DAVID MARCUS: Biden's war on cigarettes belongs on the ash heap
Columnist and cigarette smoker David Marcus writes that a Biden administration proposal to lower the levels of nicotine in cigarettes is a de facto ban, and ill-advised.
In the final days of his failed presidency, President Joe Biden’s Food and Drug Administration is moving ahead with a preposterous and dangerous plan to all but ban the sale of cigarettes in the United States. It must never be allowed to happen.
The harebrained scheme from the geniuses in Washington is to reduce the level of nicotine in a cigarette to an almost imperceptible level, rendering the product all but useless. Mind you, nicotine itself is mainly harmless, but our bureaucratic betters find the cigarette’s deadly delivery of it too dangerous, even with high taxes and warning labels. So, like so many illiberal pencil pushers before them, their plan is simply to ban it.
There are four basic reasons why this regulatory stomping out of cigarettes, a product associated with our nation for centuries, by the way, must never come to fruition.
First and most importantly, my choice to smoke and that of over 25 million regular adult American smokers is none of Biden’s damn business. We all know it's dangerous. It's not 1950, and celebrities aren’t doing TV ads about which brand of smokes four out of five doctors prefer.
Sure, it is a choice with negative health consequences. But so is obesity, drinking alcohol, or failing to exercise.
The difference is that smokers, for reasons I’ve never completely understood, are treated as moral reprobates. Nobody would ever walk up to a fat guy eating a Big Mac and say, "What’s wrong with you buddy? Don’t you see what you’re doing to yourself?" This happens regularly to smokers in public.
But even if one is a narrow-minded authoritarian who thinks the state should stand in the way of my after-dinner smoke, beware of unintended consequences. Which brings us to reason No. 2, the obvious invitation to a black market that this policy creates.
The economic opportunity here for criminal organizations is simply massive, and in fact tobacco smuggling is already a major issue in our country. Thankfully, so far, it has only been a domestic one.
Typically, smugglers will fill trucks with cheap cigs from low-tax states like Virginia or Indiana, and sell them at a discount in high-tax states like New York or Illinois. In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, three stores within five blocks of my home sold packs of cigarettes for $9 instead of the legal price of $15, and they always bore Virginia tax stamps.
This de facto nationwide ban on cigarettes would, for the very first time, introduce international smugglers into the cigarette market in the United States, and that is the third reason this FDA plan is so entirely bonkers.
"Biden's ban is a gift with a bow and balloons to organized crime cartels with it, whether it's cartels, Chinese organized crime, or Russian mafia. "It's going to keep America smoking, and it's going to make the streets more violent," Rich Marianos, former assistant director of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the current chair of the Tobacco Law Enforcement Network, told Fox News Digital of the proposal.
This is an obvious truth that we have known since Prohibition a century ago. What makes this iteration so much worse is that now Mexican cartels will be smuggling in foreign cigarettes, many of them Chinese counterfeits, all while making fentanyl and human trafficking harder to contain on the border.
The fourth and final reason why cigarette smokers are infuriated by this proposed violation of their rights is that it seems like every 10 minutes a new marijuana dispensary is opening on some corner in America.
All of our nation’s great cities smell like a Grateful Dead concert or Snoop Dog’s den, and I mean at 9 in the morning.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINION
Isn’t it interesting that the government champions the smoking of marijuana, which makes people lazy and compliant, but rages against the smoking of tobacco, or even nicotine, which I believe has has sharpened the senses of Americans since Sir Walter Raleigh first took a puff?
Future President Dwight D. Eisenhower smoked four packs of cigarettes a day while leading American troops during World War II. Thank God he wasn’t blazing blunts instead.
It seems very likely that the FDA had good intentions when framing this debacle of a plan, but hasn’t that been the problem with the entire Biden administration? Biden's good intentions, once carried out, never fail to make things worse, from the economy, to the border, to Afghanistan, and now tobacco.
As smokers, we will pay through the nose in taxes, we will swallow the snide remarks about smelling like smoke, we will be driven onto the frozen streets, and on those corners by bars or restaurants we will be happy as we share our cigarettes along with the stories of our lives.
The government will never take that away from smokers, and hopefully, as saner and more level heads move in to lead President-elect Donald Trump’s FDA it will never even try.
