Marijuana Edibles, Flavored E-Cigarettes, And The Folly Of Child-Proofing The World: "Although flavored e-cigarettes and marijuana edibles are intended for adults, appeal to adults, and can be legally sold only to adults, the prohibitionists argue that they cannot be tolerated because they also appeal to minors. The same rationale has been offered for bans on flavored tobacco products and sweet malt beverages. This argument, although couched in the language of moderate and sensible regulation, should be a non-starter in a free society, because it reduces adults to the level of children...
Back in 2009, Congress banned flavored cigarettes because they supposedly lured kids into smoking. But as a favor to Philip Morris, which supported the bill, Congress made an exception for menthol, the only flavor that has ever had a wide following among teenagers, while banning products like clove cigarettes and strawberry bidis, which accounted for something like 0.1 percent of the underage market. Later that year, the New York City Council went further, banning all flavored tobacco products (again, except for menthol cigarettes), on the theory that stopping adults from buying rum-flavored cigars or cherry-flavored pipe tobacco would stop kids from smoking cigarettes.
The argument for banning flavored e-cigarettes is equally rigorous. “These flavors are direct marketing to children,” says the sponsor of the bill, Councilman Costa Constantinides (D-Queens). “They appeal to children, and we’re taking them out of that market.” Notice how Constantinides, like the CDPHE, equates making a product that could appeal to minors with “direct marketing to children.” I doubt that Constantinides has any evidence, aside from his own intuition, to back up his claim that e-cigarette companies are targeting children. But one thing is clear: Whether or not they appeal to minors, the flavors that offend him appeal to adults who switch from smoking to vaping...
Critics like Constantinides and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-Va.), guided by little more than their own idiosyncratic tastes, want to decree which flavors adult vapers may consume, even at the cost of deterring smokers from quitting. They do so in the name of protecting children, even though the risk that experimenting with e-cigarettes will lead to smoking is purely speculative. “Although there have been claims that EC [electronic cigarettes] is acting as a ‘gateway’ to smoking in young people,” notes a recent review in the journal Addiction, “the evidence does not support this assertion. Regular use of EC by non-smokers is rare, and no migration from EC to smoking has been documented (let alone whether this occurred in individuals not predisposed to smoking in the first place). The advent of EC has been accompanied by a decrease rather than increase in smoking uptake by children.”
...In other words, Constantinides and his allies are prepared to sacrifice the interests, and potentially the lives, of verifiably real adults for the sake of hypothetical teenagers. This is where the logic of regulating “for the children” leads. Attempts to child-proof the world do not necessarily make kids any safer, but they always makes adults less free."
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Also, Best. Entrance. Ever.
