Let’s Be Clear Here
By Mitch Berg
The Strib’s headline says “Minnesota legislators try to clear confusion over e-cigarettes“.
Let’s be clear, here.
The only “confusion” about e-cigarettes is in the legislature; “do we tax them, do we ban them, or both?”
And around those questions, it’s the legislature – not the state – milling around like stunned cattle.
Glad we could clear that up.
February 28th, 2014 at 9:10 am
What I want to know is if I can fire up an e-cig in one of these Lyft cars.
February 28th, 2014 at 11:11 am
E-cigs produce vapor. So does breathing. When they tax e-cigs, what will be the next step?
February 28th, 2014 at 11:32 am
Factually deficient again.
There are communities across the state that are also looking at banning e-cigs. The concern is the costs of the health risks in individual communities.
The other concern expressed is if having flavored forms of e-cigs providing an alternative delivery system for nicotine is intended as a marketing device to hook kids.
Glad to clear up yet one more instance of conservative error and misinformation – or is it disinformation?
February 28th, 2014 at 11:57 am
Down the street from the State Capitol, in St. Paul’s Midway neighborhood, Vape Pro’s owner Troy Decorsey puffed banana bread-flavored nicotine from his e-cigarette device, which he said helped him quit smoking after 25 years.
God for him! Cigarettes are far, far worse than e-cigs. It ain’t just the nicotine in tobacco that makes them unhealthy!
. . .
In a crowded hearing room at the Capitol, some legislators said Wednesday that consumers can’t wait decades for proof, the way they did with tobacco.
These guys are saying that they want to vote without knowing the facts. Got it. Everything that is not permitted is forbidden.
“This is the Wild West,” Rep. Laurie Halverson, DFL-Eagan, told a panel of lawmakers looking at restricting e-cigarettes. “We just don’t know and the consumer doesn’t know. The consumer is being told they’re harmless, but the fact is the consumer doesn’t know because we haven’t regulated it.”
I literally cannot understand what this woman is trying to say. A tip to Halverston: if you cannot organize your thoughts on a topic into coherent sentences, you probably should keep your trap closed. See Dog Gone’s comment in this thread for an example.
February 28th, 2014 at 12:06 pm
Powhaten: Legislators keeping their trap shut when they don’t know what they’re talking about? You’ve just defeated the idea of a legislature.
February 28th, 2014 at 12:09 pm
Poor Mitch – A commenter who claims to be a closer friend than any Mitch-ka-teer could ever be has labeled him both a racist and an agent of disinformation in the last 30 days. With friends like Dog Gone….
So if you ever want an example of the two pillars of the DFL – “That which isn’t compulsory is forbidden” and “That which isn’t forbidden is compulsory” you could do no better than referring to this quote from Laurie Halverson, DFL-Eagan: “The consumer is being told they’re harmless, but the fact is the consumer doesn’t know because we haven’t regulated it.”
PS: Where are the layers of editors & fact checkers at the Strib?
“In Minnesota, where 80 percent of the state’s 200 e-cigarette retailers have popped up in the past year…”. Does the Strib has a no math policy in their HR handbook? Other than that, the story was accurate.
February 28th, 2014 at 12:20 pm
I think I see the problem with the Halverson quote. She was “femsplaining” the issues surrounding e-cigs.
If Bachmann had said anything like that it would plastered on the home pages of every left-wing blog and newssite as proof that she was so stupid she shouldn’t be allowed out of her home unescorted.
Since she has the letters “DFL” after her name, the Strib pretends that her quote actually makes sense.
February 28th, 2014 at 12:32 pm
DG,
Your statement doesn’t “factually” undercut a single one of my points.
There are communities across the state that are also looking at banning e-cigs.
Right, but that’s not the contention.
The concern is the costs of the health risks in individual communities.
About which there is no empirical data. None.
The other concern expressed is if having flavored forms of e-cigs providing an alternative delivery system for nicotine is intended as a marketing device to hook kids.
Leaving aside that there is no empirical evidence that any such thing happens – a common-enough pattern for your assertions in general – from where I sit, this seems less like a “starter drug” for tobacco than a vastly-less-harmful alternative.
Given a) that some people will seek out some form of self-medication, and b) you have a choice between tasty water vapor with a mild nic buzz, and a cylinder of burning plant material that delivers tar, formaldehyde and insecticides along with the nicotine, what’s smarter, among people for whom “neither” isn’t an answer?
Until someone does a *controlled* study controlling for how many people start using e-cigs and go on to tobacco as opposed to those who stick with e-cigs, you really have no point whatsoever.
Until someone does that study, my scenario has exactly the same empirical basis as yours does.
February 28th, 2014 at 12:37 pm
DG,
If we have another weekend blizzard, I’m pondering going through your entire body of assertions on this blog to catalog exactly how many “factual” assertions you’ve not merely made, but made with an air of cloying, unearned condesdenscion, that are just plain bollocks.
It’s roughly “all of them” – seriously – but I’m looking for a count, not a percentage.
We can start with your assertion that Salem Twin Cities was absolutely positively going to get sued back into the stone age over the various affinity marketing lawsuits. Sources with actualy knowlege of the situation place the odds somewhere between “Zero” and “Is she crazy?”
But that’d be a lot of writing…
February 28th, 2014 at 12:38 pm
The other concern expressed is if having flavored forms of e-cigs providing an alternative delivery system for nicotine is intended as a marketing device to hook kids.
And where’s the study saying how harmful nicotine alone is to kids? We sure as hell don’t prevent 12 year old kids from going into Starbucks or Caribou and buying multiple flavors of caffeine delivery devices. Are you pushing for a ban on selling those devices to anyone under 18 or 21 years of age?
February 28th, 2014 at 12:42 pm
What Bill C said.
Nicotine is not much different than caffeine in the doses that e-cigs deliver.
February 28th, 2014 at 12:44 pm
In related news…..bureaucrats in DC are planning on making a decree that there can be no unhealthy foods or drinks advertised anywhere were school kids go to school or play sports.
So before that hockey game, some poor sap has to go around the arena and drape covers over the Pepsi signs so the kids don’t see them and get the urge to suck down a pop.
February 28th, 2014 at 12:58 pm
Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere is having a good time. – H.L. Mencken
The reason proggressivism is so closely linked to American Puritanism is because their default position, re: everything, is that individuals can only have a good time by destroying the commons, and they represent the interests of the commons. Hunting and shooting? No, no, no. Promotes violence and lead pollutes the environment. Drinking? Linked to drunk driving and it has public health costs. Smoking? fuggedaboutit. Sports? Causes wife abuse. Big SUV? Pollution and uses too much gasoline. Motorcycle? Public health costs again.
Don’t believe me? The government now believes that it knows better than you do what you should have for dinner. It is insane and it can’t go on.
February 28th, 2014 at 1:10 pm
Tobacco is a health problem because it causes cancer. So ban tobacco? Well, no, Democrats depend on tobacco sales to fund their boondoggles such as Valhalla-for-the-Vikings that will only cost a cool billion dollars. So that’s a Good Thing?
E-cigs might deliver nicotine which might hook kids on tobacco which might make them buy cigarettes when they’re adults which might generate revenue which might be used to pay for future Democrat boondoggles. So that’s a Bad Thing?
Dog Gone can’t resolve the conundrum and doesn’t even attempt to because by leaving a Dog Dropping here, she proves the cares about The Children. And that’s the Main Thing.
February 28th, 2014 at 3:36 pm
And the companion quote to the Mencken one, from C. S. Lewis:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
I’d offer one caveat — any kindness that one might get from Mrs. Teasdale would be evanescent.
March 1st, 2014 at 8:23 am
Here’s an interesting thought: can individual communities over-ride the legislature, Congress and the President?
Dog Gone says Mitch is wrong because it’s not only the Legislature that’s confused about e-cigs, individual communities across the state also are confused. Okay, true, Liberal busybodies are not confined to the Legislature, they are confused and meddling at all levels. Score one for Dog Gone.
But consider WHY she says they’re active: individual communities are concerned about the costs of the health risks in individual communities.
But Dog Gone, there ARE NO costs to the individual communities. Every single solitary human being in entire the country either already has health insurance or signed up for free Obama-care health insurance. And not crap plans like they used to have, these are good plans that meet Obama-care standards. So what do individual communities care if e-cigs make people sick? It’s covered.
Should the City Council of Whalen be allowed to over-rid the judgment for that of President Obama and the entire United States Congress?
.
March 1st, 2014 at 2:21 pm
Which component of an e-cigarette is the bad one; the possession or use of which would be illegal under whatever circumstances the dictators dictate?
The plastic tube that transports the vapor? The “bowl” that actually holds the substance? The substance itself that actually contains nicotine? Or, the just nicotine itself?
Or prohibited behavior; using an e-cigarette as intended? Just holding one in the mouth, as some hard-boiled detectives are portrayed, holding unlit cigar stubs between her/his teeth? Simple possession, like firearms in schools?
How about ingestion of the substance by other means? Drinking it? Eating it via brownies or something? Perhaps inhalation using some device other than the one supplied (a pencil, pipe, or pop bottle modified to deliver the substance surreptitiously)? Injection or transdermally? There’s another means of ingestion that would (hopefully) require privacy so would not likely be detected.
What if I just enjoy the flavor, smell, and activity of “smoking” an e-cigarette that is nicotine-free? I’ll take the banana bread, please.
Again, what exactly is illegal and would allow for the arrest, detention, or citation of a miscreant upon whom the cops were sicced by some well-meaning soccer mom? Or called by a militant vaper wanting to give him/herself up as a test case?
While this is somewhat facetious, there is some validity to the questions. Some poor cop (when not scanning an enemies list, looking for someone to torment) will get a call to enforce the law. If s/he is unlucky enough to find the “vaper”, what are the elements of offense required to enforce the law? What is of evidentiary value, and what does s/he then do with the offender?
At the far end of all these good-feeling, self-righteous, punitive and pointless laws is some Officer Mancuso who gets the mess dumped in his/ her lap and will be expected to swiftly mete out justice. Good luck …
March 1st, 2014 at 8:13 pm
Chesterton once described Heaven as being like a convivial dinner party. Good drinks, good food, good company and conversation, and, of course, good cigars.
I think that to liberals Heaven would be an eternity of inflicting justice on victims who can’t fight back. You know, like what demons do in Hell.
March 1st, 2014 at 10:04 pm
But at least the food in liberal heaven would be good for you …
March 2nd, 2014 at 7:27 pm
To liberals, the important thing is that you eat what you are told, not that it is “good for you”. There is no joy in making people eat chocolate sundaes. Joy comes from making people eat what they do not want to eat. The ultimate goal is to make you want to eat foul-tasting poison.
March 2nd, 2014 at 9:12 pm
“The ultimate goal is to make you want to eat foul-tasting poison.”
you mean tofurkey!
March 3rd, 2014 at 11:10 am
to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
Which is exactly how the elitists (and their sycophants like DG) view everyone of a different mindset than theirs.