Much Ado About Flavoring: Part One

[admin]

Carter is back at Pipes Magazine after a brief hiatus from getting work piled on from dual college majors (Psychology & Journalism) and also from writing feature articles for our sister site, Cigar Chronicles.
In his latest column to kick off 2012, he talks to two industry heavy-weights; Paul Creasy of Altadis USA and Erik Stokkebye of Villiger-Stokkebye International about the extremely serious legislative issue of flavor bans for tobacco.
In October of 2009, a New York City law went into effect banning ALL tobacco with any type of flavorings added. In effect, an estimated 90% of all pipe tobaccos became illegal. [See: New York City Bans ALL Flavored Tobacco]
Now, this is being explored on the national level, and if passed, say goodbye to almost all pipe tobaccos, the companies that produce them and the jobs that go along with them.
(Please place your comments on the article as well as here. You can just copy / paste them. Thanks.)
Much Ado About Flavoring: Part One

 

[admin]

Bump

 

[matchstickman]

You would think that with the economy tanking the way that it is, the legislators would be more thoughtful of how many people this would affect by halting production, sales, and leading companies to go out of business, but since tobacco is bad, I guess their jobs don't matter. This whole thing smells, I tell ya!

 

[romanza10]

I read this not to long ago. What I take from this is that anti-smokers are just another type of Prohibitionist. Instead of alcohol, it's tobacco. There will alway be people who will say "this is wrong, and no one should be doing it". The "this" being alcohol, drugs, and now tobacco. The problem here is that these people have managed to get into positions of power, and are forcing their view of what's wrong on us.
I have no solution to this problem. I believe it's a cultural issue that only time will resolve.

 

[baronsamedi]

Prohibition didn't, doesn't and won't ever work. Unfortunately, once something is prohibited, it takes an obscene amount of time to get it repealed after the public demands an end to the nonsense. It took 10 years for alcohol, but close to 100 years for absinthe (and it wasn't really officially outlawed), which chemically is no more or less dangerous than Bacardi 151. The green smoke is working up to a hundred if you count statewide bans. It's very important to make your needs known to legislators so they'll have something to balance the disinformation and outright thuggery of the tobacco police.

 

[admin]

Carter is working on part 2 right now, which will include two more industry heavyweights comments.

 

[spartan]

It's not prohibition to them. They are our angels with enough legislative push to force us to be better people!
(where's the vomit emote when you need it)

 

[seakayak]

Thank you, Kevin, for bringing this to my attention. Just when I think they can't get much worse...

 

[zanthal]

Well I know that law doesn't extend throughout the state ... All of the orders I've gotten from P&C ship from Albany, NY
I suppose they're trying to push the idea that flavored tobacco is just like candy, and we wicked pipe smokers are trying to get pre-teens to light up. :crazy:

 

[admin]

Yes, it's just New York City ... for now.

 

[romanza10]

And the one thing that always boggles my mind, and to tie into a article Kevin recently Posted Massive hk pipe tobacco smuggling ring busted, prohibition will most likely only lead to a black market anyways. Which in turn leads to an unregulated and less safe product.

We have got enough black markets as it is. We don't need another one. Just about anything that's in the black market could be reasonably taxed and regulated.
If they are worried about children getting hold of tobacco (I'm sure there are lines of teens wanting Romanza No.10), then they need to keep an eye on the people who are on the cash registers. Not punish law abiding consumers.
It's like this with gun laws, they don't stop criminals, they hurt law abiding gun owners. Just replace the word gun with tobacco.
I wish there was a way to make the people who come up with this legislation to understand how goofy this is.