My little rant about banning E-Cigs.
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I suppose One Definition of a Government is an Entity that can Impose, Collect and then Spend Monies thru Taxation.
I just dont see making e-liquids that contain Nicotine Illegal as very Viable. If the FDA cant make Analogs Illegal, which they have Repeatedly tried, I see no hope of them Outlawing Nicotine Base.
And It doesnt serve the Government well.
Not only would they Lose Monies thru Direct Taxation / Regulation but they Also Lose Monies thru not being able to collect Sales Taxes and Taxes on Profits.
I just dont see making e-liquids that contain Nicotine Illegal as very Viable. If the FDA cant make Analogs Illegal, which they have Repeatedly tried, I see no hope of them Outlawing Nicotine Base.
And It doesnt serve the Government well.
Not only would they Lose Monies thru Direct Taxation / Regulation but they Also Lose Monies thru not being able to collect Sales Taxes and Taxes on Profits.
I dunno. Every time I see a proposed ban in a city or municipality, I never see lost tax revenue brought up as a reason to oppose it.
State legislatures can't ban them for legal reasons, but they can make it incredibly difficult. Vermont just did this with their ban on mail order sales.
As it stands, the FDA can't ban them outright either. But they are the one entity that still has the power to do everything short of an outright ban. They can impose such onerous restrictions on e-cigs that, cumulatively, they might as well ban them. They can limit e-juice to 6mg, tobacco flavor only, sealed non-refillable cartridges, max. 3.4V, etc., etc., etc. Then, the states and fed gov't can impose huge taxes and licensing conditions and restrictions on top of it.
What would it do to the future of e-cigs if all that was legally available was a 3.4V device with a sealed 1ml carto, taxed at $3 each, full of 6mg juice in tobacco flavors only? What would happen if only a small handful of manufacturers could afford the near drug manufacturing and licensing standards imposed by the FDA? How would that differ appreciably from a ban?
State legislatures can't ban them for legal reasons, but they can make it incredibly difficult. Vermont just did this with their ban on mail order sales.
As it stands, the FDA can't ban them outright either. But they are the one entity that still has the power to do everything short of an outright ban. They can impose such onerous restrictions on e-cigs that, cumulatively, they might as well ban them. They can limit e-juice to 6mg, tobacco flavor only, sealed non-refillable cartridges, max. 3.4V, etc., etc., etc. Then, the states and fed gov't can impose huge taxes and licensing conditions and restrictions on top of it.
What would it do to the future of e-cigs if all that was legally available was a 3.4V device with a sealed 1ml carto, taxed at $3 each, full of 6mg juice in tobacco flavors only? What would happen if only a small handful of manufacturers could afford the near drug manufacturing and licensing standards imposed by the FDA? How would that differ appreciably from a ban?
I'm actually just as afraid of an over-regulated, corporate-run PV market where direct imports are banned and only a limited line of products is made available to the public at luxury commodity prices. With taxation and regulatory requirements strangling smaller providers out of existence, then only a very small array of actual choices would be available (with the typical supermarket fake choice scenario - dozens of brands all of which are more or less the same, produced more or less by the same big corporate mothership). That's gonna suck. Corporate will be more effective than any government entity in bullying and/or absorbing any tentative competition. We'd be left with crappy, non-refillable, semi-disposable units and, quite possibly, little choice of flavors (to protect the children).
And when I say "we", I don't really mean already veteran vapers who could circumvent all that by using DIY liquid and rebuildable hardware, but new vapers and smokers who'd be left with no good alternative.
@tinajfreeman: I guess Downloadable Graphics
ETA: how cool is that, expat007? I hadn't seen your post
And when I say "we", I don't really mean already veteran vapers who could circumvent all that by using DIY liquid and rebuildable hardware, but new vapers and smokers who'd be left with no good alternative.
@tinajfreeman: I guess Downloadable Graphics
ETA: how cool is that, expat007? I hadn't seen your post
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From the CASAA web site. Just click on my banner/signature and it will take you there.
There's absolutely no way they could enforce it. They ban nic liquids and people will just start making their own nicotine solutes by extracting from bulk, organic tobacco leaf. Unless they ban organic tobacco (I would NEVER extract from the garbage big tobacco produces), they can't stop vapers.
OK, If you say so.
But don't ever Confuse Political Posturing and Saber Rattling with Reality. Especially in an Election Cycle.
The FDA needs to look like the Good Guys in many People's Eyes. So they want to Ban e-Liquids. But a Court wouldn't let them do that. They don't lose face and it only Opens up the Ability for Taxes to be Imposed on Non-Prescription e-Liquids which containing Nicotine.
And why would " Local and state bureaucrats" want to outlaw e-Cigs? Wouldn't it be Smarter to just Tax the Nicotine in e-Liquids?
Unfortunately, a whole lot of reality happens, and a whole lot of stupid laws get passed, in an election cycle.
The FDA can't impose an outright ban on tobacco products. They can't even impose taxes. That's up to Congress and the various state legislatures. What they can do is even worse. They can regulate every aspect of production as well as the characteristics of the products themselves. They can impose virtually any restrictions they please on the manufacturers and vendors. They can regulate the conditions under which e-cig products are sold. Taxes are only the insult added to whatever injury inflicted by the FDA.
Local and state bureaucrats may well want to outlaw e-cigs for the same political purposes that they'd outlaw anything else. Many of them are bought and paid for by BT. Legislatures in the "tobacco states" like NC, VA and KY have been staunch allies of BT since forever. Legislatures in other states are beholden to the pharmaceutical industries and some others have made public health their personal issues. Those legislators dance to the tune of organizations like the ALA, AHA and a whole alphabet soup of anti tobacco zealots. As for Congress, perhaps you remember the day that John Boehner was caught live on C-Span as he walked the floor of the House passing out checks from BT.
What is "smarter" seldom reigns in lawmaking. If they could get away with it, many state legislatures would have outlawed e-cigs already. The best they can do under the current court rulings is to lump them together with cigarettes and subject them to the same bans as smoking. Is that smart? No. Legislating the word "vapor" to mean the same thing as "smoke" is not smart, it's Orwellian. Is it "smart" to jack up taxes on e-cigs to acheive parity with cigarettes? Of course not. Mark my words though; they will devise a formula that equates X mls of e-juice to X numbers of cigarettes and the taxes will be as close to equivalent as they can make them. BT lobbyists will see to it that that is exactly what will happen, just like they did with bulk tobacco. And state lawmakers will go along with it fearing that to do anything less will eat into their revenue sources, not to mention their campaign contributions. It's decidedly not smart to make vaping as expensive as smoking but, as I said already, smart has nothing to do with anything when it comes to legislation. It's about influence and money, not "smart".
All that aside, it's not smart to tax nicotine juice at all, yet it will certainly happen. The purpose of taxes on tobacco is to defray the public health cost and to discourage use. That's all. It's not supposed to be to provide a source of general revenue. Neither one of those factors applies respecting e-cigs. In fact, vapers should get a subsidy. People should receive a tax credit to switch from smoking to vaping. But that won't happen. E-juice will be taxed with absolutely no justifucation, except that BT wants to make sure that e-cigs don't become unfair competition in the marketplace. Again, smart is irrelevant. If politicians were smart, instead of being owned, they'd realize that they'd save a lot of money by trying to make e-cigs as cheap and widely accepted as possible.
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If voters allow their government representatives to create bans to "save them" or "save the children" any ban is possible. Consider some of the recent bans in chronically ordered....
Rock and Roll - California
Rock and roll is banned in Santa Cruz, California — History.com This Day in History — 6/3/1956
Sunny Side Up fried eggs - New Jersey
Business | Sunny Side Down: Runny Yolks Banned Under New Jersey Law | Seattle Times Newspaper
Trans-fat New York
New York City passes trans fat ban - Health - Diet and nutrition - msnbc.com
Salt - New York
Center for Consumer Freedom New York Considers Legislation to Ban Salt in Restaurants
School lunch brought from home - Chicago
Chicago school bans some lunches brought from home - Chicago Tribune
Never underestimate the stupidity our lawmakers can stoop to !!
Rock and Roll - California
Rock and roll is banned in Santa Cruz, California — History.com This Day in History — 6/3/1956
Sunny Side Up fried eggs - New Jersey
Business | Sunny Side Down: Runny Yolks Banned Under New Jersey Law | Seattle Times Newspaper
Trans-fat New York
New York City passes trans fat ban - Health - Diet and nutrition - msnbc.com
Salt - New York
Center for Consumer Freedom New York Considers Legislation to Ban Salt in Restaurants
School lunch brought from home - Chicago
Chicago school bans some lunches brought from home - Chicago Tribune
Never underestimate the stupidity our lawmakers can stoop to !!
As stupid as those laws might be, the most insidious laws are the ones passed to enrich special interests. Dumb laws, even ones passed to "protect the children", can often be repealed in the face of intense public pressure. Laws passed at the behest of corporate interests are almost impossible to have repealed. Money trumps any amount of public sentiment that represents less than a significant majority of likely voters.
As for those laws, a little digging might find at least some of them have some basis in common sense. Chicago may have banned "some" lunches brought from home. Does that mean you can't pack your kid a lunch consisting of 3 twinkies and a cookie? If so, I see nothing particularly wrong with it. New York "considered" a ban on salt in restaurants. Considering is one thing. Passing is another. The ban on rock & roll was repealed in Santa Cruz. Had that law been passed for the benefit of a strong country music lobby, it might well be still on the books.
The runny yolk law was based on a high rate of Salmonella poisoning in eggs that, if not for the agribusiness lobby, would have been produced in facilities and under conditions designed to prevent Salmonella ridden eggs. In that case, a lack of regulations and enforcement at the producer end translated into seemingly dumb laws on the consumer end. In some states, raw oysters can't be served. Why? Because anti-pollution regulations have been gutted on the behest of industry. The same thing for meat. In my day, steak tartare was a dish you could safely eat. Now, big agribusiness has ensured that laws prohibiting the overuse of antibiotics never get anywhere. The result is that meat is full of resistant bacteria strains and raw beef is dangerous.
When big money interests dicatate laws, it's not about "saving the children". It's about "saving the bottom line" and those laws are nearly impossible to repeal.
As for those laws, a little digging might find at least some of them have some basis in common sense. Chicago may have banned "some" lunches brought from home. Does that mean you can't pack your kid a lunch consisting of 3 twinkies and a cookie? If so, I see nothing particularly wrong with it. New York "considered" a ban on salt in restaurants. Considering is one thing. Passing is another. The ban on rock & roll was repealed in Santa Cruz. Had that law been passed for the benefit of a strong country music lobby, it might well be still on the books.
The runny yolk law was based on a high rate of Salmonella poisoning in eggs that, if not for the agribusiness lobby, would have been produced in facilities and under conditions designed to prevent Salmonella ridden eggs. In that case, a lack of regulations and enforcement at the producer end translated into seemingly dumb laws on the consumer end. In some states, raw oysters can't be served. Why? Because anti-pollution regulations have been gutted on the behest of industry. The same thing for meat. In my day, steak tartare was a dish you could safely eat. Now, big agribusiness has ensured that laws prohibiting the overuse of antibiotics never get anywhere. The result is that meat is full of resistant bacteria strains and raw beef is dangerous.
When big money interests dicatate laws, it's not about "saving the children". It's about "saving the bottom line" and those laws are nearly impossible to repeal.
Lawmakers always have the best of intentions, if we would just understand........
I didn't say that there's nothing wrong with them limiting what anyone eats, drinks, etc. I do see a legitimate interest in preventing child abuse. If you send your child to school with a bag of candy in lieu of lunch, that's child abuse. I don't know the details of the law in Chicago. But if that happens, the child needs protection from someone against their negligent parents.
The runny yolk law was just like the raw oyster law or the raw steak law. The same libertarian types that railed against regulations and inspections of food production and processing facilities will also rail against laws that protect people from the consequences of leaving food safety to the tender mercies of the invisible hand of the market. The runny yolk law wasn't to protect people from themselves, it was to protect people from the greed of egg factories that never hesitate to cut corners in the pursuit of profit. And, the incidence of salmonella contamination in all types poultry products is far greater than any 0.001%. It's going to get far worse too, because recent pressure by agribusiness and budget cuts to the USDA has more than doubled the workload of USDA inspectors who can no longer do their job. Poultry plants are increasingly expected to regulate themselves. That never worked before and it won't work now. People will just be getting sick more often and there will be more "runny yolk laws" passed. Even where no such laws exist, such as where I live, restaurants won't take an order for a "sunny side up" egg because they know darn well that they are setting themselves up for a lawsuit. Runny yolks are not safe to eat, regardless of the law. That's a direct consequence of factory farming and industrial food production with little government oversight.
I remember a time when I wouldn't hesitate to eat raw eggs, or raw steak, or raw oysters. There was a time when the U.S. had the most trusted food safety system in the world. All over the globe, the stamp "USDA Inspected" meant something. Thanks to corporate greed and the "government can't do anything right" crowd, raw meat, eggs and oysters are no longer safe to eat and more than a few countries no longer allow the importation of many U.S. food products.
The runny yolk law was just like the raw oyster law or the raw steak law. The same libertarian types that railed against regulations and inspections of food production and processing facilities will also rail against laws that protect people from the consequences of leaving food safety to the tender mercies of the invisible hand of the market. The runny yolk law wasn't to protect people from themselves, it was to protect people from the greed of egg factories that never hesitate to cut corners in the pursuit of profit. And, the incidence of salmonella contamination in all types poultry products is far greater than any 0.001%. It's going to get far worse too, because recent pressure by agribusiness and budget cuts to the USDA has more than doubled the workload of USDA inspectors who can no longer do their job. Poultry plants are increasingly expected to regulate themselves. That never worked before and it won't work now. People will just be getting sick more often and there will be more "runny yolk laws" passed. Even where no such laws exist, such as where I live, restaurants won't take an order for a "sunny side up" egg because they know darn well that they are setting themselves up for a lawsuit. Runny yolks are not safe to eat, regardless of the law. That's a direct consequence of factory farming and industrial food production with little government oversight.
I remember a time when I wouldn't hesitate to eat raw eggs, or raw steak, or raw oysters. There was a time when the U.S. had the most trusted food safety system in the world. All over the globe, the stamp "USDA Inspected" meant something. Thanks to corporate greed and the "government can't do anything right" crowd, raw meat, eggs and oysters are no longer safe to eat and more than a few countries no longer allow the importation of many U.S. food products.
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Ha! I just read that article about school lunches in Chicago. It's got nothing to do with laws or lawmakers. There is no law about it at all. It's a decision by the school district to leave it up to individual school principals whether or not to allow certain food to be brought from home. So, in your zeal to prove that lawmakers can do nothing right, you cited a law that isn't a law at all. Way to make your point.
As for your made up statistic: From the article you linked to.
Let's see.... 0.001% = 0.5% You only missed it by a factor of 5000. Nice try.
0.5% is one in 200 eggs. How many eggs does an average sized restaurant go through in a day? What would happen if one of every 200 McDonald hamburgers or Coca-Colas or bananas made people sick or even killed them? Do you think that might prompt some action by public health authorities? Do you think McDonalds might do something about it? Evidently the Egg Board would rather just leave it up to the restaurants to sanitize their contaminated products.
If I eat 2 eggs, over easy, each morning, I have a pretty good chance of salmonella poisoning at least once or twice a year. Thanks a lot, egg board.
As for your made up statistic: From the article you linked to.
Let's see.... 0.001% = 0.5% You only missed it by a factor of 5000. Nice try.
0.5% is one in 200 eggs. How many eggs does an average sized restaurant go through in a day? What would happen if one of every 200 McDonald hamburgers or Coca-Colas or bananas made people sick or even killed them? Do you think that might prompt some action by public health authorities? Do you think McDonalds might do something about it? Evidently the Egg Board would rather just leave it up to the restaurants to sanitize their contaminated products.
If I eat 2 eggs, over easy, each morning, I have a pretty good chance of salmonella poisoning at least once or twice a year. Thanks a lot, egg board.
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There's already laws against child abuse, for all the good they do. If it's OK to regulate what someone eats when they are young, what age does it stop?
The runny yolk law was repealed reasonably quickly many years ago, without any outbreaks of food poisoning. The original hysteria was blown out of proportion by the media reporting. Very much like the reporting being done on PVs, nicotine and vaping currently.
The runny yolk law was repealed reasonably quickly many years ago, without any outbreaks of food poisoning. The original hysteria was blown out of proportion by the media reporting. Very much like the reporting being done on PVs, nicotine and vaping currently.
So the school district has no force of law? Not government supported? All lawmakers aren't elected representatives, most regulations are formulated by un-elected bureaucrats (FDA), with the blessing of the people supposed to represent us.
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