I mean growing and rolling your own tobacco is fine and I have no problem with people doing that, but allowing Marlboro to prey on you is pretty fucked up.
I mean growing and cooking your own food is fine and I have no problem with people doing that, but allowing grocery stores to prey on you is pretty fucked up
How? Tobacco is tobacco and shitty for you no matter where you get it from, also most people don't have a field to grow it in or space to cure it. Any time you buy pretty much anything you're being exploited by one shitty company or another. Any of these arguments can apply as much if not moreso to alcohol and they can freely advertise that and no one is saying we ban booze that tastes good or demand that beer be sold in a plain can with just Beer written on it in a plain font with an image or a destroyed liver and no one seems to have an issue there.
Never said it was good for you, even if it was homegrown, but why are we defending large tobacco companies that knowingly add harmful additives to their cigs and pretty much prey upon the poor with their product? That's what's got me confused here. It feels like people are tripping over themselves to go to bat for Philip Morris. And yeah it's a shitty equivalence because people need to go to the store and by groceries. The grocery store isn't putting rat poison in their food and selling it back to you.
The grocery store itself isn't, but the companies that make the food sure are. How much high-fructose corn syrup is in everything nowadays? What kind of preservatives and flavoring agents and coloring chemicals are added to damn near anything you can buy? Maybe it's not rat poison, but unless you're growing, packaging, and preparing your own food, you have no more idea of what kind of additives it contains than a smokers knows what's in their cigs.
Saying that tobacco companies are no worse or better than the ones selling you processed food that will give you stomache cancer isn't going to bat for them. You're the one that said tobacco is cool if it's homegrown so I don't see how that wouldn't apply to everything else as well.
real bruh moment, not a good look my dude, you just posted cringe, that's certainly an opinion. Piss the fuck off. Do you really think smoking is only okay if you grow your own fucking tobacco? So you need land to grow it and space to cure it and time to do so? Yeah it's the same thing, if you don't hate the product but hate the capitalist means of obtaining it then there is no distinction and you're being a paternalistic moralizer to say otherwise.
Not accurate. This is not a prohibition issue. This is focused on limiting the way that capitalists can manipulate people with advertisements and snake oil. Cigarette companies have spent decades saying that menthol cigarettes are more healthy for you. I don't think that any drug should be advertised, but in the US we have drug advertisements on television.
You may say that "We're all adult, we can do we want," but this is naive. This is the same kind of thing that liberals say about wage labor. Liberals say "We're all adults. You don't need a union to protect you." Doing what you want to yourself may be okay, but profiting by exploiting people is not okay. Cigarette companies exploit and manipulate cigarette users in ways that the user may not even understand. Cigarette companies should be obstructed in any way possible.
Being against prohibition does not mean being against business regulation.
This is focused on limiting the way that capitalists can manipulate people with advertisements and snake oil. Cigarette companies have spent decades saying that menthol cigarettes are more healthy for you. I don’t think that any drug should be advertised, but in the US we have drug advertisements on television.
You can ban all of that without banning the actual sale of menthols.
Anyone who smokes knows that menthols are worse for you. The urban legends about the added fiberglass or switching to menthols when you have bronchitis to make yourself cough out more crap are both hella common in low income communities where people smoke. Considering how little advertising there is for nicotine nowadays, I must have missed the period where they advertised that menthols were healthier. If anything, the people that smoked them liked them because they were harsher but had a flavor.
Either way, it's been seen over and over that prohibition doesn't work. Ban menthols. People will find a way to dip their cigs in VaporRub or something. Ban vaping. People learn to make their own vape juice and sell it. Ban alcohol and people will brew their own. And then people will get sick even worse than they did from the original substances because these modifications will be completely unregulated.
I agree that smoking shouldn't be banned and that propaganda isn't a mind control ray, but fucking hell did cigarette advertisments work well. They worked so well that even though they're mostly banned, the effects are still rippling through our society via generational transmission.
Cigarettes have lore to them in working class communities. Everyone has a brand they smoke and it becomes a part of your identity. More than anything else I can think of except maybe a car. I know dozens of people with Camel Cash stories they got from their grandparents and shit.
So yeah, the marketing worked insanely well. It helped that the product was addictive, but I really don't think it would have been the same without the pervasiveness of the advertisement and branding.
I fully agree in that it's more of a generational thing and working class association moreso than outright people "falling for advertising" that has been illegal for years that seems to be the angle being peddled a lot in this thread. My smoking habit came from being a cook and that's the only way you can get breaks. I'd never defend smoking but a lot of people here seem to to be using the same late 80s just say no kind of logic towards smoking or acting like adults who made a decision knowing the consequences were manipulated by tobacco ads that were outlawed before most of us were born, smoking is bad and Id prefer not to but the moralizing here is sickening
This is not a prohibition. It's a business regulation. Make your own menthols if you want.
Alcohol is already extremely regulated in very similar ways. There are very strict guidelines on how alcohol is made and sold.
You already admitted in another post that you oppose the ban because you smoke menthol cigarettes yourself and don't want to be inconvenienced. You don't care that cigarette companies exploit people. You don't care that cigarette companies prey on black communities. You just don't want a tiny inconvenience in your life.
Read the article by the FDA. According to their research, the ban of the sale of menthol cigarettes is predicted to prevent the deaths of 633,000 people, including 237,000 African Americans. To you, a tiny inconvenience is more important than the lives of 633,000 people. Then you say that it's entirely their fault, as if it not possible that people were deceived, manipulated, and exploited.
This is a liberal mindset to think that consumption of a commodity is simply a relationship between the consumer and the commodity. The commodity is a relationship between the consumer and the producer. You are doing commodity fetishism. The menthol cigarette sale ban breaks this relationship. You can still roll your own menthol cigarettes.
I talked about this in another thread. Having tobacco companies exist with a profit incentive is bad, since this means they will always want to go out of their way to get as many people addicted to nicotine as possible, since this increases their profits. Hence the marketing, hence the very existence of menthol cigarettes, hence the handing out free samples of menthol cigarettes to kids in black communities in the 50s/60s. This is just scratching the surface of the evil shit tobacco companies have done. Without this profit incentive there simply wouldn't be nearly as many people using tobacco products. I'd expect a socialist society to still have smokers, just a lot less without the incentive to expand the customer base. In the meantime, though, it makes sense to curb tobacco use wherever possible, because it is still killing people today. Full prohibition would likely fail, but policies like plain labels have been shown to work, and I suspect banning menthols will also help, so there's plenty of room to reduce harm.
I agree with this. A socialist society would still have cigarettes but without the need for profit there wouldn't be advertising or marketing to grow their customer base. I think cigarette use would be near zero in 2 generations. Similar thing with vapes.
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I mean growing and rolling your own tobacco is fine and I have no problem with people doing that, but allowing Marlboro to prey on you is pretty fucked up.
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I dunno, that's just my take as a smoker and someone who lost a loved on to smoking.
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I mean growing and cooking your own food is fine and I have no problem with people doing that, but allowing grocery stores to prey on you is pretty fucked up
This is a bullshit equivalency, knock it off.
How? Tobacco is tobacco and shitty for you no matter where you get it from, also most people don't have a field to grow it in or space to cure it. Any time you buy pretty much anything you're being exploited by one shitty company or another. Any of these arguments can apply as much if not moreso to alcohol and they can freely advertise that and no one is saying we ban booze that tastes good or demand that beer be sold in a plain can with just Beer written on it in a plain font with an image or a destroyed liver and no one seems to have an issue there.
Never said it was good for you, even if it was homegrown, but why are we defending large tobacco companies that knowingly add harmful additives to their cigs and pretty much prey upon the poor with their product? That's what's got me confused here. It feels like people are tripping over themselves to go to bat for Philip Morris. And yeah it's a shitty equivalence because people need to go to the store and by groceries. The grocery store isn't putting rat poison in their food and selling it back to you.
The grocery store itself isn't, but the companies that make the food sure are. How much high-fructose corn syrup is in everything nowadays? What kind of preservatives and flavoring agents and coloring chemicals are added to damn near anything you can buy? Maybe it's not rat poison, but unless you're growing, packaging, and preparing your own food, you have no more idea of what kind of additives it contains than a smokers knows what's in their cigs.
Saying that tobacco companies are no worse or better than the ones selling you processed food that will give you stomache cancer isn't going to bat for them. You're the one that said tobacco is cool if it's homegrown so I don't see how that wouldn't apply to everything else as well.
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reddit moment
i don't have strong feelings one way or another but you really thought this was a post, huh?
real bruh moment, not a good look my dude, you just posted cringe, that's certainly an opinion. Piss the fuck off. Do you really think smoking is only okay if you grow your own fucking tobacco? So you need land to grow it and space to cure it and time to do so? Yeah it's the same thing, if you don't hate the product but hate the capitalist means of obtaining it then there is no distinction and you're being a paternalistic moralizer to say otherwise.
i don't eat cigarettes lol
I'm sure you eat processed junk food that has little nutrional value and gives people stomache cancer lol. You probably also drink lol.
You're missing out some of them have that real Necco wafers flavor.
Not accurate. This is not a prohibition issue. This is focused on limiting the way that capitalists can manipulate people with advertisements and snake oil. Cigarette companies have spent decades saying that menthol cigarettes are more healthy for you. I don't think that any drug should be advertised, but in the US we have drug advertisements on television.
You may say that "We're all adult, we can do we want," but this is naive. This is the same kind of thing that liberals say about wage labor. Liberals say "We're all adults. You don't need a union to protect you." Doing what you want to yourself may be okay, but profiting by exploiting people is not okay. Cigarette companies exploit and manipulate cigarette users in ways that the user may not even understand. Cigarette companies should be obstructed in any way possible.
Being against prohibition does not mean being against business regulation.
You can ban all of that without banning the actual sale of menthols.
Anyone who smokes knows that menthols are worse for you. The urban legends about the added fiberglass or switching to menthols when you have bronchitis to make yourself cough out more crap are both hella common in low income communities where people smoke. Considering how little advertising there is for nicotine nowadays, I must have missed the period where they advertised that menthols were healthier. If anything, the people that smoked them liked them because they were harsher but had a flavor.
Either way, it's been seen over and over that prohibition doesn't work. Ban menthols. People will find a way to dip their cigs in VaporRub or something. Ban vaping. People learn to make their own vape juice and sell it. Ban alcohol and people will brew their own. And then people will get sick even worse than they did from the original substances because these modifications will be completely unregulated.
Oh no I've been TRICKED into smoking!
Sorry, I forgot that you were immune to propaganda.
Propaganda isn't a mind control ray.
Propaganda is peepee poopoo.
I agree that smoking shouldn't be banned and that propaganda isn't a mind control ray, but fucking hell did cigarette advertisments work well. They worked so well that even though they're mostly banned, the effects are still rippling through our society via generational transmission.
Cigarettes have lore to them in working class communities. Everyone has a brand they smoke and it becomes a part of your identity. More than anything else I can think of except maybe a car. I know dozens of people with Camel Cash stories they got from their grandparents and shit.
So yeah, the marketing worked insanely well. It helped that the product was addictive, but I really don't think it would have been the same without the pervasiveness of the advertisement and branding.
I fully agree in that it's more of a generational thing and working class association moreso than outright people "falling for advertising" that has been illegal for years that seems to be the angle being peddled a lot in this thread. My smoking habit came from being a cook and that's the only way you can get breaks. I'd never defend smoking but a lot of people here seem to to be using the same late 80s just say no kind of logic towards smoking or acting like adults who made a decision knowing the consequences were manipulated by tobacco ads that were outlawed before most of us were born, smoking is bad and Id prefer not to but the moralizing here is sickening
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This is not a prohibition. It's a business regulation. Make your own menthols if you want.
Alcohol is already extremely regulated in very similar ways. There are very strict guidelines on how alcohol is made and sold.
You already admitted in another post that you oppose the ban because you smoke menthol cigarettes yourself and don't want to be inconvenienced. You don't care that cigarette companies exploit people. You don't care that cigarette companies prey on black communities. You just don't want a tiny inconvenience in your life.
Read the article by the FDA. According to their research, the ban of the sale of menthol cigarettes is predicted to prevent the deaths of 633,000 people, including 237,000 African Americans. To you, a tiny inconvenience is more important than the lives of 633,000 people. Then you say that it's entirely their fault, as if it not possible that people were deceived, manipulated, and exploited.
This is a liberal mindset to think that consumption of a commodity is simply a relationship between the consumer and the commodity. The commodity is a relationship between the consumer and the producer. You are doing commodity fetishism. The menthol cigarette sale ban breaks this relationship. You can still roll your own menthol cigarettes.
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I talked about this in another thread. Having tobacco companies exist with a profit incentive is bad, since this means they will always want to go out of their way to get as many people addicted to nicotine as possible, since this increases their profits. Hence the marketing, hence the very existence of menthol cigarettes, hence the handing out free samples of menthol cigarettes to kids in black communities in the 50s/60s. This is just scratching the surface of the evil shit tobacco companies have done. Without this profit incentive there simply wouldn't be nearly as many people using tobacco products. I'd expect a socialist society to still have smokers, just a lot less without the incentive to expand the customer base. In the meantime, though, it makes sense to curb tobacco use wherever possible, because it is still killing people today. Full prohibition would likely fail, but policies like plain labels have been shown to work, and I suspect banning menthols will also help, so there's plenty of room to reduce harm.
I agree with this. A socialist society would still have cigarettes but without the need for profit there wouldn't be advertising or marketing to grow their customer base. I think cigarette use would be near zero in 2 generations. Similar thing with vapes.