One could say that we always need
some element of a drug war.
There's this need for a new demon
drug. Every society needs
a boogeyman.
One vital factor in Jim's death
was this.
Nicotine is one of the most
addictive substances out there.
A major factor in the dramatic
decline in US smoking rates is the
advent of alternative delivery
mechanisms for nicotine, especially
e-cigarettes.
Vaping isn't completely risk free,
but is far less harmful than smoking
tobacco, according to the British
Royal College of Physicians.
Laboratory tests of e-cigarette
ingredients, in vitro toxicological
tests, and short term human studies
suggest that e-cigarettes are likely
to be far less harmful than
combustible tobacco cigarets,
according to the National Academies
of Sciences, Engineering and
Medicine.
But instead of welcoming
this wildly successful smoking
cessation technology, state
and federal regulators are making
e-cigarettes harder to access.
So do you think we're entering a new
era of prohibition for tobacco
products?
We are definitely on that path.
There's been a ton of moral panic
around electronic cigarets,
partially driven by adults, but
mostly driven by the fact
that a lot of teens are taking it
up.
Journalist Jacob Grier is the author
of The Rediscovery of Tobacco, which
argues that the war on smoking has
become counterproductive.
His article, "Welcome to the
Nicotine Prohibition Era," appeared
in a recent issue of Reason
magazine.
Tobacco is arguably one of the
most destructive drugs in the world,
and it kills more than 400,000
Americans every year.
So there's a very understandable
desire to encourage people to smoke
less.
Now, vaping, it's helping smokers
quit. On the initiation level,
more people are taking a vaping
instead of smoking.
As of the latest numbers among
youth are that while yes, vaping
is obviously higher than it was,
you know, several years ago.
Smoking is all but disappearing.
The surgeon general calls it an
epidemic.
The use of e-cigarettes among
middle and high school students has
skyrocketed in the last couple of
years.
The data is pretty clear so far,
in the limited studies we have that
it looks like it is a gateway for
youth smoking.
The research actually shows that the
long term decline in smoking
prevalence among U.S.
youth accelerated after 2013
when vaping became more widespread.
That's according to a 2018 paper
in tobacco control, which shows an
especially pronounced decline among
kids in 10th and 12th grades.
Teen vaping did rise dramatically
from 2017 to 2019,
but has been declining ever since.
Because in taking the drugs, a
person is doing exactly
the opposite of what he's trying to
do as a teenager.
He is putting himself into a
position where he cannot make
decisions, where he is only
irresponsible and incapable
of doing this and he is
cutting his life off.
I think the other thing we have to
keep in mind is that for so
many years, the war on drugs
was justified as one great big
Child Protection Act.
Described by Rolling Stone as the
point man for drug policy reform
efforts, Ethan Nadelmann is the
founder and former director of the
Drug Policy Alliance and a central
figure in the unwinding of America's
longest war.
Why can we legalize medical
marijuana for medical purposes, for
medical patients?
It's about the kids.
Why can't we legally regulate
marijuana for adults?
It's about the kids.
But when you get on narcotics, it's
like starting a never ending
downward tailspin from 30,000
feet. You become less sure of
yourself, your surroundings, your
friends.
Quarrels are more frequent with your
parents and loved ones.
You think of little else but another
blow up.
Your new found language for smoking
marijuana.
Now that turned out to be all
bullshit. But now we have that same
rhetoric, those same arguments
happening with the war on tobacco,
nicotine products.
Tobacco as a loaded pistol.
And time pulls the trigger.
Since 2009, the FDA
has had the authority to regulate
the manufacture, distribution and
marketing of tobacco products.
This move received praise from Big
Tobacco because their products, like
the traditional cigaret, were
grandfathered in.
In 2016, the agency determined
that vapes counted as tobacco
products and fell under the agency's
purview.
Eventually, this would make it
nearly impossible to bring new
brands of e-cigarettes to market.
So it's created this perverse
situation where the most
dangerous tobacco products on the
market are virtually untouched,
and the ones that pretty much
everyone agrees are firefighters
safer are getting taken off the
market.
Now, manufacturers have to convince
the FDA that sale of their products
is appropriate for the protection
of public health.
So far, the agency has determined
that just three brands meet the
test, all of which contain tobacco
flavored nicotine only.
Even though a majority of adult
vapers prefer flavored
options, all the rest, according
to the FDA, are marketed unlawfully
and subject to enforcement action at
the FDA's discretion.
As of Sepember 2021.
The FDA has ordered more than 5
million e-cigarette products off the
market and they've indefinitely
delayed making a decision on the
market leader Jewel.
E-cigarettes had divided the medical
community.
The American Lung Association says
bluntly "E-cigarettes are not
safe." But the American Cancer
Society, on the other hand, says
they are, "significantly less
harmful for adults than smoking
regular cigarets."
As far as high school fads which
often come and go, this one
seems to be sticking and there's a
lot of concern about it.
There is a perceived harmlessness
with this, that's not the case.
Vaping may not be a particularly
healthy habit, but most health
authorities and even the FDA concede
that vaping is substantially safer
than smoking.
Credible estimates suggest that
millions of premature deaths could
be prevented by a widespread
transition from combustion to
vapor, notes Grier.
Yet five states and more than 300
local jurisdictions have passed
additional restrictions on flavored
tobacco or nicotine products,
knocking many popular brands
off the market.
They're basically allowing big
tobacco to continue to profit from
selling their cancer sticks.
Nadelmann says that Cigaret
Prohibitionists failed to learn
crucial lessons from the failure of
the drug war.
We are this kind of collective,
hysterical mindset that
really resembles what happened with
the War on Drugs back in the late
eighties and nineties.
So the fact of the matter is, is
that even if all these cumulative
public health efforts and people
coming to their own realization
result in a radical reduction
of smoking in the U.S.,
it still means don't go to
full scale prohibition.
Don't go there because of the
harms that will result in terms of
generating a vast black market
that really begins to resemble and
potentially transcend what
we saw with heroin, cocaine,
amphetamine and now illicit
fentanyl.
Driving markets underground
eliminates quality control,
such as in 2019, when contaminated
black market weed vapes led to
nearly 2,500 hospitalizations
and 60 deaths.
That was a very scary thing where
people were getting severe lung
damage, even dying.
It became evident fairly quickly
that the cause of that was
oil based thickeners used in
mostly illicit THC devices.
So realistically, it didn't have
anything to do with nicotine vaping.
Black market purveyors had added the
diluted vitamin E acetate
to their products, which turned out
to be the culprit.
But the media is reporting on the
topic led many consumers to draw the
false conclusion that e-cigarettes
alone pose a substantial risk.
CDC officials now say vitamin E
acetate, an additive sometimes used
in e-cigarette products, may be
linked to the national outbreak.
There are two epidemics going
on right now. There's an epidemic of
lung injury associated with
e-cigarette or vaping products,
primarily containing THC.
There's a second epidemic right now
skyrocketing rates of teen
use of e-cigarettes,
the nicotine containing
e-cigarettes.
A majority of Americans in recent
years believe that vaping
nicotine is as or
more dangerous than smoking
cigarets.
But vaping isn't the only product
regulators are pushing into the
black market.
The FDA recently announced its
plans to ban menthol, cigarets
and flavored cigars.
These products are already
prohibited in Massachusetts and
Washington, D.C..
There's a case that hasn't got much
attention where
police in Massachusetts staked out
the small Latin American clothing
store. They're a very small time.
And they saw a customer leaving
the store with Newport Menthol
Cigarets, which are now
contraband in the state of
Massachusetts to sell.
And so police went in.
They seized both
alcohol and tobacco, just small
amounts, but they laid it out like a
drug bust on the table.
But they arrested the owner of the
store for this and devoted their
police resources to it.
I think there's just been not a lot
of self-reflection among advocates
of cracking down on different
tobacco products about what the real
effects will be.
NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo
place Gardner in a chokehold while
attempting to arrest him in 2014.
Garner, who had been selling loose
cigarets, then died after
telling officers, "I can't breathe."
Eric Garner was initially approached
by police under suspicion of selling
individual cigarets, which
is essentially a way of getting
around taxes and selling them more
cheaply. When these dealers come in
and start selling, whether small or
large amounts of menthol cigarets or
flavored e-cigarettes.
Violating the ban itself doesn't get
them in trouble, but selling the
products on a black market does,
and that can mean years in prison.
The war on drugs is not just about
arrest and incarceration, but
all the civil sanctions
that prevent people from getting,
you know, access to public housing,
access to any types of welfare
benefits, accents to student loans.
I mean, all you know, having their
children taken away from them, you
know, having this used against them
in a divorce proceeding.
The more intense this
criminalization gets, the more
it's going to invite ever more
organized forms of criminal
behavior.
We're criminal organizations which
are already involved in smuggling
cigarets from low tax jurisdictions
to high tax ones, whether it's
domestically in the U.S., from
southern states to northern states,
or whether it's from the U.S.
to Canada.
There's this really obvious tension
between the progressive desire
to stop people from taking up a
deadly habit and protecting
individual choice and preventing
abusive policing.
How do we resolve that tension?
Harm reduction.
You can drastically reduce the harms
of smoking and the use of cigarets.
If consumers have access to a much
safer product.
The most famous example of this is
Sweden, where they use a product
called Snus, which is a form of oral
tobacco that is far, far
safer than smoking.
Unfortunately, Snus is illegal
throughout much of Europe, so its
impact has been limited.
Both England and some scientists
here are looking at the best
science, and we see the same thing
in e-cigarettes, a way less
harmful than cigarets.
And they can and do help smokers
switch if they can't quit.
Ultimately, it's going to take some
real courageous political leadership
in the way that we saw Kurt Schmoke,
the mayor of Baltimore, back in the
late eighties, step up
at a conference of mayors in saying
the war on drugs is the wrong way to
go.
Who's really winning and
who's losing in this war
on drugs?
I see a strategy that is
not only failed,
but it can't be made
to win.
That is, every time we pour
in these heavy law
enforcement resources, we
inflate the risk which
drives up the price, which
brings more people in trafficking
and more profits to drug dealing.
As the war on drugs winds down.
The war on tobacco is ramping up.
Upwards of 10 million consumers will
no longer be able to visit
independent vape shops to buy
customizable components for open
systems, or choose from a wide
variety of flavors and nicotine
concentrations to smoke.
And in 2020, teen smoking
rates ticked up.
Maybe because the government is
making the most popular alternative
more expensive and harder to get.
And the recent FDA announcement to
ban menthol smoking products,
including menthol e-cigarettes,
will only make matters worse.
So when you see people who are
pushing for bans on menthol or
flavored tobacco, they always try to
emphasize that it's a
regulatory matter and they
pitch it as just a product
regulation with only benign effects.
The reality, of course, is much more
complicated because there is still
demand for these products.
This is what I was really looking
for menthol cigarets
where you can taste the tobacco.