’s important to remember what they’re bickering about: Whether or not Garner was peddling contraband cigarettes on the sidewalk. Really?! And this seemingly irrelevant disagreement ends in a man’s death?

"This opening scene reminds me of the story of Mohamed Bouazizi, the 26-year-old Tunisian fruit vendor who sparked the Arab Spring.

"He’d been harassed for years by local officials over petty regulatory issues that seemed to change daily.... One day the harassment got too much and he set fire to himself in protest....

"In Garner’s case, he was killed because the government was protecting both the cigarette brands it favours and the massive taxes it collects from smokes....

"Whatever your thoughts about how police brutality and racism play into the story, this altercation would have never happened in the first place were it not for the cigarette laws....

"So here’s where we’re at: The government has made a product unaffordable for low-income people. Those people in turn buy from the black market. This creates a criminal underworld and also reduces government tax revenues. The government then uses tax dollars to employ police resources to crack down on this. This is a perverse circle.

"The problem with the Garner case at every single step is a lack of proportionality. Too many stupid laws. Too many cops on the scene. Too many instances of harassing low-income people who are just doing what they need to do to make it through the day."

Read more: http://www.winnipegsun.com/2014/12/05/reduce-government-reduce-police-brutality
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Garner's death shows need for an American Spring

Eric Garner could spark American Spring: Column - David Boaz, USA Today:

December 5, 2014 - "The violent death of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia set off the Arab Spring. Could the killing of Eric Garner lead to a springtime of police reform – and regulatory reform – in the United States?

"Bouazizi was a street vendor, selling fruits and vegetables from a cart. He aspired to buy a pickup truck to expand his business. But, as property rights reformer Hernando de Soto wrote in the Wall Street Journal, ...  'government inspectors made Bouazizi's life miserable, shaking him down for bribes when he couldn't produce licenses that were (by design) virtually unobtainable. He tired of the abuse. The day he killed himself, inspectors had come to seize his merchandise and his electronic scale for weighing goods. A tussle began. One municipal inspector, a woman, slapped Bouazizi across the face. That humiliation, along with the confiscation of just $225 worth of his wares, is said to have led the young man to take his own life'....

"Garner's story is surprisingly similar. He had been arrested more than 30 times, for such crimes as marijuana possession and driving without a license, and most often for selling untaxed cigarettes on the street.

"Why sell untaxed cigarettes? Because New York has the country's highest cigarette taxes, $4.35 a pack for New York State and another $1.50 for the city. A pack of cigarettes can cost $14 in New York City, two and a half times as much as in Virginia . So a lively black market has sprung up.... A 2013 study by the Mackinac Center found, not surprisingly, that New York had the highest rate of cigarette smuggling, totaling 61% of the state's cigarette sales.

"Eric Garner was a small part of that black market. He sold individual cigarettes – 'loosies' – on the street to people without much money. It's easier for police to apprehend street sellers than interstate organized crime. Thus his long record of arrests. And the more laws we pass, the more chances there are for people to run afoul of the police. Especially when we outlaw peaceful activities, such as smoking marijuana, selling untaxed cigarettes or feeding the homeless.

"Eric Garner's last words could have been said by Mohamed Bouazizi. We've all heard that his very last words were 'I can't breathe,' which he told the police eight times. But before his encounter with the police reached that final, fatal point, cellphones captured his frustration:

"'Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I'm tired of it. It stops today. … Because every time you see me, you want to harass me. You want to stop me [garbled] selling cigarettes. I'm minding my business, officer, I'm minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone.'" 

Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/12/05/eric-garrner-protests-reform--cigarette-taxes-column/19948609/
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