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Biden administration dropping plan to ban menthol cigarettes: Report
(www.thehill.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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Or y’know ban the sale and don’t criminalise it?
Funny how a lot of countries are starting to crack down on cigarettes and the health issues they pose without mass locking people up.
Even if you do that you risk creating a black market that will be served by organised crime. In Australia it's an issue where tobacco shops get firebombed, and that's with just expensive cigarettes, not outright bans.
Here in Canada, we have a loophole in the law where indigenous have the right to use tobacco without taxation due to tradition. Which is totally fair - but it also applies to modern mass produced cigarettes for some reason.
As a result of ever increasing taxes on tobacco, I would reckon that at this point 80% of cigarettes smoked in my community have been smuggled off of a reserve. The black market is booming with "Rez smokes" selling for $5-10 a pack while legal cigs go for ~$30.
The federal government recently introduced a regulation mandating a health warning printed on every cigarette. Most agree it's a transparent attempt for the police to spot an illegal smoke in your hand, as Rez smokes don't have warnings on them. They are losing a ton of revenue to the black market, and are trying to crack down with heavy fines for even possessing a pack off of a reserve.
I definitely agree with taxing cigarettes more, but if you get to the stage where organised crime starts doing arbitrage, you've gone too far.
But then you're hurting the corpos bottom line. And thats the one real law.