Oh no, I don't expect banning cigarettes overall for example to do anything. But I don't think that a huge black market will appear for menthol cigarettes (at least to any degree that matters). The main reason they exist is to be more addictive, which only really helps if they are just as accessible as normal cigarettes. If they're significantly harder to access, then it wouldn't really help that much, because anyone willing to go that far out of their way for menthols would likely just go for normal cigarettes if that option wasn't available.
And as long as the penalties are just for the sale rather than the use or possession, I wouldn't think very many people would be thrown in jail over this, then again we do apparently have summary execution as the penalty for selling loose cigarettes, so...
And I might as well add that quite a bit of my perspective is informed by the long history of smokers in my family. Losing someone from smoking-related health issues tends to make you quite a bit more supportive of these types of measures. I see it very much like the opiod crisis in a lot of ways -- not only in root causes, but if you see what either of these things do to people, you don't think strictly about harm reduction, you think about how it needs to end, because I don't want anyone to go through that.
I'm someone who's been severely impacted by the opioid crisis, and I have a lot of friends who have been impacted as well. In my experience, this type of prohibition only ever makes things worse for the people addicted at the bottom. There will be a black market for this, and people are going to get killed when police use it as an excuse to terrorize poor and BIPOC communities even further. As you said, Eric Garner was murdered by police after they targeted him for selling unlicensed cigarettes. This is the end result of these type of laws.
I understand you've been hurt by piece of shit cigarette companies, and the way we deal with those companies is by going after them directly. Same goes for pharma companies in the case of opioids. We need to force them to pay restitutions and shut them down. Simple prohibition will hurt the people at the bottom exponentially worse than the people at the top. If this were not the case, then Biden would not be moving to ban this stuff at all.
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Oh no, I don't expect banning cigarettes overall for example to do anything. But I don't think that a huge black market will appear for menthol cigarettes (at least to any degree that matters). The main reason they exist is to be more addictive, which only really helps if they are just as accessible as normal cigarettes. If they're significantly harder to access, then it wouldn't really help that much, because anyone willing to go that far out of their way for menthols would likely just go for normal cigarettes if that option wasn't available.
And as long as the penalties are just for the sale rather than the use or possession, I wouldn't think very many people would be thrown in jail over this, then again we do apparently have summary execution as the penalty for selling loose cigarettes, so...
And I might as well add that quite a bit of my perspective is informed by the long history of smokers in my family. Losing someone from smoking-related health issues tends to make you quite a bit more supportive of these types of measures. I see it very much like the opiod crisis in a lot of ways -- not only in root causes, but if you see what either of these things do to people, you don't think strictly about harm reduction, you think about how it needs to end, because I don't want anyone to go through that.
I'm someone who's been severely impacted by the opioid crisis, and I have a lot of friends who have been impacted as well. In my experience, this type of prohibition only ever makes things worse for the people addicted at the bottom. There will be a black market for this, and people are going to get killed when police use it as an excuse to terrorize poor and BIPOC communities even further. As you said, Eric Garner was murdered by police after they targeted him for selling unlicensed cigarettes. This is the end result of these type of laws.
I understand you've been hurt by piece of shit cigarette companies, and the way we deal with those companies is by going after them directly. Same goes for pharma companies in the case of opioids. We need to force them to pay restitutions and shut them down. Simple prohibition will hurt the people at the bottom exponentially worse than the people at the top. If this were not the case, then Biden would not be moving to ban this stuff at all.
Cops are just going to murder a dude selling tropical flavored Swishers on the black market or something. That's no good.