The Nanny State – FDA Tobacco Regulation
-
Kevin Godbee - Aug 24, 2009
- 6 min read
By Tommy Zarzecki
Say… What’s that Smell?
There’s an old saying that simply says, "I smell a rat."
Back on June 22, 2009, President Barack Obama signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (PDF, 350 K). This historic legislation grants authority to regulate tobacco products to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The interesting thing here is that tobacco is neither a food or a drug, yet the brain trust of our wonderful country has put the FDA in charge of regulating the industry.
Now it’s a big industry and quite diverse, including cigarettes, pipe tobacco, cigars, and smokeless tobacco. Those who have created this bill claim that its main purpose is aimed at keeping cigarettes out of the hands of kids. While I agree with that most noble sounding notion, I believe that the lawmakers are full of Shinola and there is a grand scheme behind this entire charade.
As I said, I smell a rat, indeed.
I listened as the loquacious President Obama praised the bill, which he claims will no doubt lower health care costs and of course he barked the rallying cry that launched the SCHIP bill (State Children’s Health Insurance Program) we need to save the children, what about the children, gotta save them god damned kids, yada, yada, yada.
Oh what a load of excrement.
Government officials claim that this is all mainly aimed at cigarettes, keeping the evil weed from the hands and mouths of children. And again, while I agree with that notion, let’s not try to yank our chains too hard, huh, fellas? They say that the bill is not in effect to ban tobacco, but rather to regulate it’s use, how it’s made, how it’s distributed, and to govern its marketing. I don’t know about you guys, but the notion of the government gaining control of an entire multi-billion dollar industry scares the livin’ bejezuz outta me, and rightfully so.
My whole point here is that I think a lot of us can see through the smoke that this is the first step in the hopes of completely banning the use of tobacco and bringing us closer and closer to prohibition.
There is just no way the feds want to police tobacco, they want to appease the stronghold groups like the American Medical Association and the American Heart Association and eradicate smoking completely. But what about us who enjoy an evening on the back deck with our favorite briar and Latakia, Perique or other blend? Do not be hoodwinked by their pseudo noble claims to save the children, they want to take our precious smokes away, and as I said, they have accomplished the very first step.
One of the first things they are going after are flavored cigarettes, cloves, and small flavored cigars. The argument is that this is what the kiddies smoke and this is what we’re going to eliminate first. They are regulating additives and flavorings and if my theory holds true, pipe tobacco is next on the endangered species list. For hundreds of years our beloved tobacco has been infused with vanilla, rum, black cherry, and other delicious flavors and scents. And this, my friends, is an easy target for the smoke Nazis to make that leap from cigarettes. After all, it’s tobacco – it’s evil, and of the devil himself, and we who smoke have become the pariahs of all of society.
There are other concerns for the tobacco shop owners who pay their mortgages and feed their families with the sales of our beloved pipe tobacco and premium hand rolled cigars. Many rumors are floating about and we really don’t know what to believe. One is that tobacconists won’t be allowed to discuss or recommend products to their customers, making it where customers would need to come in and tell the shop employee what he wants. Yeah, that’s just batshit crazy, isn’t it? And, those who handle tobacco may also be required to wear gloves. Plus, no displays for brands or advertising signage will be allowed.
Say, here’s a scary one for ya, and don’t think we’re not next.
In certain parts of Canada, there are laws that prohibit tobacco shops to display tobacco (jars of pipe tobacco and cigars) in the open where customers can see it. They will have to point to a photo in a book and tell the shop employees what they want. If you haven’t heard of this already, it probably sounds like I’m making it up, but this has been in effect in Ontario since May 31, 2008.
Check the links below:
http://www.region.durham.on.ca/departments/health/idt/outOfSight.pdf
http://www.cctc.ca/cctc/EN/tcrc/books/tcmonograph.2008-04-25.9011735026/
This same ban will go into effect January 2010 in Newfoundland, Canada. http://www.health.gov.nl.ca/health/tobacco_act/default.htm
Here’s one brave retailer trying to fight this law in Canada:
https://pipesmagazine.com/blog/pipe-news/one-brave-tobacconist-fights-insanity-in-canada/
Display Restrictions for Tobacco Products
Tobacco products cannot be displayed in a retail store. This means:
• tobacco products must be stored and sold in a way that prevents consumers from seeing them before they are purchased; and
• tobacco products must not be visible to a person outside of the store.
The Tobacco Control Act does not specify how a retailer should ensure that the tobacco products are not visible. Options available for retailers to ensure tobacco products are not visible include the use of drawers, cabinets with doors, curtains and under counters.
Wow… insane you say? Unconstitutional you say?
Maybe you thought I had the Chicken Little thing going earlier on, but it’s possible that you’re a little more convinced that the government has indeed taken the first step in eliminating tobacco from the American public. It’s happening directly above our border and I’m thoroughly convinced that we’re next in line for Big Brother to successfully save us all from ourselves.
Believe it or not, there are actually those in our government that are against this legislature. Kentucky senator, Jim Bunning vehemently opposes the bill. (See his plea to the senate at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5fJf22QyPE)
Senator Bunning feels the department of agriculture should govern the tobacco industry and not the FDA.
Of course since it is an agricultural product, that would make perfect sense but when did anything our full-time paid officials did make any real sense? Bunning is particularly worried that American tobacco farmers (many from his home state) will lose their lively hoods. He notes that it’s a very big business for farmers that have been around for hundreds of years and have contributed greatly to the country’s economy. And he also makes sure to note over and over that tobacco is still a legal product in this country. In a recent interview with the Charlotte Observer, North Carolina senator Kay Hagan also noted, "It’s a legal product, I don’t want to do anything that would harm the industry in North Carolina."
So what does this all mean? It means we better stand up and fight for the civil liberties that are getting stripped away from us on a daily basis. Since 1998, the tobacco industry has spent nearly $308 million in lobbying to block the bill. It seems they haven’t done a very good job, now have they? It’s up to us who love our Meerschaum, Calabash, and Briar to stand up to this Nazi-esque fascism head on. First it’s our pastime of tobacco, and then what? Just how long is it before all our heads are bald and we’re outfitted with gray jumpsuits like the mindless drones in the famed Macintosh 1984 commercial?
I definitely smell a rat my friends. And after my little diatribe, here, I hope you’re getting a good whiff of the stench, too.
———————————–
Tommy Zarzecki, aka the Zman, lives in northern New Jersey and is a feature writer for Cigar Magazine as well as the writer and editor-in-chief of the weekly column, JR Cigars Blog With the Zman (www.jrcigars.com). Tommy’s latest venture is his website, PLANET ZMAN, the Official Portal to All Things Manly – a site dedicated to the Man’s Man in all of us. (www.planetzman.com)
Another article by the "ZMan" –Oh Yes, My Friends, Pipes are Cool Again
Written by Kevin Godbee
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Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 636. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Barry Kane. Barry started smoking a pipe in 1961 when he was 14-years old. Back then it seemed like everybody smoked, and you could buy pipes and tobacco just about anywhere. Barry is a true old-school pipe smoker, sticking to just one blend. See if you can guess which one before listening. At the top of the show Brian will give his take on Scandinavian Tobacco Group’s purchase of Mac Baren and Sutliff Tobacco and their announcement that they will be shut down.
There’s a pipe in my collection that I cannot bring myself to smoke, though I’ve had it for more years than I care to recall. It’s old, or shall I say, well experienced; that experience, that oldness came to it long before it was in my possession. The pipe is an old Comoy’s Grand Slam from the 1940s. The shape (#93), a slightly canted, stack billiard (sometimes referred to as a Belgian) is right up my alley, and it’s a beautiful example of it. It came to me with some wear and tear; nothing unusual for an old pipe, but more the signs of one that has been well loved, smoked a lot, treated as a favorite tool, cherished, in a sense, by frequent use. It’s the pipe equivalent of a vintage car that’s been driven a lot, enjoyed fully and maintained adequately, rather than one kept in a spotless garage, dusted and detailed weekly, brought out only for leisurely Sunday drives, or to be ogled behind the ropes at the next Concours d’Elegance. When it arrived, those uncounted years ago, it wanted a little restoration. Nothing dramatic needed to be done to it, but the stem was oxidized, the finish a little dingy. The cake was even and fairly thin, and the airway was relatively clean, both signs that its previous owner cared for it, but the bowl’s surface was a little drab and dull. It took little effort to reveal its beauty, to show the lovely contrasted stain and interesting grain beneath the old wax. I often think I should do before and after photos of pipes that I work on, but those thoughts always come after the work’s been done. This one would have been a great illustration of how years of handling that can sometimes make a pipe more beautiful, can other times make it just look grungy. Once I’d cleaned up the externals, it was time to address the inside bits. I approach this a little bassackwards, I realize. It would be more sensible to take care of the inside before addressing the outside, but it’s how I roll. If an old pipe isn’t pretty to look at, it’s unlikely that I’ll care much about it, and cleaning is usually the hardest part, or at least the most boring part of any restoration for me. Alcohol and pipe cleaners. Lots of pipe cleaners. That’s why I leave it for last. Sometimes, I’ll even give a pipe a test smoke before a deep cleaning, just for a point of reference. I gave it a sniff to get an idea of what I was up against, and it stopped me cold. There in that bowl was an aroma that I had not smelled in decades. My head was instantly filled with memories of being in the back room of a fabled Berkeley tobacconist’s shop where I stumbled upon a few jars of long discontinued blends. One of them, a blend called Forty and Eight, had the most engaging and unusual scent of any tobacco I’d stuck my schnoz into. It was sweet, but not in a candy store way. There were none of the usual vanilla, cherry, berry or anise notes of typical aromatics, nothing that could be compared to aftershave or deodorant soap, but something almost musky, a little earthy, something exotic. The shop’s owner couldn’t tell me what was in it, how, or where it had been produced. The old blend had been retired before he’d bought the place. The printed catalogue gave no clues, either, other than being overprinted with the word “DISCONTINUED” in bold, rubber-stamp type. (And, I don’t recall it as being “highly aromatic” as the description indicates.) There was still quite a bit in the jar. Being, at that point, an intrepid explorer of all kinds of tobaccos, whether I thought I’d like them or not, I had to give it a try. It was burly based, but also comprised a good measure of virginia leaf, and maybe some other varieties; I didn’t have enough experience at the time to really pick it apart. But, that aroma was unlike anything I’d experienced before or since. It was something now completely lost to time. Until it wasn’t. Memories are powerful things, and there is no sense more tightly bound to memory than our sense of smell. One whiff was all it took to carry me back in time, conjuring a vivid recollection of something long submerged in the inky depths of a subconscious mind. Look, I know as well as anyone that pipes are meant to be smoked, and that many feel it almost sacrilegious to have a pipe and not set it to its intended task. In this case, I simply can’t. I won’t. Ever. Rationally, I am fairly certain this pipe would probably be a great smoke. It was too well loved by its previous caretaker to be anything less than that. My choice not to smoke it is an emotional one, not something rational. Of the thousands of pipes that have passed through my hands over the years, this is the only one to create such a singular and vivid, almost Proustian recollection of temps perdu, of lost time. It revivified a long dormant memory that is mine, and mine alone, and that’s enough. I keep it in a drawer with other old English pipes. In some ways, it’s nothing special, just a nice old pipe. I don’t lavish it with any particular care that arguably befits the hidden treasure that it holds. It’s not in a special box, or displayed preciously in a glass cabinet. Every once in a while, I take it out, point my nose bowlwards, and every time, those memories return just as powerfully as they did the first time. I have no idea how long it’s been since its last owner smoked it, but in the years I’ve had it, there seems to have been very little degradation of the aroma, and that’s […]
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 635. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with James Ravenwood. James is the boutique tobacco blender of Ravenwood Blends. His blending started out as a fun hobby, and he now has professionally packaged commercially available products with some great tin art. Part of his interest in pipe smoking goes back to fond memories of a retired Navy Veteran that lived on his street while he was growing up that would sit in his driveway smoking a pipe all day. Later, in 2011 he began smoking pipes and soon after started experimenting with mixing different tobaccos. His other hobby, that he has been doing for 30 years, is photography. He takes wonderful photos of outdoor spaces, and still life pictures of pipes and tobacco. You can see them on his Instagram @thebriarfellowship. At the top of the show we’ll have an Ask the Pipemaker segment with renowned pipe artisan Jeff Gracik.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 634! Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Warren Ertle. Warren is an extremely accomplished musician with a PhD in music. He started early as a percussionist in sixth grade. Later his grandmother got him a cheap Casio keyboard which he taught himself to play. He started playing in blues bands in high school, and has been a pianist with jazz big bands for years. Even though he was already a professional musician, he took his first real piano lesson when he enrolled in college with his studies in classical music. He is of course a pipe smoker. At the top of the show we will have an Ask the Tobacco Blender segment with Jeremy Reeves. Jeremy is the Head Blender at Cornell & Diehl, which is one of the most popular boutique pipe tobacco companies in the USA.
Soon now, supposedly, our neighborhoods will shift from grinning pumpkins, skeletons in various assortments, and zombies dashing about to pretty reindeer, angels, and flashing lights illuminating homes with sparkling stars and laughing, scurrying Santas. But, lest we forget, there is the turkey season, fancy pie aromas wafting from kitchens, and a national pardon of a big Tom Turkey. Remember, now, that only one of these holiday personalities is a pipe smoker. And that is the hefty, bearded fellow in a bright red suit sitting in a sleigh with a herd of deer hitched up and ready to streak across the globe, bringing tidings of joy and many presents. Ok, the scene is set for the next couple of months, right? So, before we get too far off the beaten path, let’s just take a deep breath of fresh autumn air, shall we? Ahh. That’s better, isn’t it? What’s got the Pundit in a snit is not all the Halloween spooks who came a-jostling for candy. 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Maybe especially with the help of their pipes in the art of thinking and philosophy. Recall the words of Mr. E=MC2 when he said, “I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs.” Amen and amen! Dealing with world-rattling events takes a calm and objective view of things, to the Pundit’s way of summing it up. You just don’t go messing around with quantum physics without a calm and objective approach, methinks. Or as the extraordinary physicist Robert Oppenheimer said after he and a team in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Labs developed a way to split atoms into bombs during World War II. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” said Oppenheimer referring to the development of the first nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. It must be pointed out that Oppenheimer was more of a cigarette smoker than a pipe smoker. Nonetheless, pipes were part of his personality. Now, if you have read some of the great authors of the past and present, their pipes were always nearby. Reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle can be a three-pipe problem at times. S. Lewis and Jean-Paul Sartre require time with your pipes to reflect on the existential problems and solutions these authors provide in learned novels and other narratives. Or take Edwin Hubble and Bertrand Russell, philosophers of another world. Pipes are required for reading. The quantum lode of ideas Pundit is attempting to sort out is that our pipes are relaxing and stimulate our thoughts and creativity. Especially in these last months of the year. Many times Pundit has had that light bulb flick on while smoking my beloved pipes. And friends in Pipedom, it ain’t easy to turn on the lights in Pundit’s rock pit head. Now it’s time for a quote from a Pipe Smoker of the Past. Shelby Foote was born Nov. 17, 1916, in Greenville, Miss., and died June 27, 2005, in Memphis, Tenn. A fact is not a truth until you love it—Shelby Foote. A parting thought: It is said that famed Southern author William Faulkner carried a packed pipe in a coat pocket wherever he went. That’s one effective way to deal with workday conflicts and confusion. A calm and objective judgment in our everyday human affairs, as the quantum man said.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 633. Our featured guest tonight is Jon David Cole. JD is the Owner/Tobacconist at The Country Squire in Jackson, MS, and the accompanying online store. We’ll have JD and Brian talking about what’s new at the store and in the business in general. At the top of the show, Brian will discuss tobacco growing, what happens to the leaf, and provide updated information on where tobacco is being gown today. Tobacco production originated in the United States and we were once the #1 producer. It’s quite different now.
OK lets use the same logic
Here is an example
Looking at undies turns some people on, so let’s get a group together to attack Victoria Secret, Fruit of Loom etc.
They must not publish any online catalogues, Printed material, Advertise in magazines, TV etc
We can call ourselves TUAP, Tobacco Users Against Porn
Thats only 1 area, we start to do as they do,
If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bs
Keep them so tied up fighting petty battles, that they can’t organize against us.
Isn’t it the Father of your Nation George Washington, who said send me money and if you can’t send money send tobacco.
I don’t drink much, so I wont miss alcohol
Lets go behind bars, Liquor Stores, Breweries and Distilleries
Actually there is a certain element thats already taken over Europe that doing that USA will be next…..
9/11
If you air TV Programs with Tobacco Usage it supposedly encourages it.
So how come you can air “The L word”, “Gay as Folk” etc.
Does this not promote that life style, to the same youngsters that would be impressionable to tobacco
God Save me from the freaking Liberals, and Religious Zealots
Mate, I wrote an article in the Summer ’09 issue of Cigar Magazine entitled: Butt out of Hollywood. The smoke Nazi zealots claim that showing any character in a movie smoking,IS promoting smoking.
I cited the example of the most recent Batman man movie where people were shot, stabbed, beaten to a bloodied pulp, and a guy’s throat was slit. And if you saw it, shit was blown up every five seconds, yet, the movie garnered a PG rating.
Why didn’t any of these politically correct do-gooders mention how the movie promoted death and violence? Because they have a clear agenda, that’s why. In their eyes if Wolverine smokes a cigar, then little Johnnie and Suzie will be hitting the tobacco really hard by age ten.
Fucking idiots, every one of ’em.
It is funny to me what people find acceptable. These lobbyists whom are “concerned with the health of our nation” sit and discuss this crap while they eat 5lbs of butter and sugar and then get pissed when another group of lobbyist try to ban butter and suger…..True I think cigarettes need to stay out of the hands of kids but I think it’s a pant load when someone tells me it won’t effect all tobacco. There are extremists on both sides of the coin and all have their own agenda, and their agendas probably don’t include my well being..
~Rob~
I live in Ontario. It’s true. I just recently started smoking a pipe and when I went into the tobacco store, I almost fell over! I mean, I knew about the law that no tobacco products can be displayed in drug stores, gas stations, etc., but this was a freaking tobacco store! That’s all he sells! The cigarettes are all hidden behind little white flaps, giving the store an \empty self\ appearance. The salesperson lifts a flap to get what you want. Unreal. Although, the cigars and pipe tobacco are all still on display in humidors, etc. As a side note, one of the main reasons I decided to start smoking a pipe was BECAUSE the government implemented these laws. Take that anti-smoke establishment! I never even thought about smoking till they started regulating it!
Excellent article, Tommy! We’re going to link to it.