[ Post a Response | The Sublime Desire of Cigarette Smoking ]
Posted by Vesperae
on December 27, 2009, 10:04 pm, in reply to "Not all FSCs are created equal and other thoughts."
Message modified by board administrator December 27, 2009, 10:10 pm
Thanks for the info PA.
However, I seriously doubt that I will return to commercially produced cigarettes, unless, as I said previously, FSCs are repealed, and unless cigarette manufacturers significantly increase the quality of their products overall, both of which strike me as being virtual impossibilities at this point.
Even after only a few weeks smoking quality MYO tobaccos, I've found that commercially produced cigarettes are not only tremendously inferior in flavor, they also make me feel physically significantly "less well" overall. It really is like the difference between fast food and cooking for yourself.
As for appealing to the FDA to get involved with amending FSC manufacturing to make them less toxic...
It seems like a reasonable course of action, but, on reflection, the fundamentally flawed logic of the FDA getting involved in regulating a product that will never be safe by it's very nature would seem to make such an appeal a long shot at best to me. The whole obvious unstated subtext seems to me to be to attempt to just ultimately get everyone to quit smoking by slowly removing everything that makes smoking pleasant, as unlikely and as short-sighted as that obviously is.
As for the menthol issue...
I dunno. My understanding was that the FDA would be unlikely to ban menthol cigarettes, since they are such a huge historical percentage of cigarette sales, and since there are so many menthol smokers...but who knows at this point?
The thing that makes absolutely no sense to me is that local, state, and federal government budgets rely so heavily on sin taxes for their operating budgets, and if/when the FDA and who knows whatever other "public advocacy organizations" (like the one behind FSCs) mandate that "this" and "this" and "this" be done to, or eliminated from, cigarettes, the result will be a product that absolutely no one will consume, and the tax funding from cigarette sales will dwindle so low that governmental operating budgets will be in serious jeopardy.
Combine that with the inevitable black market trafficking in cigarettes that smokers can actually smoke, and the tax revenue shortfalls will snowball, and then add to that the increased financial burdens to law enforcement, and the whole thing becomes an idiotic cluster fu¢k just like the so called "war on (illegal) drugs" is.
You'd think that between the abundantly obvious failures of alcohol prohibition and the "war on drugs", that government would have learned these lessons by now, but clearly, they haven't.
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