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In the last days of his failed presidency… President Joe BidenThe US Food and Drug Administration is moving forward with an unreasonable and dangerous plan to ban the sale of cigarettes in the United States. This must never be allowed to happen.
The reckless scheme of the geniuses in Washington is to reduce the level of nicotine in a cigarette to an almost imperceptible level, rendering the product almost useless. Considering that nicotine itself is basically harmless, our best bureaucrats find it extremely dangerous to deliver a deadly cigarette, even with high taxes and warning labels. So, like so many illiberal pencil pushers before them, Their plan is to simply ban it.
There are four primary reasons why this deregulation of cigarettes, a product associated with our nation for centuries, by the way, won't work.
First and most importantly, my choice to smoke and the choice of more than 25 million regular American adult smokers is none of Biden's business. We all know it's dangerous. It's not 1950, and celebrities don't do TV ads about which smoke four out of five doctors prefer.
Portrait of a middle-aged woman smoking a cigarette while standing outdoors. (Istock)
Certainly, it is a choice that has negative health consequences. But so is obesity, drinking alcohol, or not exercising.
The difference is that smokers, for reasons I don't fully understand, are treated as morally immoral. No one would ever walk up to a fat guy eating a Big Mac and say, “What's wrong with you, buddy? Don't you see what you're doing to yourself?” This regularly happens to smokers in public places.
But even if one is a narrow-minded authoritarian who thinks the state should get in the way of my after-dinner smoking, beware of unintended consequences. Which brings us to the second reason, which is the clear invitation to the black market that this policy creates.
The economic opportunity here for criminal organizations is enormous, and in fact tobacco smuggling is already a major problem in our country. Fortunately, so far, it's only been local.
Typically, smugglers fill trucks with cheap cigarettes from low-tax states like Virginia or Indiana, and sell them at a discount in high-tax states like New York or Illinois. In my Brooklyn neighborhood, three stores within five blocks of my house sold packs of cigarettes for $9 instead of the legal price of $15, and they always carried Virginia tax stamps.
President Joe Biden speaks at a reception for new Democratic members of Congress in the State Dining Room of the White House, Sunday, January 5, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Bals Sinita) (AP Photo/Manuel Bals Sinita)
This de facto nationwide cigarette ban would, for the first time, introduce international smugglers into the U.S. cigarette market, which is the third reason why this FDA plan is absolutely crazy.
He added: “The ban imposed by Biden is like a gift with a bow and balloons to him Organized crime gangs With it, whether it is gangs, Chinese organized crime, or the Russian mafia. “It will perpetuate smoking in America, and it will make the streets more violent,” said Rich Marianos, former associate director of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and current head of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Tobacco Law Enforcement NetworkFox News Digital said of the proposal.
This is an obvious fact that we have known since Prohibition a century ago. What makes this recurrence much worse is that Mexican cartels will now smuggle foreign cigarettes, many of them Chinese counterfeits, all while making fentanyl and human trafficking more difficult to contain at the border.
The fourth and final reason why cigarette smokers are so angry about this proposed violation of their rights is that it seems like every 10 minutes a new marijuana dispensary opens in some corner of America.
All the great cities in our country smell like a Grateful Dead concert or Snoop Dog's lair, and I mean at 9 a.m.
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Isn't it interesting that the government supports marijuana smoking, which makes people lazy and subservient, but rages against tobacco smoking, or even nicotine, which I believe has sharpened the senses of Americans since Sir Walter Raleigh first took a puff?
The future president was Dwight D. Eisenhower smoked four packs of cigarettes a day while commanding American forces during World War II. Thank God it wasn't burning instead.
It seems very likely that the FDA had good intentions when formulating this failed plan, but wasn't that the problem with the entire Biden administration? Biden's good intentions, once implemented, will never fail to make things worse, from the economy to the border, to Afghanistan, and now tobacco.
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As smokers, we will pay taxes out of our noses, we will swallow snide comments about smelling like smoke, we will drive into the frozen streets, and on those corners next to bars or restaurants we will be happy as we share our cigarettes together with the stories of our lives.
The government will never deny that to smokers, and we hope that as more sensible and rational heads move to lead President-elect Donald Trump's FDA, it will never try.
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