Petty attack on convenience and pleasure
Sunday, May 17, 2020 at 12:51 I have just finished writing an article, to be published tomorrow, about the menthol cigarette ban.
It was a bit long and this section didn't really fit so I took it out. The point I wanted to make, though, was this:
There’s a pettiness about the ban on the sale of menthol-flavoured tobacco products that says a lot about the regulators behind it. Following the ban it will still be legal for retailers to sell menthol-flavoured filters and papers in the same transaction as non-flavoured rolling tobacco, but not packaged together.
This may seem a very minor issue, hardly worth complaining about, but the Tobacco Products Directive is not just an attack on consumer choice, it’s an attack on convenience. This is what we mean when some of us talk about ‘creeping prohibition’.
Baby steps, for sure, but the direction of travel is clear. Prohibition, in the modern sense, is just not about banning things. It’s also about inconveniencing people to the extent that they may quit rather than continue their habit.
Some might say this is merely 'nudging' people to change their behaviour. I disagree.
Like the ban on cigarette vending machines, I think it's a deliberately spiteful act designed to make some people's lives just that little bit more difficult than it has to be.
The ban on menthol cigarettes is also an attack on pleasure. Sure there are alternatives – which I will list in another post – but the reality is that people have smoked menthol-flavoured cigarettes for decades because they prefer the taste.
This week that small pleasure will be taken away from them and the sad thing is, very few people seem bothered.
Reader Comments (4)
It is not nudging. It is bullying. I call it how I see it.
I think the intended end is not so much prohibition, but their own brand of Victory Cigarettes, after all, they've already got the packaging and they will still want to be paid.
The method ban--like the plain packages, vending machine ban, and smoking bans in general--are absolutely spiteful. They are meant to persecute and bully smokers and should be reversed. The antismoking bureaucrats and opportunists are cruel, hateful ideologues.
Another example of exploiting children to punish adults who are doing nothing wrong. The only kids that smoke menthol are those in the imagination of smokerphbic bullies in the anti smoker industry who know that unless they use children they could not ban adults from legal actvity.
I suspect the silence in response to the menthol ban is because it affects a minority. Professional anti smokers go for minorities first. They are easier to bully and likely to be poor, unrepresented, and have no voice so win win for them. Soon they will demand a ban on another minority product. They are pushing prohibition on us, bit by bit, slice by slice, and only in their ignorant heads has it worked in South Africa during lockdown.
Boris's government should be working for all of us, not some revolting, nasty professional anti smoker quango whose job is to abuse, punish and ultimately criminalise the consumer while treating freedom as if it is a dirty word.