In yet another decisive blow to freedom, the Food and Drug Administration has banned the sale of flavored cigarettes, cigars and cigarillos. This comes after recent legislation gave the FDA the authority to legislate the tobacco industry. The alleged primary targets of the new ban are the tobacco companies who market them and minors, who are the primary consumers of flavored cigarettes.
The ban on flavored cigarettes is only another example of how big government and social programs such as health care, social security, Medicare/Medicaid and others invite the government to interfere with people’s lives and mess with their rights.
Since our lifestyles and life decisions influence how much of these social services we use, it encourages the government to further regulate our affairs and our rights. Smokers, for example, need more health care than others, prompting the government to require them to smoke less so they don’t abuse its health care services as much.
On that note, though, what about all the other factors that necessitate more social support? What about obese people? Maybe we should ban all hamburgers with more than 200 calories so people don’t become overweight or get sick as often. Perhaps in order to keep kids from getting addicted to fast food at an early age, we could restrict fast food to those over a certain age, like with alcohol.
In addition, we could ban everybody from going hiking, or going mountain climbing or doing anything dangerous because it would exploit government-run social programs. By mentioning these examples, I mean only to point out the hypocrisy of this ban, but many others will try to rid this hypocrisy by following the other extreme of my logic and see these as other potential problems to fix in order to reduce the drag on government programs.
If it makes so much sense, then why doesn’t the government ban fast food or further regulate our actions? It’s because the smoking issue is inexorably a moral issue. The ban on flavored cigarettes is part of the never-ending struggle by government to legislate morality. Though it isn’t blatantly said, it is not hard to see the issue is in some way linked with social trends and norms.
So from that standpoint it is only wrong to ban flavored cigarettes because it is wrong to legislate morality. If we start banning cigarettes and smoking because they are “bad,” it won’t be long before the federal government attempts to ban other “bad” things. If politicians could only keep it in their pants, adultery would be the next target, as well as drinking, cursing, wearing hats inside, growing facial hair and other things.
Lastly, why not tax it? If we are going to have these social programs, we can solve everything else by simply leaving people to their sins and taxing the cigarettes to pay for their health care, just like we have been doing. Not to mention the fact that banning these flavored cigarettes infringes on the rights of occasional, responsible smokers and those who begin smoking at much older ages.
The best solution to the problem, however, is to simply get rid of these social programs and the taxes and force smokers to pay for the consequences of their own actions.
Lazarus Austin is a senior majoring in history. He can be contacted at [email protected].