When I’m not spending my free time investigating cases and dealing with Ponch (my mentally challenged apprentice who always finds a way to make my job so much more of a hassle), I like to check up on the country and see what the lawmakers are up to.
And it’s not to see what kind of beautiful and moving policies they’re makin’. It’s to see what kind of creative scheme they come up with to further reward themselves while screwing over- I mean, looking over the middle and lower class.
People never fail to amaze me, but let’s go over what’s been goin’ on, shall we?
So the Trump Administration decided to ban particularly flavored vape products at the beginning of this month in a holy attempt to “protect the children” from the almighty Big Tobacco, yadda yadda. Considering millions of youth decided to take up on flavors like mint and mango, it seems like a noble enough cause. Except, there ended up being a loophole in the ban: flavored cartridges can stay on the market as long as they’re disposable and non-refillable. And not just a loophole, but a footnote.
I guess things wouldn’t be so bad if they just banned the damn flavored products as a whole, but someone intentionally added that exception in. What’s the point of only making disposable ones legal if kids are still gonna be using ’em? They’re just gonna keep buying, they’re just gonna keep finding ways to stuff that shit into their bodies. Well I’ll tell ya why: it’s to protect the vendors, it’s to keep up the sales and to keep the market alive.
Instead of protecting these kids with the new ban, they’re literally steering them into a different direction of dependence on this vaping stuff, especially since disposable ones are cheaper. Now kids are depending on competitor products that are wasteful and potentially more harmful than what they used to use.
I say just let people do whatever the fuck they want with their own bodies if it doesn’t affect others. Sure, we’d all love an ideal world where kids don’t vape and the world works in harmony and where everything goes our way and where we live the lives we want instead of the lives that other people want us to live.
There are a lot of things we want but can’t have.
The fact of the matter is, no matter what you ban, people are gonna find their way to it if they really want it. Take a look at prohibition in the 20’s for example. The U.S. wanted to “protect” the people and promote social well being. They tried to keep people off the alcohol by any means necessary, including dumping drinks down the drains and poisoning industrial alcohol. To which the people responded byyy, you guessed it, drinking anyways. Getting poisoned, getting sick, making cheap homemade stuff.
And what makes you think anything would be any different in the current 20’s? Instead of preserving public health and shit they’re just criminalizing people and making “harmful behaviors” even more dangerous and underground.
There really needs to be an end to bans on stuff that people use for leisure. It’s not like they’re killing anyone or physically harming anyone else with their habits. I’m sure no parent wants their kid to be hooked on nicotine but at this rate, as long as it exists, those who wanna do it are gonna find their ways. Making things illegal won’t put a halt to anything, it’ll just put more obstacles in their ways to the same end.
And trust me. They’ll find their way through.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a huge fan of young addiction but what else can we do to stop it? Put a ban on nicotine in general? Cut off the tobacco industry as a whole? If we truly cared about peoples’ health, we wouldn’t just be looking out for the kids, we’d be lookin’ out for everyone.
But they won’t cut off the industry, will they? They really can’t. Whether people start at 17 or 21, it doesn’t change the addictive nature of the chemical. Our world is one that’s run amok with shit that makes people feel things, that lets people forget, that lets us feel that there’s at least a moment where we can relax and have the time of our lives in a mundane world that leaves us nothing but disappointed with an inevitable end.
Just keep some regulations to dwindle down the amount of people who wanna use this stuff but for the love of God, do not draw higher temptation to something that people can’t have.
People are just dumb enough to use stuff that takes a hold on their minds and bodies for the rest of their lives. But they’re also smart enough to get their hands on it no matter what law comes into play.
Ranch.
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